Month: August 2007

… 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.

I was looking for the Turkish airlines office on Hadda street from a dabob. The driver was speaking in the worst dialect that I have ever heard. I couldn’t understand a thing he was telling me and he couldn’t understand me. Damn this proper Arabic! Anyway, he was trying to explain something to me when a kid (12-16 years old, its so hard to tell the age of people here) jumped infront of the dabob. BAM! The driver slammed on the brakes, but he still hit him full on. The kid managed to turn slightly, but he still bounced off the dabob in a rather frightening way. The driver started to yell (I still couldn’t understand a word) and the kid popped up and started to yell back. I estimate that we were going about 35mph when he hit the brakes, so he hit him going about 10-15 mph. Like I said, it was pretty scary. The hitee was grasping his side as he was giving the driver what-for, I’m sure that he had at least cracked some ribs if not broken a few. After yelling for a while, the driver sped off down the road, visibly shaken. I really thought it was the kid’s fault and attempted explain it to him, but we quickly got back into the “What?” mode of conversation.

The kicker for me was that as scary as it was, no one seems to think it’s a big deal. “Yeah, that happens sometimes..” is the typical response. WHAT? That kid could have been killed, just falling to the pavement like that is dangerous let alone being HIT BY A MINI BUS! I can’t believe how casual people are treating this. On the other hand, I have talked to several people that have witnessed fatal accidents. I’ve never seen one of those actually happen, just the aftermath. Traffic is scary here, thank God it’s usually slow…