Category: Yemen

I attempted to have a discussion with my teacher about revenge. Not such a good idea it turns out. I got the ugly mentality that I expected. I had brought up the new gun ban and he basically said that the law would have no real impact. There is too much “cultural” significance for the men to give up their guns. Whenever I hear this, I can’t help but think that it is just another pissing contest for men to engage in. From my eyes, it always looked like they were trying to make up for “something.” Anyway, he then talked about how they like to shoot into the air during celebrations. “Isn’t that dangerous?” He said that they didn’t care, most of them have a very fatalistic view. They will die when they are supposed to die. Whether it is from a bullet or a car crash it doesn’t matter. If you were meant to die that day, you were going to die. Wait a minute, that doesn’t exactly jibe with the whole concept of vengeance. That’s when things got somewhat heated…

He was predictably appalled at the idea of the government handling justice. You should do it yourself is the overriding feeling here. His argument against even a good government administering justice was that those are man’s laws, not God’s. I tried the whole “God is the only just judge,” idea. I thought that idea would have some traction, but no. He complained that it would take too long and that the government could get it wrong. “Well, couldn’t a person carrying out God’s laws get it wrong?” He would not listen, and even refused to accept the idea that people might misapply God’s laws. More importantly, he did not see the connection between the desire for vengeance and the current situations between warring tribes and never ending vengeance quests (Someone from one tribe kills another, so that tribe kills someone from the offending tribe, so they kill back, repeat for a 100 years..). “That is different,” he said, “Those people are not following God’s laws.”

Blink Blink

He didn’t see the connection. The idea of mechanisms doesn’t have a lot popularity here. In most people’s minds here, justice and vengeance are the same thing. If they can’t see the obvious problems with vengeance, what are the chances that they will understand the concept of a civil society? Honor and saving face is everything here, sometimes to the detriment to everything else. I didn’t have the guts to tell him that if he wonders why western people sometimes think that Arabs are “animals” or “uncivilized” he need look no further than their obsession with vengeance.

There is a new law going into effect right now that basically bans weapons in the cities of Yemen. The police have been stopping cars and doing searches and the general consensus is that they are stopping many people from carrying weapons around. It isn’t clear if it is an outright ban on guns or just banning them from being carried. It’s also not clear at this point if this was a presidential directive or something passed by parliament. I’m pretty sure that the right to own weapons is in the Yemeni constitution, but that has never stopped the president or the legislature from passing laws that they wanted to. It is fairly common for a law to be enforced even when everyone knows that it contradicts the constitution…

There are always potential problems when it comes to banning guns, especially when they were so common before. The most obvious one is that not everyone will be willing to give up their weapons. Especially here in Yemen where they have tribal significance, carrying a knife (the Jambiya) has long been a measure of your “manhood” here, guns just add to that. The other potential problem is one that we see in the US quite a bit. If everyone gives up their gun, that means that anyone that smuggles one in is free to do what they want. Washington DC is a prime example, they have had one of the worst gun caused homicide rate in the nation despite having one of the strictest gun control laws. That law has been struck down (it is pending in the US supreme court), with any luck the homicide rate will drop once that gets through the system. I don’t think that will be as much of a problem here. From what I gather, armed robbery, muggings, etc. are pretty rare here. In addition, there isn’t nearly the drug trade (and the associated violence) here that there is in the states. The main problems here are disputes (usually land and/or tribal related) that escalate into gun fights. The government is also claiming that the vast quantities of guns scares off tourists and even foreign investment. Those sound plausible enough…

I see this kind of like the Va. Tech shooting conundrum. If people were carrying guns, that nutjob wouldn’t have been able to rack up such a high body count. On the other hand, if guns were really common on campus, you could expect that the number of stupidity related gun accidents would rise. In the end, there is a relatively small chance that a lone gunman will go around shooting the place up, so it makes sense to limit guns on campus. Here, the chances of being robbed or assaulted are pretty slim, so limiting the number of guns makes some sense. It will be interesting to see if the lack of armed assaults were due to the deterrence factor of many people being armed. Will the would be robbers now feel that they have free reign? It is a common belief that most women here have a gun under their balto. My usual quip is that you need to be prepared, you never know when you’ll have to extract revenge…

One of the more interesting parts is that most bodyguards will no longer be able to carry weapons. People guarding certain government people will be allowed to carry pistols. I suppose the president can always assign some army troops with heavier arms if he feels the need to do so. I’m curious to see how this goes. Seeing a sheik with 3 or 4 Kalishnikov toting bodyguards is a pretty common sight. You can be sure that they will fight the new law tooth and nail, or at least claim that they are an exception (the typical “above the law” attitude that most sheiks seem to have.) The paper has already witnessed one sheik flaunting the rule, I want to see how the government reacts. My guess is that the government will allow certain ones, the ones the government needs favors from, to get away with it. The hell of it is that most sheiks do not need armed bodyguards, it is a status thing. They don’t feel like VIPs unless they have an armed entourage. I will be following this intently…

OK, I have some numbers to kind of sum up what the traffic is like here.There are 250,000 vehicles here in Sana’a. 40,000 of those are taxies and 15,000 af those are busses. The article states that the number of cars has doubled in less than two years. That means that two years ago there were 125,000 cars here. Keep that in mind for these next statistics. Between 1995 and 2006, there were 40,141 accidents, 32,969 injuries caused by accidents, and 2,398 deaths caused by accidents here in Sana’a. The numbers are a little skewed since the only accidents that are reported are the really serious ones. I can assure you that the dizzying number of fender benders are not reported, hell traffic barely slows down for them… In any case, we can forget trying to figure out the deaths per accident because there are so many unreported accidents. We can look at the number of serious accidents as compared to the number of cars here though. Even if we go with the current number of cars, that means that 1 in 6.2 cars were involved in a serious accident over the past 11 years. remember, these are only the serious accidents, 1 in 1.2 of those accidents resulted in “injuries” (presumably requiring a trip to a hospital), and 1 in 16 resulting in a death.

I don’t have the US numbers to compare, but that seems really high to me. Just from anecdotal experience, I have been involved in two accidents, neither of which would be reported in here in Yemen, and a couple of fender benders in 20 years of driving. Not only that, but I drove amongst many, many more cars and at much greater speeds. One of my accidents was caused by snow and ice (and maybe the driver:-), once again, neither of which is an issue here in Sana’a.

Part of the reason may be enforcement issues. There are 1,343 traffic wardens posted here in Sana’a but with only 15 patrolling vehicles and 45 patrolling motorcycles. And get this, they only have 45 “wireless communication transmitters.” There are copious citations issued, a mind boggling 2,122,097 (yes, that is 2 million) between 1995 and 2006. Keep in mind that until 2004, there were only 125,000 cars here! They have a “plan” to clean up the traffic over the next 20 years or so, but I think their first priority will have to be combating the totally insane drivers. I have yet to ride with any local that I would consider a good driver here. I have no idea how to address that, but they better while there is only 250,000 cars here instead of millions…

If you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you know I’ve been having ongoing problems with my shoes. Well, to be more exact, I’ve been having trouble with my feet. I came here with shoes of course, but within a month and a half, they were too small for me. I bought some shoes in Malta in order to avoid some real foot issues, but they were too nice to walk around here. So I ordered some more shoes and my mother shipped them over to me. They did fine, until I went home. For some reason, they are now too big. I think what I really need is a size smaller, but in a wider width. Right now, the only shoes I have that fit well are sandals. That’s OK, but it’s really disgusting when it rains and my feet are just filthy all the time. I need shoes.

Now that I’ll have this teaching gig, I’ll also need some actual work clothes, and shoes of course. I started looking around for shoes today. Ideally, I would get one pair of decent looking shoes for work and another set for general walking around. I still have my sandals too. The problem is that most of the shoes here are total crap. They’re cheap, but they are crap. I found one place selling decent shoes (mostly Italian and French) but of course they cost just as much as they do back home. $125 is absolutely crazy money here for a pair of shoes. I just read an article about traffic and traffic cops (more about that in another post) in the newest paper. According to them, the average salary of a traffic warden does not exceed $100. I hope to God they mean per month, but they may not.

Another problem I have is that my feet are really large. I think I need a size 46 (european thank you very much), but most places only stock up to a 45. I’m going to try a bunch of shoes and pray that they are bigger than other brands… If all else fails, I should be able to get some shoes in Athens, but I shudder to think what kind of prices I’ll see there…

I will be teaching English when I get back from my trips. It also appears that I will be able to have as many hours as I want. The whole program sounds really, really nice. I will not be expected to go over the technical aspects of the language, I will only be expected to talk to the students and get them to talk. They will plan around my schedule, so I will be able to travel if I want. They really, really want an American in the school. This will allow me to come back next year AND be able to do some more traveling. Things are looking up!

I was really worried for a while. I had been told that a “family” would be taking over the ground floor of the house I’m living in. If a child had been brought in, and/or if the family was Yemeni, that would have been it. I have enough problems with the noise from the surrounding kids and Yemenis, i didn’t need them in my house as well… Thankfully, it is a South African couple. They are muslims and want the entire bottom floor so that she doesn’t “have to” stay covered the entire time. Whew! That’s fine…

We also got our required German. There is always at lest one German in the house, our lone Austrian just wasn’t cutting it:-) Anyway, things are fine, I won’t think about moving out for another couple of months…

… and move to a place with wider streets. Say what you want about the suburbs, but at least you don’t have trucks making deliveries at 11:30 at night. Last night, we had the delivery, and it involved the truck backing up and going forward about a zillion times. So I got lots of the BEEP BEEP BEEP sound. Then they turned off the truck and unloaded it, shouting to each other all the while and listening to the radio. That’s the usual noise, last night we also had a little kid imitating the backing up sound for a while too. Who lets their kid play around on the street at midnight? Anyway, eventually someone had to pass the truck, but the truck is blocking the way, so they lay on the horn. They continue to lay on the horn even as the truck is attempting to maneuver out of the way (BEEP BEEP BEEP), like the horn is going to speed things up. Then the truck had to get back into it’s original position (BEEP BEEP BEEP) and finish the unloading. They finished up around 12:45. For the next hour or so, a motorcycle blew its horn at random. I assume that they just didn’t want me to get to sleep because there isn’t a damn reason for a motorcycle to blow its horn more than once… Grrr, if I lived in a newer part of the city, the streets would be wider and so people could get by without honking and the truck could get into position without so much beeping. I’ll look around for a place after I get back from Greece…

The incident I had in the dabob started me thinking. I was a little shocked that the driver just left the kid there even though he was in obvious pain. I have now remembered a little tidbit that I read a while back in one of the English newspapers. It seems that the police have a habit of arresting first and asking questions later. In some cases, they may not get around to asking anything for a couple of days. Another potential danger is that if they do not have any other witnesses or people in captivity, they just may hold the guy they have and assume that he’s the guilty one. There have been stories of people stopping to help an injured pedestrian being rushed off and held in jail, sometimes even if that person was not driving and the pedestrian had been hit by a car!

The police here are really something else. Often times they do some powerful person’s dirty work as their main line of business. It isn’t uncommon to hear of people being picked up and “detained” for a while. The release of the prisoner usually coincides with some sort of payment… The police can also, not surprisingly, be used by the government to intimidate people. There was an incident not too long ago where a previously closed religious school reopened without the government’s approval. The police swooped down and arrested 7 people in the school but curiously not the teacher/director. Two of the prisoners are under the age of 15. The authorities have agreed to let them out since they received the word of the sheik in the area that they will be on “good behavior.” What does that mean? Get this, and this is a quote, “This means that the seven have agreed not to belong to, or support any political group that opposes the government. They should also make a commitment not to follow any radical school of thought. This includes all religious schools of which the government disapproves.” Now isn’t that nice? The police detained them without pressing any charges and then extorted an agreement not to oppose the government in any way in order to be let free. Now why on earth would they have something against the government? I wonder….

The power outages seem to be picking up in frequency again. We’ve lost power twice today, twice yesterday, and once over the weekend. This is probably the worst I’ve seen it here. It was almost this bad when I first got here, you could expect to lose power about 4 times a week. After 3 months went by, things really improved and we rarely lost power for the next 5 months or so. These last two months have been getting progressively worse. I understand that Yemen has a power generating shortage and that causes rolling blackouts, but maybe there’s something else going on causing the really terrible gaps in service recently…

UPDATE: It turns out that there is a problem with the cable connecting our house to the rest of the power system. Now that we know what the problem is, I’m hoping that they’ll fix it soon. The power is going off in the rest of the city, but it comes back on for them…

This story was printed in the latest Yemen Times. She was the Director(!) of an English language school here… I weep for her students.