Month: January 2008

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…