Last Yemen Blog (for this year at least)

So I’m sitting in the Frankfurt, Germany airport, waiting for my connecting flight back home. I’m out of Yemen and not happy about it. This has been the fastest 5 weeks of my life…it literally feels like I only spent a long-weekend in Yemen. Sitting in this industrial airport, I feel like its only for a few minutes, and then I’ll be back walking through Maydan at-Tahrir. The last week in Yemen was a whirlwind. Every day was so busy that it was Friday before I realized it. Class until 1, tutoring my Yemeni friend from 2 to 4, exploring the city/doing last-minute shopping until 7 or 8, dinner, homework. Also, Ramadan started 2 days ago, so that was a new and fun experience to have in Yemen.
Also, Ramadan Karim! Ramadan Mabrook! Kul 3am wa intum bikhaiyr!
Ramadan in Yemen was great (the three days I got to experience). It was like day and night were reversed. Everyone was so tired and cranky during the day, and the streets were deserted during the mornings, but about an hour or 2 before iftar (the sunset meal that breaks the day-time fast), everyone would come alive, restaurants would open to sell the iftar appetizers, women and men would be running around looking for ingredients and buying their qat so that they could start chewing the second the fast was broken. Also, all the men are ridiculously grumpy during the day because they are in qat withdrawal…they will pick a fight with anyone…this doesn’t defeat the purpose of Ramadan at all.........
I was lucky enough to be invited to my Yemeni friend’s house with Laura and Jeri to experience iftar with her family. This is the way it works in Yemen: around 6:30 (it is different every day, because it depends on the time that the sun sets) the Maghreb call to prayer begins, and after prayer, the family sits down to eat. First, you have to eat a date (or two or four). Then, you eat sambusa (triangular-shaped folded filo dough, stuffed with cheese, or potato, or spiced meat, and then deep-fried). You can also have salad and fried, sweet, donut-like puffs. You don’t eat much of this, this is just to break the fast and give your stomach something before dinner. About 30 minutes later, dinner is served. The women usually spend half the day cooking a ton of different things for dinner. That night, we had salta (Yemen’s traditional dish) and an amazing casserole with chicken, potatoes, eggplant, tomato and tons of spices (yes, I got the recipe, yes, I’m going to cook it very soon), spiced rice, mushekkel, and bint as-sahan (Yemen’s traditional/famous dessert made from layers of fluffy moist dough and tonssss of amazing Yemeni honey). Afterwards, we sat around and drank delicious Yemeni tea and had cream caramel and jello and talked. They wanted us to stay the night, but we felt really tired and headed home. Actually, as soon as we got back, Jeri and I decided to go exploring. At first we were hunting for Orange Miranda soda, then we decided to walk to Zubairy Street to get some Yemeni honey. Zubairy Street is the place to go for honey shops, and we walked past several shops before I just walked into one. Let me tell you, I can pick the winners. Of course I decide to walk in to the one run by the Wahhabi Saudi-wannabe….aka the very young but righteous guy with the long beard who refused to look at my face or come close to touching me when he handed me the spoon to taste the different kinds of honey. By the time I realized, it was too late and I couldn’t walk back out…Jeri was more perceptive and stayed outside the door until I yelled at her to come in so I wouldn’t be alone. Also, it was obvious that he had lived in the States because even though he tried really hard not to speak English, we could tell that his English was perfect because he would answer questions I asked to Jeri in English and every once in a while, an English word would pop out. I think we made a good impression on him…he was trying REALLY hard to act distant and hard and angry-looking, but he loved having the foreigners in his shop, and he would accidentally let a smile slip through and he was very helpful and patient when I was deciding between honeys. Just goes to show you that that whole thing about not judging a book by its cover is the right thing to do…even though he never did look me in the face. Also this past week, me and a few other girls in the program got henna-ed (which is red ink, even though we requested naqsh, which is more common in Yemen, and is black ink). I had both my hands done. Two Yemeni women came to one of the dorms and the one who did the drawing was really talented. I asked her where she learned, and she said that she always like to draw and that she taught herself. They were a little anti-social and …weird, but the final result was beautiful. Also, helpful hint to any girl travelling to Yemen who wants naqsh or henna…the guys love it…in an awkward sort of way. Just draws a lot more attention, because for Yemenis, henna/naqsh symbolizes the wedding night, in which the bride’s entire body is covered in henna in preparation for her first night with her husband. We got lots of compliments on our henna…Then, my last day, my roommate and I as well as Jeri and Laura all went to the old city to explore the souk/market for the last time and do some last minute shopping. A big group of us met up for dinner, and me, Elena, Bilal, and Martin had our last chicken, rice, and mushekkel. This whole experience has turned out a lot different than I expected. I came to Yemen this summer thinking I had better go now while I still can, before the security situation gets worse. I expected to experience the most traditional of the Arab countries, to see it and be done with it, to have experienced it and then be able to move on. Instead, I have realized that 5 weeks is not enough for Yemen. I want more time to hang out with my Yemeni friend and her family, I want to talk to more Yemenis, I want more Yemeni food, I want to walk around the old city for at least 100 more hours, I want to travel around to Hudayda, Hadramawt, Aden, Soqotra. At this rate I need at least a year in Yemen…while I don’t think I have that much spare time (or money), I know that I definitely want to come back next summer, for the whole summer…I really don’t see the security situation getting worse in the near future, and I definitely didn’t feel threatened while I was there. I think one of the biggest problems Yemen faces is the water shortage…and only time will tell how the next elections go. If anything, being in Yemen for 5 weeks has made me want to dedicate months to researching its politics, culture, and geography before I most definitely return
Illa al-liqa’!
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18 Hours Later: Now I would like to take time to say a few lovely words about Delta losing my ticket reservation in Germany and the Atlanta airport's border security. OK, so I have flown Delta all my life--I'm a card member/frequent flyer, whatever, but when I went to the counter, they had "lost" my reservation. The girl wouldn't give me any explanation, and she most definitely did not apologize. Instead, I lost my window seat, and was stuck in the middle of the middle section of the plane, next to a women who was scared of flying and a family man who took up half my seat and chatted with his loooovely little boys across the aisle the whole flight. Thanks, Delta!
So, after landing in Atlanta, I knew I was going to have trouble with customs/border control...I mean, come on, I've been to Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, West Banks etc etc, so I was expecting a good hour of interrogation...I'm obviously not a convert, I'm an American citizen, I have all the documentation for the program I was in, I was traveling to these countries for tourism/educational reasons not anything bad etc etc, so I wasn't expecting a big deal...I also wasn't expecting them to be as stupid as they were...I should have known better. I want to say that the people working in Zone 2 Border Control at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport are some of the most incompetent/lazy people I've ever seen. So I first went to the little booth that everyone goes to...the guy takes one look at "Yemen" and calls security and I'm escorted to the little room for bad people. No phones allowed, nothing, and I had told my parents to pick me up at around 2 or 2:30 (my flight landed at 1:30). So around 2:30, a little under an hour in the room being completely ignored, I go up to the desk where all of them are sitting chatting, and ask if I can use a phone to call my parents because I haven't talked to them since the day before and they don't even know if I made the flight...the man looks up and me, tells me to sit back down and ignores me. I would like to mention that this whole time, all the employees were sitting behind the desk, loudly talking about open cases, past cases, how "sneaky" illegals are, and how to "get em outta the country" and basically just talking shit about foreigners, making fun of the things they have done/places they have gone, then they moved on to discussing their salaries, comparing salaries, comparing over-time pay rates (one guy has $247 OT just for this week! wow!) and comparing the worst places to be stationed in the airport. Then one of the security guys came in and smacked all them on the back except for the one woman and shouted loudly "Hey, don't worry! I won't touch you, I know how all you women are about sexual harassment charges!!!". A little later, a woman security guard came in to deliver some papers, and walked into another little room in the back and they all proceeded to loudly talk shit about her and her attitude in front of all of us foreigners.
So, after over 2 hours in the room, I had watched probably over 30 people come and go out of the room in front of me, without them asking me any questions or knowing anything about where I was, other than Yemen, so it's not like they were doing follow-up. I had watched a poor 14-year old German/Ghanian girl be treated like shit...she was coming to visit a cousin from Germany, and her minor escort had left her at security, she didn't speak English, and after she had finally explained her case to one of the guys, he decided to take a break and passed her case on to another man (the man that ignored me when I asked to use the phone) and he made her start over, after making her sit back down for 30 mins while he sat on his ass gossiping. Finally, a great ex-army/marines young guy calls me into the back and announces that he is the head of the counter-terrorism squad. Surprisingly, he was probably the most competent out of everyone there, but still, he didn't know anything about Yemen, Arabs, or Arabic. He asked me if I was aware that Yemen is an extremely dangerous country and that I was putting myself in danger. I replied that Sana'a is extremely safe and welcoming and that I never felt in danger. He replied "oh...yes....well....Sana'a is safe...but no where else"...I replied that I traveled to a few different places and that they were all extremely safe. He asked about the program, what I was doing, who "sent" me to Yemen, what exactly I studied...but he never asked me WHY I chose Yemen over everywhere else. I offered to show him my program certificate and transcript from the program to verify my story, he didn't care. They didn't even search my bags. He did however ask if my parents knew where I was going (duh, of course they knew, they were sitting for hours waiting to pick me up), what school my mom teaches at, what classes exactly does she teach etc etc. I mentioned that I have held a secret security clearance and that I have worked for the government, and finally he felt that I am not a threat, I should work hard in school and consider his recommended options for jobs after I graduate, I am free to go, have a nice day, blah.
All in all, I feel that being kept at the Syrian border for 6 hours for being American is just as rational as being an American citizen, being kept for 3 hours, being subjected to stupidity that reflects badly on all Americans, and being interrogated and asked the completely wrong questions.

Yemeni Engagement Party, Dar al-Hajar

More Yemeni adventures! So I know I said I would never go to another Yemeni wedding...but I figured that an engagement party would be different (maybe more relaxed? less psycho? less make-up and fewer prom dresses?).
The story: So myself and my friend Laura are tutoring a Yemeni girl in English and French. She is amazingly smart--she just graduated from high school and is waiting for her test results which will determine whether she can go to law school in Egypt. She is the only one among all of her friends that have plans to go to university and not marry immediately after high school. Even though the English programs at school here in Yemen are atrocious (and only 8 students in her entire high school chose to learn English) she has largely self-taught herself English by watching television and reading. And her English is amazing; she could easily travel to America and not have any trouble getting around and communicating with people, and probably even be able to take classes at university. Because the law school in Egypt is taught on the French system, she also needs to know rudimentary French before she goes, so we are helping her with that as well. Also, she does not wear the niqab (she doesnt cover her face, just her hair), and I have had some really interesting conversations with her about how Yemeni women perceive the niqab and her reasons for not wearing it. Her older sister wears the niqab, but her parents are very relaxed (and very well-off) and have let her decide for herself. It was also interesting talking with her about harassment. I asked if she is ever harassed because she is Yemeni and she shows her face, and she said that a lot of women are harassed whether they wear the niqab or not...she said that sometimes men will walk up to women who are totally covered (balto/abbaya + niqab) and they will lift up the girl's veil or abbaya. She said that when she goes to Egypt, she will not wear the abbaya, and she thinks that while it may be necessary in Yemen because of social pressures, it will be nice not to have to wear it in Egypt.
So anyways, her best friend just got engaged, and she invited us to the engagement party. Because it is different from a wedding and because I want to meet as many Yemenis as possible, I decided to go...
Yemeni engagement parties are pretty much just for the young, unmarried girl friends/family of the bride and groom. Because Yemenis marry so young, it was a room FULL of girls 18 and under. It felt like one of my sleepover birthday parties from when I was 12 years old because they were all so excited and waaaay over-dressed/over made-up. Every time the power went out (about every 10 minutes) they would all scream and go crazy. For the first part of it, it was actually really awkward. My friend and I didn't know anyone there except for the girl we tutor plus 2 of her older sisters (whom we had just met 15 minutes beforehand). At first, the girls sitting around us just stared at us in awe and didn't talk to us at all (a big difference from the wedding, where they attacked us with questions the second we walked in). After a little while, the girls on one side of me started to ask questions about life in the US...and, just like at the wedding, there were those two crazy girls who ask the awkward questions and are really invasive...this one girl started out with "So, you are Muslim?" I answered, "No, I'm Christian." Her: "Christian...?" I said it again, thinking she didn't hear me correctly or i mispronounced it in Arabic. She had no idea. Then she asked: "Do you know Islam?" Implying that if I knew anything about Islam, I would immediately see the error in my ways and convert. I answered, "Yes, I know about Islam, I lived with a Muslim family when I was in Jordan." Her: "Have you thought about Islam, it is a very good religion." I said I was Christian and that that is what I believed...awkward. Then she gave me a death glare and ignored me for 15 minutes. Then as she was getting up to leave for the night, she turned to me, grabbed my hand and said I should come back home with her to meet her family and hang out with them...I politely declined.
Several times, my friend and I were pulled/yanked up to dance. Personal favorites were NSYNC, Lady Gaga and "Mabrook" by Rami Ayach (this is a engagement party must have--and was played at least 4 different times). I wish I could have taken pictures, but because it was all girls and they were unveiled, photography was strictly forbidden.
Near the end, the mom of the bride and the mom of the groom came in to present the traditional presents of gold to the bride from the groom. This is the chance for the groom's family to show off their wealth, and they are expected to lavish gold on the bride to show off to the neighborhood that they are a good family. The event was completed with tons of cake and roses throw into the crowd of screaming, pushing 16-year olds.

Anyways. So the next day, a bunch of us in the program loaded ourselves onto the crazy van driven by the skilled and equally crazy Abu Bakr. We went to Dar al-Hajar...if you have ever seen anything about Yemen, this will have been the picture. It is the palace built on top a very tall and narrow spike of rock. It is not very far outside of Sana'a, so we got there relatively early. It is a gorgeous building. It was built around 1930 as a palace but now has been turned into a museum, and it is the most visited tourist site in Yemen....given this fact, the lack of paved roads to the village where the palace is located makes for an interesting drive. The valley it is in is gorgeous and looks a little bit like a smaller and greener Grand Canyon.

Then today, the girl who I tutor invited myself and 2 other women in the program to her house to have a traditional Friday lunch with her family. I love Yemeni food...up until today, I had really only had Yemeni food in restaurants, but because only men can work in restaurants, the food is not as good as that in the house. THE FOOD WAS SOOOOO GOOOOD. They went all-out and cooked so many different things: green beans with ground mean and tomato and spices, boiled potatoes with spices, tender juicy stewed lamb, baked chicken with spiced rice, salata, salta (yemen's traditional dish), bread, dessert, fruit....etc etc. It was amazing. Amazing, amazing, amazing. I'm really sad that I won't be in Yemen long enough to learn how to make it all (another reason to come back next year).They were so welcoming and friendly and we had really interesting conversations about politics, Yemen, the West etc etc. They invited us back for lunch every Friday...I'm really sad that I'm leaving in a week and that I didn't meet them sooner, because I want to spend all of my time at their house!

Trip to Ibb, Taez, and Jibla

Just got back from a 3-day trip to three Yemeni cities south of Sana'a: Ibb, Taez, and Jibla. We left super early in the morning...I almost didn't wake up because a couple of us were out until 1 in the morning at the British compound's "Lion and Jambiyya Club" singing karaoke and drinking things that facilitate the singing of karaoke....wow, that was a nice change. Anyways, Yemen has very interesting roads. There aren't really speed limits or guard rails...or traffic police. The roads are treacherous...some of the worst I've ever been on because they are very narrow, have no lanes and are meant for 2-way traffic. And they are full of hairpin curves round the sides of mountains. And our driver was psycho and was driving waaaay too fast. Plus there are tons of military checkpoints along the way, and we had to wait 5 or 10 minutes at each one because we were a big group of foreigners. Finally we get to Ibb and have lovely chicken and rice and mushekkil veggies for lunch. Ibb is almost 200 km away from Sana'a and it is surrounded by mountains. Ibb is also the wettest place in Arabia, so a lot of qat and coffee and other unimportant crops are grown in this area. Also according to my fact sheet about Ibb, "it is also considered one of the worst areas in Yemen for landmines"...didn't get to see any of those. Outside of Ibb, we drove up Ba'adan Mountain and visited Hosn Hab (Hab Fort), which is a huge stone escarpment that is in a severe state of disrepair. Visiting a site like that made me appreciate the lack of tourists...something like that in Turkey would be swarmed with people, but we had the place completely by ourselves except for a few kids from the nearby village who followed us around, gawking. It rained a little bit on top of the mountain, but the views were gorgeous and it was nice to be able to wander around and explore something that old.
Next we returned to Ibb and had a brief tour of the old city/souk. We also visited the Jalaliya mosque, which supposedly dates back to during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Like the Grand Mosque in Sana'a, it is undergoing restoration, but is currently in a state of gross disrepair (rotting, bird-infested wood ceiling, chipped paint, rot). Despite its age and the fact that it has not been very well-preserved, it was gorgeous.
Afterward, we got back on the road and headed to Ta'ez. Ta'ez is Yemen's third-largest city, and it is huge. The architecture is not as beautiful as that of Sana'a, and the city is by far a lot newer and dirtier and less organized. But overall, Ta'ez was great...the people and the souk and the buildings are all a lot more "Arab/Middle Eastern" than in Sana'a...I don't know how to explain it, but they just look more Arab, and the architecture is a lot more similar to that found in other Arab countries that I have visited. For dinner we had lovely chicken and rice and mushekkil veggies. We had some free time to explore, but we didn't get too far from the hotel because of how tired we were from going out the night before, climbing mountains and being crammed into a van for hours. Our hotel was an experience. My roommate and I were on the 5th floor, and because of this, there was no water pressure. The water came out of the faucet in drips...literally.
The next morning, we hopped back on the bus and drove through a very rural area to Shijirah al-Ghareeb (the strange tree). This is a 3000-year old baobab tree and it is huuuuge. It is the only baobab tree in Yemen and no one knows how it got there. Driving through rural parts of Yemen was very interesting because we were able to see how Yemeni women used to dress until very recently (when Saudi influence grew and now all the women wear all black niqabs and baltos), and in the country, all the women are wearing very bright dresses and headscarves, and many do no even have their faces covered.
Then, as we were driving along, we came across a little stream, and we decided to go hiking through it (note: I was not dressed for this) until we came to a grove of wild mango trees. We stopped for a little while and had an impromptu lunch of....lovely chicken and rice and mushekkil veggies. When we got back to Ta'ez, we went for a walk around the old city/souk and went to the Ashrafiyya mosque/madrassa, which was built in 628. It is big and white-washed and also in a state of disrepair, but it is very majestic and is undergoing restoration. Next, we went to the Qala3 al-Qahira (Qahira/Cairo Citadel) which sits atop a steep rocky hill in the middle of Ta'ez. Technically, the main part of the citadel is closed off for renovations...but of course, because we are foreigners, we were allowed in and got to explore and have the place completely to ourselves. By this time, the sun was setting, and from the citadel, you can see all of Ta'ez stretching out to the edge of the valley. When we returned to the hotel, a group of us decided to go out exploring and we roamed the fruit/veggie souk and wandered around the old city.
The next morning, we drove up to the top of Jabal Saber (Mount Saber), which is one of the tallest mountains in Yemen, and we went exploring and climbing around the top. I met a shepherdess little girl at the top and we talked to her for a bit...she was maybe around 10 years old and has never been to school a day in her life because her father divorced her mother after she was born, and since there are no other children in her family, she has to stay home to take care of the animals and protect the family's livelihood.
Next, we went to the small city/town of Jibla (after a lunch of lovely chicken and rice and mushekkil veggies). This city used to be the home of Queen Arwa, and was once the capital of Yemen. The old palace was unfortunately closed for repairs, but we were able to look inside of the mosque that she built. As we were waiting for the bus to come pick us up, it began to rain and a friend and I took refuge under a little overhang over a doorway. As we were standing there, a woman walks up and needed to get through the door to enter her house, and she insisted that we come in for some tea/orange tang. No one else in the group was near us, and we were kinda pulled into this house. This was one of the highlights of the whole trip for me, because it was the first time I've been invited inside a Yemeni house (apart from the crazy wedding), and it was really cool to see Yemeni women at home. One thing I have noticed about Yemen is that you are not invited in as much...I was dragged into so many Jordanian and Syrian houses for tea that it was weird in Yemen, not being able to talk to the women or interact with them at home. We talked for a little while, until the rest of our group came looking for us because they had been waiting in the bus for a while. Then we got back on the road and returned to Sana'a...with a military Humvee escort, complete with mounted machine guns, because we were foreigners.