Category: Yemen

Some random observations from the latest English papers here in Yemen…

An article about ongoing mediations in a tribal conflict mentioned not only the government’s Committee to combat revenge, but the sub-committee of that organization as well. We all know that the best hope we have against violence is sub committees…

The authorities seized 136 video cds that contain what they consider pornography. The phrase “Tip of the iceberg” comes to mind… The video and audio CD shops are everywhere. The official in charge of this operation made some strong statements condemning the sellers of these types of movies and urged more crackdowns against them. I’m sure that this would stop people from viewing porn, why would a guy living in a country where he can’t even see woman’s faces or hair want to look at stuff like that?

A new organic restaurant opened up in Sana’a, the first of it’s kind apparently. The caption under the photo of the establishment says, “Now peace loving health nuts have a place to dine.” The photo showing patrons of course featured a woman in what we in ithaca called a “Lola granola” dress…

Those were in the Yemen Observer. The Yemen times, normally a slightly more sedate paper, had pictures of various sleeping positions. The report was trying to show how different sleeping positions revealed different aspects of people’s personality. There was a chart, probably copied from the internet, showing different positions and their titles. One of them was titled “Shake that ass.”

I wrote a rather pointed letter to the “economics” editor of the Yemen times. I asked why a variety of topics that are plaguing Yemen do not have adequate economic coverage. Many times, there are obvious (to those that are economically minded) reasons why certain things happen, but they are not reported. He wrote back with a fairly good response, explaining a lot of the problems with wheat prices here. He also made it clear that there are certain things that papers cannot really say due to either government pressure, or pressure from powerful individuals. The press in the Arabic world is quite a bit different than the US. The letter I got partially explained why the English papers here are filled with “fluff.” The papers are only 12 pages long, 4 of which are nothing but ads. There are also ads scattered throughout the rest of the paper. Of the remaining 10 pages, 3 or 4 of them are things like sleeping positions or painting on glass stories. With so much to possibly report on, there is much that the journalists can’t really say out loud…

There are several kids here that always seem like they are on the verge of blowing up. This morning for instance, one of them was running up and down the short alley by my window, screaming his head off for twenty minutes. The alley is only about 8 feet wide, so the sound bounces around pretty good. He wasn’t in pain or anything, just yelling, and running, and yelling… The other day a truck backed up near my house. He and another kid proceeded to imitate the sound while running around for 25 minutes or so. They would scream BEEP BEEP BEEP as they ran past each other, turned around and did it again.

I figure if they don’t do this, they will probably explode. I guess kids are like this all over the world, but here they are much more confined in the old city. There aren’t any parks or open spaces to really run around. Grass is rarely seen, and you certainly can’t play on it (it is for show, you don’t want to tear it up). So they run around the streets until they’re old enough (and lucky enough) to get a bike. Then they go tearing around the streets on their bikes.

Once, back in my Penn camera days, a father came in with his rambunctious kid. Apparently, the kid had already been a bit of a problem in another store because as soon as they walked in, the father took the kid aside and said in a stern voice, “Do not move from this spot!” The kid didn’t, but he was fidgeting and the demon in him was trying really hard to get out. After a little while, the kid couldn’t take it and started to jump in place and spun in the air. Now there was a kid that needed some wind sprints or something….

The trash trucks here are equipped with deafening sirens. I think I have heard a police siren twice here, but the damn trash truck comes every day. 8:30 may not sound real early to some of you, but it is well before I usually get up, or at least it’s well before I want to get up. I get woken up every day around that time. The trash service here is actually very reliable, it’s one of the only things I can think of that seems to operate the way it should. Anyway, I’ve been asking people why the trash truck has to be so fricking loud, and no one has had any idea. I asked my teacher today and he told me that he had recently had a conversation with some of the trash guys about this since he didn’t know either. What he was told is that it makes sure that people know when the truck comes by. This didn’t make any sense to me, after all, in America, we all know when the truck comes by. If we miss it, it’s our problem. The difference is that here, if people miss the truck, they just throw their trash into the street, making an enormous mess. The trash guys are just covering their butts, by using the siren everyone knows when they are there, if the streets are a mess, it isn’t their fault. Apparently, they are worried about their supervisors seeing streets filled with trash. It sounds like this may have happened before. It sure is refreshing to hear of government employees being worried about what their superior thinks. If only the rest of the government were like this…

According to a recent poll, 65% of people in Yemen think that new laws are the solution to Yemen’s FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) problem. The other options that were offered in the poll were education and religious training. We’ll ignore for the time being that FGM is already “illegal’ in Yemen, I think that this poll shows that people still have a real faith in government power. Why I have no idea. With problems like this, top down “solutions” just don’t work. The laws are unenforceable. If you want to make a change in this area, it has to come from the bottom up. For me, education is the key. In a really religious place like this, religious education might help as well, but I would hope that pure humanitarian reasons would be enough to stop FGM. My gut feeling is that until women have some power in these countries, not much will change….

Over half the population of Yemen is below the age of 15. Poor countries have a much higher birth rate than rich ones, for a variety of reasons. People that are worried about “overpopulation” should always pursue policies that improve the economic situations of poor countries…

Muslims do not like dogs. There are multiple references in the Koran of how dirty and “weak” dogs are. Muhammad (PBUH) realized that Gabriel was not coming to him whenever a dog was in his house. Once he got rid of the dog, the revelations continued. Of course I’m not sure why Gabriel didn’t just tell him to get rid of the mutt instead of letting him figure it out on his own… Muhammad (PBUH) also changed the direction his army was taking when they came across a bitch giving birth along the way. He saw this as a sign, changed directions, and went on to victory.

People here go out of their way to chase dogs and kill them when they are in a car. Many dogs get poisoned just to get rid of them. Not coincidentally, there are probably 100 cats for every dog here. I go weeks without seeing a single dog, but the cats are everywhere… Cats are considered much cleaner and wholesome here. I happen to like both cats and dogs, but I have been a little shocked at the level of hatred of dogs here. If you’re not going to have a pets, I can sort of understand it. Cats are fairly clean as far as where they go to the bathroom and they keep the rodents under control. Dogs, on the other hand, are pretty messy. I had also heard of problems of dogs forming packs and causing real troubles harassing people.

Last night a group of dogs were fighting along our street. There may have been as few as 8 dogs involved, but it sounded like a 1000. it sounded as though they were killing each other, the barking, growling, yelping, screeching, etc were quite a racket. I like dogs, well domestic, trained ones at least. Feral ones are not on my list of favorites… Anyway, I like dogs, but if I had a gun, I probably would have gone out and started to kill them. The noise they were making was truly blood curdling and sounded downright dangerous. If I had heard that while I was laying in my bed when I was 5 or 6, I’d be terrified of dogs to this day. I guess I’m glad that there aren’t nearly as many dogs as cats here.

Nobody here has hair like mine. Jenny has accurately referred to it as “baby Hair.” It’s very, very fine and straight. The slightest puff of wind will blow my hair everywhere, I have to be really careful and make sure my hair is completely dry before I go out, otherwise it’s liable to dry in whatever position it gets blown into. The kids here think it’s hilarious, I must get told 15 times that my hair is messed up on windy days.

The locals’ hair is usually very short and fairly wiry. There’s a fair amount of African blood in the people here and the men almost always keep their hair very short. Interestingly, the few women I’ve seen here without a hijab have long, straight hair. I don’t know if it’s the rarity of seeing women’s hair, but their hair always looks quite nice to me. The last guy that cut my hair did ok except for my cowlicks, he pretty much screwed those up. I’ll need a cut again soon, but I’m hoping I can do that when I’m at home where my hair type is a little more common.

Well, just like I said, I went home from the internet and lied down. I woke up 4 hours later feeling pretty good but really hungry. Hungry as in “If I don’t get food in me I’m going to pass out.” I decided to go down to the Indian place. Took one bus and decided to hike the rest of the way instead of taking another bus.

The houses here are all flat roofed and there are drains at various intervals around the wall of the roof. They use pipes to shoot the water out away from the house. Whenever I dump my laundry water out I always hope that I don’t hit anyone… Well, you guessed it, somebody got me. On the way to the restaurant I got a big splash of “water” right on top of my head and shoulders, it was a perfect hit. God only knows what it actually was, I don’t want to know. All I knew was that it didn’t smell (Il Hamdillila) and I was dying of hunger. I went to the restaurant with a wet head and shoulders. I doubt that it was deliberate, you would have to time things pretty well from behind a wall. In any case, I made sure to scrub myself really well last night…

Yemen has a shortage of electricity generation. People demand more power than can be generated by the current facilities. So we have blackouts, seemingly more common these days. How’s this for a laugh, the government wants to pursue nuclear power plants in order to take care of the problem! OMG, even I am scared about that. One look at the infrastructure around the country should be all that it takes to rule that out. There is no way that I would trust this government’s ability to protect against a catastrophic failure… It doesn’t matter, no one world wide will want this to happen and Yemen doesn’t have the wherewithal to fight like Iran is doing. I’m pretty sure that they’ll manage to extort some money out of donor nations as an alternative to nuclear.

This brings up another point. People that want to “fight” global warming need to come up with some sort of alternative energy source. Nuclear would certainly solve the CO2 issue, but there are other complications, especially with governments and situations like Yemen’s. Yemen will most likely install several new oil burning power plants. other nations might go with coal instead. In either case, more CO2 is the result. What is the alternative to these power sources for developing countries? I don’t actually know what the alternatives are, but something will have to come up if these places are to keep improving AND for CO2 emissions to drop. One thing is for sure, these places need electricity, and more of it in the future…

… of how visitors are treated here, something interesting happened to me tonight. I went to a juice stand to get some chips and a strawberry juice. The clerk was distracted, with this back to me. I said, “Slaam aly koom” to him rather loudly, but he didn’t notice. Another man in the place started yelling at the clerk and really gave him hell. The literal meaning of the greeting “Salaam aly koom” is peace be upon you. The response is, “wa ally koom salaam” which is and peace upon you. It’s an automatic thing, when you say one, the other person says the other. Well, if you don’t give the appropriate response it is considered quite an insult. This other guy was quite upset that the clerk had “done” this to me and gave the clerk an earful. The kid looked pretty sheepish as he apologized to me… Anyway, people take hospitality quite seriously here…