Sorry for the delay! I am now back in Chicago and recovering from the trip quite nicely, if I don’t say so myself! I’ll update a few more times over the next couple weeks with additional stories and photos, so keep checking back if you’re interested!
I realized the other day that it had been quite some time since I’d posted anything to let everyone know what I’ve been up to! Part of it is good, part of it is very, very bad. The bad part is that I got pretty sick last week, and today is the first day I’ve felt remotely normal. It seems like I injested some kind of bacteria I shouldn’t have, although I had shared every meal for the 24 hours or so before I got sick with my roommate, who wasn’t ill at all. Suffice it to say the whole experience was really gross and involved a trip to the hospital. I went to the Yemeni German Hospital, which is staffed by Yemenis trained in Germany, and my saintly roommate Siti went along with me to make sure I ended up okay. The doctors spoke good English and the place was reasonably clean. Anyway, after that day I was too weak to go much further than one block and had to lay down after walking up stairs, and this got boring fast! Today I feel like I have a normal amount of energy but I still have to be careful with the eating. In sha Allah, by the time my flight home rolls around I’ll be fine. The good news is that I am giardia/parasite free!!
Michelle (in Canada, not to be confused with Aurora) asked about harassment on the street – I’ve only had one problem here, thank God. No one has tried to touch/grab me as happens in other places in the Middle East. That doesn’t mean that harassment doesn’t happen here though. There’s a lot of staring in the street from men, women, and children alike, just on the basis of being foreign. Usually if you say hello to women they smile and say hi back. It’s not okay to talk to men in the street and a lot of them will yell out HELLO or WELCOME YEMEN or something like that, which I ignore because they shouldn’t be talking to women anyway, foreign or not. The children are a little trickier because they’ll yell HELLO over and over again or SURA (picture – because foreigners take their pictures), and taking their pictures usually results in a request for money. They also yell I LOVE YOU (in English), WHAT’S YOUR NAME, and the occasional FUCK YOU. The kids that live on the street between our house and school got into yelling FUCK YOU at people briefly, and they definitely know what that one means, but then our director had a “chat” with some police officers and the problem magically disappeared. Most of the kids are harmless, and will talk to you like nice kids if you talk to them in Arabic, but some are just bad kids that will do things like throw rocks at you.
Anyway, all of this seems trivial in light of the fact that I’ll be leaving in a few days. I leave for America on the 6th and arrive in Chicago on the 7th (long flights). I’ll put a post up shortly after arriving to let everyone know I’m safe and sound! (Don’t worry Mom and Dad, I’ll CALL you!) I feel like I just got here, I feel like I’ve been here forever, and I feel like there’s a million things I still have to do so I’m pretty overwhelmed right now! I’ll put up a few more stories and thoughts after my return, don’t worry.
One of my favorite evening activities here (besides eating dinner and getting harassed and stared at on the street, of course) is reading the local English language newspapers. Sure, I could fight my way through the Arabic ones, but after all the homework I need about as much information as I can get in 30 seconds of reading and the English language is a key component in that equation. There are a couple papers published in English here, and although I’ve learned a lot about local politics, issues, and interests from reading them, it is some of the worst written English I have ever seen in an actual, legitimate publication. I feel like I can be a little bit critical here because the names of the writers and editors on some of the offending articles are not Arab. I think these are native English speakers that are just bad writers. I would not criticise a Yemeni person for less than eloquent writing in English.
Anyway, the headlines are the best parts of these papers. There was one the other day, and I’m sure this wasn’t the exact wording, but it said roughly “Yemeni Student Outsmarts American Peers at University.”
Really? That’s a news story? If there’s something newsworthy in there the headline is certainly not showing me what it is.
A big issue lately has been the locusts. They’re here, they’re huge, and they’re disgusting. People in the streets are grilling them and eating them. I’m not sure if I’m curious about this or just really freaked out. Sometimes at night it seriously looks like an episode of Fear Factor. You can buy water bottles filled with grilled locusts. I hear they taste like chicken. They’re getting in our house a lot and the cat is chasing them around and toying with them before killing them. This is funny, and very effective, but apparently last night she brought a HUGE cockroach in the house. I’m not quite as amused by that. Anyway, there was a headline the other day that said, “Locusts Invade Sana’a. Become Snack Food.”
I’ll try to keep you all up to date with more amusing (and disgusting) news anecdotes from the local papers.
Since we’ve just reached the end of a 3 week term here lots of students are taking off over the next week. Tonight we’re losing our Austrian friend, and on Wednesday we’ll lose a Belgian, an Englishman (formerly of the English Navy, apparently), and an American woman who was supposed to stay as long as I am but has been groped in the street too many times and is going home early (apparently this happens in Yemen – she got her breast grabbed).
I’ll probably be a little more bored after this, but since my group classes (with two Belgian guys) have disbanded I’ve been receiving only individual lessons and this requires more time from me outside of class. To cut to the chase, I’m only in 3 hours of class a day now instead of 5, but it’s pretty much equivalent educationally speaking since I’m now working on my own with the teachers. I was called into the mudir’s office today so he could “apologize for the error” in that I had lost my group and tell me I had to either cut back on hours or pay extra – he’s a real slippery politician, that mudir, and he caught on to my receiving hours and hours of individual instruction very quickly.
I asked my morning teacher, Ahmed, if he could help me find a reputable place to buy a ney (Arabic flute – vertical and sort of diagonal, either plastic or bamboo, depending on how much you want to spend) while I’m here, and he said he’d ask around and then go with me to help me get a good deal (ie the Yemeni price instead of the ajnabiyah price). I’d love to get an oud as well (Arabic lute) but apparently they can run about $300, so maybe on a future trip to the Middle East that will be my major purchase. And yes, I want an oud bad enough to lug it home all the way from Yemen to Chicago! They sound so beautiful!!!
Lessons with Ahmed are interesting now that it’s just the two of us – I was certainly getting bored when there were 3 students (myself and the 2 Belgians) but now that it is just me and Ahmed we have been spending the first hour of class on the lesson (short text, vocabularly, drilling me on grammar, etc) and then the second hour discussing some random topic. Now that I’m down to only one hour a day with him I think we’ll alternate lessons and conversations. At any rate, our first conversation was about America, American geography, and what I do at graduate school. Apparently he has an uncle that teaches Arabic at some university in California – he wasn’t sure where.
Then our second conversation (yesterday) was about … Jews. This devolved quickly into him asking me questions such as “do you like Arabs or Jews better,” and me continually explaining that I can only say things like that about people I’ve met and it’s impossible (and racist) to say I like or don’t like any entire group of people. Also, I kept insisting that Israel and Jewish people the world over are two different things, and although he kept insisting that he understood the distinction, that understanding certainly didn’t show up in our conversation. Finally, I learned that he had never met a single Jewish person in his entire life. I’d say Ahmed looks about 30, but it’s hard to tell how old people are here – Yemenis are very small and I can never seem to guess their ages with any kind of accuracy. He’s still unmarried, but he seems a little old to be single, by Yemeni standards.
Then today we talked about Iraq. I’m glad the students here are such an international crowd (as opposed to consisting of giant hordes of Americans – like locusts, apparently - like I’ve heard about another school here that will remain nameless on my blog) but I’m really getting tired of being held accountable for ALL the actions of the American government. I’m also tired of explaining that not ALL Americans are pro or anti war. There is a VARIETY of positions, and while my professors will acknowledge this, I still get asked questions like, “why is America always with Israel?”
I think today’s conversation really proved how much my Arabic skills have progressed here when, for some reason I can’t recall, Ahmed casually mentioned “the Jews love money.” My response was first (in Arabic), “please just give me a minute to think here,” and then, “that’s completely racist. It’s ideas like that one that lead to millions of Jews being killed in the Second World War. I don’t know how you can say that when you’ve never met a single Jew. I really think you should rethink that.” Surprisingly, this went over okay. The jury’s still out on the “rethinking,” though.
Tomorrow’s conversation topic is TBA, but I’m sure it’ll be equally contentious. It’s strange, despite these weird talks with Ahmed, which regularly include racist comments about Jewish people and sexist jokes, I enjoy my classes with him – somehow he’s still a good teacher. I don’t approve of these things that he says, but I would hope through our classes and his classes with other students that he could learn a little bit more about the world. Perhaps I’m being ridiculous and optimistic, and probably patronizing, but he’s not a bad guy and he certainly has the capacity to broaden his views outside of what is common in Yemen. (ie anti-Semitism and mysogyny) I hope my feelings don’t change as we continue to discuss the most contentious subjects available. Can’t we just talk about food or something???
Or every google service I use (which is basically everything I use on the internet) could be being a punk. It’s a distinct possibility.
So I’ve been at Coffee Traders, the “American” coffee shop in Sana’a (run by an expat) for the last several hours. They have free wireless here, and it’s the only place in town with that feature! The connection was good last time I was here, but this time it’s taking hours and hours to upload really small numbers of pictures. I had planned an exciting photo-packed post, but this is turning into a total ordeal! I’m working on uploading just a few at a time while I catch up on emails, bills, etc.
Speaking of bills, my American phone is working again thanks to some pretty awesome customer support from Cingular, so feel free to txt.
The pictures I’m working on uploading right now are from a trip to Aden with my friend Maryame, who is French/Moroccan, which was last weekend (Thursday-Saturday). Aden is a port town, and we were able to stay at a reasonably fancy hotel that was right on the beach. It was hot as all get out, so I was pretty uncomfortable pretty much whenever we got out of the water. Fortunately our room had great air conditioning so I was at least able to sleep! The trip was long – about 8 hours on a bus – and when we got down there we learned that we’d have to stay an extra day because the next several buses were all booked up. It ended up okay though, since the ride was so long the extra day made the trip more worthwhile. The hotel we stayed at was incredibly nice by Yemeni standards – very clean and right on the beach, but a little no-frills by American standards… I also learned that since it’s so hot in Aden no one has hot water heaters. The pipes just heat up and all the water is warm all the time. Our hotel was packed with Yemeni families, and I only saw 2 other foreigners there. The beach was a “family” beach, which meant there were men on the beach and women were swimming in abayas, scarves, etc. I even saw several women playing in the water in niqab (face veil). It was really incredibly sweet to see all the families running and yelling and splashing around together. But with the exception of the beach I found Aden to be pretty unremarkable.
Then yesterday I went on a school trip to Manakha. We visiting a village called Hajjarah, which was really beautiful, but we were also completely mobbed by local children who wanted to be our “tour guides” (this consisted of following us around so close that I nearly fell over them on steep rock staircases a couple times and yelled at them to get away from me) and then demanding money after we’d walked through the town. Honestly, every village you can visit here is probably going to be a little bit like that, but the hustling aspect of the place was pretty depressing. Needless to say, really beautiful views, and greener scenery than I’ve seen elsewhere in Yemen so far.
Next we headed over to an Ismaeli pilgrimage site, and our teachers hadn’t been there before so I’m not really sure what the whole story is with the place. Most of the pilgrims we met were from Bombay. Next to the tomb there is a huge hill with a small mosque/prayer hall at the top that we all climbed up. At the top there were goats grazing, families praying, and a beautiful view. And it was absolutely silent – so beautiful! It’s taken me so long to upload my photos from Aden that I doubt I’ll get to the Manakha ones today, but soon, I hope. The school’s gardener, Naji, and his wife, Oum Abdul-Rahman came along on the trip. Oum Abdul-Rahman lives with her children in an apartment on the ground floor of our building so I see her around a lot, and this trip was my first chance to get to know her a little better. We have a really difficult time talking, since she is from a village and speaks only dialect, and I can only make sense of 1 of every 10 words or so. She asked me if I would teach her to knit on the bus, and Naji seemed amused by this, but all of a sudden told me to stop – not angrily or anything, but I’m still not really sure what was going on. Anyway, once we got to the top of the hill over the tomb Oum Abdul-Rahman grabbed me by the hand and started RUNNING up a ledge, which was terrifying at first, but she had found a couple Yemeni ladies that were sitting at the top of the hill crocheting and hanging out. I sat down and pulled out the sock I had been knitting on the bus, and we were all instant friends. They were crocheting little cell phone bags, which looked really good, with TINY hooks. They liked my sock. Anyway, they were Yemeni and from around there, and they were friends and like to walk up to the top of the hill to sit and hang out together up there! They told me everyone in the surrounding area was Ismaeli, and also that I spoke very good Arabic. In situations like this one I wish I could take a picture so I’d have something more to remember the moment, but sometimes taking Yemeni women’s pictures doesn’t really go over very well. The only woman I’ve been able to photograph is Oum Abdul-Rahman, and of course only when she’s wearing the niqab. But so far the encounters I’ve had with the women here have been so amazing that I want to remember every detail, which is hard when you can’t use a camera!
Well, my connection sped up immensely while writing this so in a few minutes all my pictures should be available on my picasa site under the albums “Aden” and “Manakha.”
Oh, one more thing – the Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh drove by us on the school trip yesterday. We were in heavy traffic in a village when all of a sudden a whole pack of range rovers full of guys dressed in camouflage FLEW by and one of our teachers said it was the president.
hello all – thanks for all the nice comments and emails! It means a lot that there are people thinking of me back home. I haven’t been able to upload pictures for a little while because word is someone here got a virus on their laptop from hooking it up to the school’s network, which doesn’t really surprise me. The computer/internet situation is particularly horrible here, and you’re mostly better off going out and using an internet cafe, even amongst the hordes of young men sitting in them playing violent video games and staring at you while you try to write an email in peace. Anyway, I’m planning on taking a trip out to Coffee Traders, which is the bizarro American style coffee shop (started by an expat, of course) with free wireless this weekend so hopefully I’ll get to upload my latest photos then and do some more thorough blogging! (FYI weekend in Yemen is Thursday and Friday.)
Since this is the end of a three week period of courses lots of students will be leaving, probably some new ones coming, and my schedule will get switched around a bit. One of the guys I have class with will be leaving and the other is taking a little break since he’s here for an entire year, so I have no idea what will be happening with me. I’ll probably cut back on my class time and have only individual lessons for a while. Those tend to be more intense and people don’t do more than an hour or two at a time generally… My Qur’an lessons will continue as always, I expect!
Lots of love from Yemen. OH AND FYI: I have royally screwed up my American cell phone until further notice, so I can’t receive text messages from the States anymore. The screwup is Cingular’s fault, nothing having to do with Yemen, but they emailed me some things I can try to get it working again. In the meantime I have a Yemeni cell phone, which you can call from the states (except most cell phone companies won’t let you call yemen so you have to use a land line or skype) if you feel like paying a fortune to hear my voice! (ha ha) Email me for the number, or ask Peter or my parents – they all have it.
Today my friend from my program brought me out to a swanky coffee shop in San`a that is far from our school, but has free wireless and is run by an American expat from Missouri (weird) and they have such items that you never see here like lattes … and women’s bathrooms. It’s pretty amazing. I’m spent most of my computer battery answering some emails (sorry I couldn’t get to everybody!!!) and uploading more photos from yesterday’s trip out to the mountains – we went to Shibam and Kawkaban, for those of you interested in googling about these places. Apparently the entire town of Shibam is a world UNESCO site, but you’d never know it from the condition of the place. It was depressing, to say the least. Just lots of really, really desperate people (I didn’t want to be exploitative and take pictures of them – plus it’s kind of hard to take a picture of a group of people MOBBING you) and garbage EVERYWHERE. I will blog about it more extensively when I have battery power. Suffice it to say, pictures of this trip are up HERE.
Hello everyone! Today is a great day – I had my first lesson on the Qur’an and my suitcase came! I was nearing the point of tears over the delayed suitcase – I had packed really smartly I think, and there were things in there I WANTED. Like pants. And lightweight scarves. Anyway, with a lot of help from Osman, who picked me up at the airport, I got the suitcase delivered to my school, and even some help lugging it up the road to the women’s dorm.
There was some confusion about my Qur’an lesson – I thought I was joining up with an existing women’s class on reciting (tajwid) and discussing the meaning (tafsir), but apparently Azhaar, who is in charge of arranging the schedules for the school, had arranged for private lessons for me, every day. So my schedule is tough – 4 hours of group class and the 1 on the Qur’an, but it’s open to change so I can always cut back if I start burning out. So far though my homework for the group classes hasn’t taken up a ton of time – it’s the talking in class that I am getting the most from. The class on the Qur’an was difficult today – we spoke only in Arabic and my teacher, Sawsa, seemed to think I was a little weird for being non-Muslim, coming from the US, and wanting to learn tajwid and tafsir in Arabic. But she thought 6 weeks would be enough time for me to get the basics of tajwid, so that was exciting. Then I read through the Fatiha (the first sura/chapter of the Qur’an) for her and we discussed the meaning a little. I know that the Fatiha introduces concepts found through the Qur’an and Islam, but it was really very new and difficult for me to express that in Arabic. Thankfully, my teacher is patient and she speaks clearly (since it’s just us she is able to remove the niqab and I can understand her better), and I imagine this is a breeze for her to explain things she probably learned when she was very young, so that’s good. The after we discussed the meaning she recited, line by line, and I repeated after her until I got it basically right. This was hard. Harder than I would have expected. My pronunciation of Arabic for conversation is not bad, but reading the Qur’an really takes a whole other level of attention and there were times when I thought I was saying one thing, but clearly was not. After 5 or 6 attempts on each line we read through the sura a couple of times and she said I had a nice strong voice for reciting, so that’s good. We didn’t get into any of the details about the rules of tajwid, but our lesson was short today because I had been confused about our starting time. Starting on Saturday (like Monday in the US – the first day after the weekend) we’ll be meeting at 1 and I will be recording our lessons. I’m sure my time outside of class will change drastically once I have the recordings and can go back and hear myself and repeat after her on my own time.
Okay sorry for going on for so long! I’m trying to upload the few pictures I’ve taken so far but the internet connection at school is very. very. very. slow. I’ve plugged my laptop in on one of their ethernet cords, and this helps some, because I hear the computers you can find in Yemen are generally constructed of pieces of recycled computers from India. So basically, India’s rejected computers aren’t so hot. I was going to try to fix up the one I’m sitting at right now by cleaning up the hard drive and downloading some anti-virus software (yeah, they don’t have that – sketchy), but this was proving EVEN MORE difficult than I anticipated so I eventually gave up.
Tomorrow I’m going on a school-organized trip out of the city, so hopefully there will be lots more beautiful pictures to share from that. I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful the old city is – the architecture (you’ll all see in the pictures!) is amazing, and the city is surrounded by mountains. Culturally speaking it’s been a little difficult to adapt, but nothing I didn’t expect – it’s definitely not okay to talk to men in the street, even when they address you, and it’s best to avoid eye contact. The noise has been the hardest thing to deal with. There are constantly people all over the streets here, most of them children, and they are LOUD and out really really late at night (little little kids, maybe 3 years old, screaming and yelling past 11PM) and up again early in the morning. Hearing the call to prayer is fantastic and beautiful, but when it wakes me up at 4AM I’m frustrated. I guess that’s the point though, huh. Gradually I’m getting used to it … and earplugs have really helped as well.
Okay, my pictures just finished uploading and my “yemen” folder just refuses to show up, and for some reason all the pictures are in the “pre-yemen” folder, but God knows I don’t have time to deal with it on this internet connection. So go here and take a look! Here’s a sampling:
My room in the new women’s dorm – small but clean
In the old city of San’a
My favorite here is the satellite dish!
Over am intermet connection that is reminiscent of dial-up AOL of the mid-90s … I am just letting everyone know that I am here, safe and sound, but sans luggage for a day or two. The luggage isn’t really the end of the world since I bought a better-fitting abaya today so I can wear whatever for the next few days, and there is laundry at my house – but it sure would be nice to have!
Okay, I start class at 8AM tomorrow morning and I hear that call to prayer will get you up early, so I’m off to buy something for breakfast and take a shower before bed (provided the electricity stays on long enough for me to use the hot water heater – it’s not super reliable and was already out for a couple hours earlier today). I’m in a 4 hour long group class each day plus one hour of intensive Qur’an study. I’m not sure if I’m joining the already-running women’ s tajwid class or starting something of my own, but I am EXCITED.
Love to everyone!
After sleeping a good long while at Jen and Dan’s house and writing my sort-of-desparate blog entry of this morning, I set about trying to find my suitcase. I called number after number for Delta, Emirates, and JFK and everyone claimed someone else had it. Not a good sign. Finally I got the one helpful customer service representative that works for Delta, who got in touch with the baggage claim people at JFK (who just don’t have a published phone number, APPARENTLY) who said that so many people got laid up in New York last night on missed connections and had lost bags that they weren’t taking claims over the phone. So, one expensive cab ride and a wild goose chase around the airport (again) later, I was told by a woman who seemed to know what was going on (as opposed to everyone else I talked to) that my bag was at JFK and when I get on my flight to Dubai it will be on the plane. The woman who told me this, like I said, seemed to be in the know, and I was talking with her way back in some underground looking office in JFK, so that leads me to trust her – kind of. I still went out and bought a huge package of underwear in case I can’t get my stuff for a few more days…
And in purely New York, non-Yemen related news:
1. I heard the Call to Prayer from Jen and Dan’s apartment in Bedstuy today. It was great.
2. I successfully fooled a NYC cabbie into thinking I live in New York. He asked me how to get back to JFK from Jen and Dan’s, and when I laughed and said I had no idea he said, “Oh I thought you lived here! The way you told me where to go!” Awesome.
So here I am …. in New York. Not sleeping on the streets, thanks to Jen and Dan, who I called a million times in the middle of the night so I could come to their house. But no thanks to Delta, who had my first flight sitting on the tarmac for two hours before we took off, leaving me 18 minutes to make it from one terminal in JFK to another, and missing my flight to Dubai by about a minute, along with about TEN other people (you would think they would wait a minute, but I digress). Also no thanks to Delta for having no clue where my bag is, so now I have to go back to file a claim at JFK – apparently the delayed so many people yesterday and made them miss connections and lose things, that they won’t take claims over the phone. Fun fun. Oh, and did I mention how Emirates only flies into Sana`a every other day? So I’m in NewYork until tomorrow night. Don’t get me wrong, it awesome to see Jen and Dan, but I’m missing the first two days of school here.
