Category: Yemen

Went to Mamoud’s house today for lunch. I usually avoid these types of things, but for some reason I went along this time. First, the good… The food was really good. I had some things I hadn’t had before, like stuffed eggplant. There was also this spaghetti, egg, cheese thing that had been baked, it was pretty good too.

Now the bad. As usual, we all sat on the floor. This causes me all sorts of problems, my hips ache and my butt falls asleep. After we finsihed eating, we went into the next room so some of them could chew qat. I got a wicked cramp in my left leg, I couldn’t stand up and it hurt like hell. They thought it was hilarious, they laughed and laughed… I got into the usual discussion about qat, they kept insisting that I chew and I kept refusing. One of the guys said that I should spread the word about qat in the US, and I just just couldn’t help myself, I asked him, “Oh, so that the US can be like Yemen?” It was actually pretty edgy humor, some of them appreciated it…

The rest of the chew involved the usual mishmash of racist and sexist comments mixed in with a healthy dose of ignorance. These things always depress me and I always wonder why I go. The irony of an Arab, a Yemeni telling me that blacks, and Africans in particular, couldn’t be trusted because of what they have done to Africa killed me. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! If an African had said the same thing about Arabs (and they just might), the guy at the chew would have been livid. I’m done, no more accepting invites to people’s houses unless I know them really well, the racism and ever present sexism is killing me. I try to be culturally sensitive, but really, c’mon. Some things are just wrong…

We were discussing proverbs today and had one of those, “Wow, I’m in Yemen moments…” The saying under discussion was “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” One of the gals in the class said, “Oh, we have a similar saying in Arabic.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Don’t name the baby until it’s born…”

I’m sorry, but there are some some things about this culture that just suck. I know, but political correctness be damned, some things are just awful here. We were talking about music in my conversation class and I even played some music for them. They liked “Stand by Your Man,” and “It’s not for Me to Understand.” I picked up that hint from a Laotian guy I used to work with. He told me that all of his relatives and most of the Pho places we would go liked listening to country music because the singers’ pronunciation was very distinct and rather slow.

Anyway, we finished up listening to them and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any bands around here. there are an endless number of kids chanting and singing in the streets, but no adolescents or older people doing music. There are the guys that do weddings, but that’s about it. I asked why that is. It turns out that it’s only socially acceptable to perform music if you’re from a certain “class” of people. It was made clear to me that it was a lower class and that they were considered undesirable.

I had heard that about drummers, really, who wants their daughter marrying a drummer? In rock bands, it’s always the drummers that are trouble… But to think of all musicians as being “lower” than you makes for a pretty awful environment for creative people. I can also only imagine what kind of weird effects that has on kids’ minds. Pop singers are universally admired, and many kids want to emulate the successful ones. But do they then aspire to a lower class of person?

BTW, when I asked them which English bands they like to listen to Celine Dion was the first off of everyone’s lips. Ugh. Some others were the Backstreet Boys, ABBA, Shania Twain, and Britney Spears. I was about to give up hope on them liking something that I really like when Batool said that she likes Elvis. She even referred to him as “The King.” LOL that made my night….

We were talking about sayings in my conversation class, and something one of them said reminded me of that quip from the Bible, “It rains on the just and the unjust alike.”

I asked them what they thought it meant, one of them responded, “It means that good things happen to both good and bad people.” Huh? How’d he get the idea of good things out of that? Oh right… Here, rain is considered a good thing, it didn’t occur to them that it meant something bad. It really is a different world…

Sometimes, the gaps between Yemeni and American cultures don’t seem so large. Other times, they look enormous… My friend Diana just wrote a decent blog post (http://fullbrightest.wordpress.com/) about some legislation she was working on. She works in some women’s advocacy group here and they were trying to get some of the laws on rape changed. Sounds like a good thing, rape laws all across the middle east are really screwed up. Here was the thing that they were hoping to get passed into law:

If a man rapes a woman and she becomes pregnant as a result, he would be required to marry her.

Now doesn’t that sound like a great idea? Diana writes about her reaction really well. The ladies there sat her down and explained the idea behind the law. You see, if a child does not have their father’s name, that child will have a very difficult time in life. The idea is that if the rapist marries the woman, the child will have an easier life and he will be forced to take care of the child financially.

Wow, talk about a different world view… Notice that the woman that was raped isn’t mentioned at all? Those reasons only make sense if the woman that was raped is totally disregarded. In addition, I’m dubious that that a rapist will suddenly become a good muslim and support his new wife and child… The legislation wasn’t passed, but is it a good thing or a bad thing? Neither myself nor Diana has a really good grasp on that. How can you possibly approach problems like that when our priorities are so different?

Well, not only has the internet here decided to become even flakier than usual, the program I usually use to post to my blog is acting weird as well. I’m posting using another method, but I hope to be back to normal soon. In a nutshell, I have a new job, Yemen is run by klptocrats, and I managed to absolutely ruin a woman’s day today… More later!:-)

Isaac

Tami and I wandered around a while and found some really interesting things. Of course the problem is that we’ll probably never be able to find them again… The old city is a total maze. The cool thing about that is that sometimes you find new things even in places you walk all the time. The bad news is that it takes a while before you can really navigate the place. We saw the “National cinema,” and they were apparently showing movies. That surprised me, I had heard all of the movie houses had been shut down, the one on Hadda street certainly looks pretty grim.

I’m still figuring out the cameras. I had some issues with the one I used before, I kept forgetting to cock the shutter before I advanced the film. The result was several overlapped frames. I’m also having difficulty judging how sharp my negs are. The scans are less than great, the lab doesn’t seem to have a 645 mask, so I get a 6×7 portion of the neg scanned every time. Most of the distance shots sharpen up nicely on the computer, although I have to hammer them with sharpening to get there. I’m still having issues with the people shots though, if the negs are slightly soft I can think of several reasons for it. I could me misfocusing, but I doubt it. The rangefinder could be off, that’s possible, it might have gotten knocked out of whack on the way over here. It’s also possible that the rangefinder simply doesn’t have the accuracy needed to focus accurately at portrait distances when the lens is close to wide open. I’ll have to keep testing to see what my problem is. I’ve been getting some decent shots, but it isn’t consistent enough. Hmm, inconstancy usually points back to the photographer. We all know that can’t be the reason…

On the upside, almost all of my shots with the pinhole camera were technically fine. I had forgotton just how wide angle that thing is though, I am going to have to get much closer with my next shots to make them decent. Anyway, as usual, some more shots can be found up on my flicker site. You can click on the right side or here to see them.

I really hate weddings here. Well, the guy’s part at least, the women have the decency to do their celebrating indoors. For the men, they set up a tent in an open area in the city and then they chew quat, dance, and play music. No big deal, but there are certain Yemeni touches that make them impossible… The biggest thing is the noise. Gatherings tend to be loud, and happy ones tend to be louder still. But that isn’t enough, just having the band’s noise on it’s own would not be enough. A PA system is installed to amplify the festivities. The speakers aren’t arranged for the participants, after all, the people there can hear just fine. No the speakers are for the surrounding neighborhood. They point the bullhorn type speakers out into the surrounding streets, sometimes even a street over and BLAST the music. The other problem is the time they do this, they usually start around 11PM and wrap up the loud part around 2-2:30.

It’s one thing to not care about other people’s sleep, but to actively make sure that the wedding is as loud as possible at the worst time upsets me to no end. A wedding party was being held last night, but they STARTED at 2AM. God was I pissed. I closed up all the windows and put in earplugs and I could still hear them. Honestly, I managed to block enough of the noise to fall asleep, but it was the idea that they not only didn’t care if I slept, they actually hoped that I didn’t that kept me awake. I was too mad to sleep. I have no idea when I drifted off, but it wasn’t too far from the morning call to prayer. I was tired enough (and had earplugs in) that I actually slept through the really loud call. Yemenis in general are very nice, but their deliberate disinterest of impacting other people’s lives is infuriating…

One of the appeals of my new place was the washing machine. I had been doing all of laundry by hand, and it really sucked. Last night I did my first load and I realized that just having a machine didn’t mean that the labor was over.

True, this one does indeed “wash” the clothes, but even just hooking it up was a pain. There is a really short cord on the back, and there’s no outlet in the bathroom. It needed to stay in the bathroom because there is no water hookup. Not only does this mean that I had to fill it up my self (more on that later), but when the wash water is drained, it just dumps it on the floor. That isn’t a problem since my bathroom, like most of them here, is one big shower stall. I don’t have a drain in the center, it’s off to the side, but the idea is the same. It’s actually kind of nice, I end up washing the floor every time I take a shower. I just squeegee after the shower and voila! Clean floor…

Anyway, I figured that I could just use an extension cable to hook the washing machine up to the outlet that is right outside the door for the hot water heater. Right, so first I rigged up some strings to support the extension cord, and ran the plug to the outlet. Surprise! It uses a plug arrangement that not only have I never seen here before, it is totally incompatible with all of my adaptors. It actually looks a lot like the 220 plugs back home, but all of the plugs here are 220, I have no idea why they would use a different one… Anyway, I stretched an extension from the kitchen and connected the extension cable from the bathroom to it. All that was left was to plug the washing machine in, ARGHHH! It uses another plug I haven’t seen, all of the prongs are slanted. Luckily, one of my many adaptors did the trick. I have now seen 5 different plugs/receptacles here; make sure you bring plenty of plug adaptors with you if you come over here for any amount of time…

So I now had power, I put the clothes in and the soap and started to fill it with water. Let me tell you, it takes a considerable number of bucketfuls to fill that tank… At long last I could start the machine, there was only one problem, all of the controls were in Chinese… I figured it out eventually. After the washing is complete, you switch the middle dial to the right and all of the wash water drains out. Then I had to fill it up again so that it could be rinsed. That went on for a while, then I drained it again. Then you take the clothes out of the wash bin and put them into the spinner to get rid of most of the water. The trick is that the spinner has about a third of the volume of the wash tub, so it took several iterations to get it all done. The clothes were fairly dry when they came out, but they have to be hung up for the final drying.

The total amount of labor is still about the same as hand washing, but it is far easier on my back. The clothes do get cleaner too, hand washing would get rid of the major clumps, but my goal with the hand washing was to not smell… There’s still a lot of time involved, especially with the spin cycle. At least with the washing and rinsing I can go do something else, but I have to keep my weight on the machine during the spin to keep it from vibrating and jumping everywhere… It really makes you appreciate the all in one washing machines, you know the ones where you put in the clothes and soap and walk away. Oh well, I guess it is progress….

We had another discussion yesterday, the topic was whether or not women should be allowed to drive. No really, it was a little controversial. The class split up primarily along gender lines, all of the women were in favor of being able to drive while only one guy was in favor of them driving. The guys started the argument by saying that women would cause more accidents. Naturally, I scoffed at this, but later on Tami made the point that you have almost zero peripheral vision when wearing Niqab. There seems to be an easy solution to that, but that wasn’t discussed… Later the guys asked the women what they would do if the car broke down. The clear assumption is that they could not ask a man for help and any other woman would be useless. I was tempted to ask if maybe the problem wasn’t with women driving but with learned helplessness and strict gender segregation, but I decided not to go down that path.

Eventually, the argument went into the area of what women could and couldn’t do. Luckily, there weren’t too many of the guys that stuck to the idea that men are always better at all things. Most of them even admitted that they would allow their wives to work if they were going to make significant money. But still, it was another amazing day. The trouble is that none of the students really understood how weird the topic was. In my youth, I remembered seeing films from the 30’s and 40’s with old men saying that women can’t drive, that’s about as close as I’ve ever come to this topic before, I plan on discussing it more in my class…