Month: March 2008

My friend Diana is working with a women’s group here in Sana’a. She has recently turned her attention to the plight of women here when it comes to childbirth. Mothers dying during childbirth is far too common. You can read about her thoughts here. You should check it out, she’s an awfully good writer… Anyway, I have been looking at a lot of the problems here for a while and I’ve settled in on a philosophy that is working really well for me. Instead of looking at a problem and wondering what could be done to fix it, I’ve been seeing most of the obvious problems as symptoms of a larger problem. Of course, those problems could be symptoms too, eventually you go back far enough and the issues become too dispersed to keep track of them. I go back as far as I can before it becomes diffuse and I think about what can be done for those.

For example, I think that the issues that Diana is dealing with are just a symptom of a larger problem, namely, people just don’t care that much about women here. Or at least there are other problems that they think are more important than that one. That’s the real reason that nothing has been done and the reason nothing will be done about mortality during childbirth. Somehow, you have to make people care, I have no idea how to do that, but it seems to me that is the only real way to solve that problem. New government spending or laws won’t do much.

I see the general lack of caring as being one of the big problems of this area. That along with the reliance on bloodlines to determine social status and the willingness to invest people with religious and governmental authority explain a lot of what’s wrong with this place. Like I said before, I have no idea how to tackle problems like that, that’s the problem with an approach like this. I do believe that with enough time and patience, views on these things can be changed and it will lead to improvements to a whole host of things. I’m doing what I can with my students to emphasize individual autonomy and the value of each person. It’s a little thing, but I hope that with enough exposure to this sort of thing, it will make a difference eventually…

Remember how I said that the mortars that hit a school near the US embassy could have either been a revenge thing or a botched terrorist thing? Well now we know, a group took responsibility… This is typical Yemen. Normally, if someone screwed up that badly, they would lie low and let people wonder what was going on. Oh no, not here… Yes they screwed up and yes they hurt school girls, but they want to make sure everyone knew that they tried…. Not only could they not hit a compound the size of several football fields, they hit a girls’ school nearby. So what do they do? They take “credit” for the attempt of spreading terror… What did they say to the families of the girls that were injured? “We told you not to get too close to the embassy…” What a bunch of morons, with any luck, other people will see how stupid those people are and this will cut into the desire of anyone else that might have been thinking about doing something like that…

I got home last night and puttered around for a while. Then I listened to some music and ate the chocolate bar that I had bought. Afterwards, I was a little dry, so I reached for my bottle of water. It was empty. So were all my others. Hmmm… What time was it? 11:30 at night. That’s not good, everything was probably closed. Oh well, I figured that I’d wait until morning and buy some then.

Before too long, I got really dry and the headache started. I figured I better try to get some water, so out I went. Naturally, all of the shops near me were closed. I asked a guy in the street where I could get some water and he took me a ways into the old city to a ducann (a small shop) he knew. Well, it was closed. I wandered back and asked someone else. They gave me some vague directions deeper into the old city. I ran across some other guys and they took me deeper into the labyrinth. The place they were thinking of was closed, so one of them mentioned walking to Bab-al-Yemen… That’s on the other side of the souk from my house and I really didn’t feel like walking that far. Just then, I stumbled across a ducann that was restocking for the next day. “I want a bottle of water, no two, make it three!” I was parched, but I had my water…

I started to walk back along the ways I thought we came, but I quickly got turned around. Every street in the old city is similar, but nothing was familiar. I wandered and wandered. When I saw someone, I asked them how to get back to where I knew my way. He gave me some vague directions which I attempted to follow. That happened two more times before I ended up out at the Sialia near my house. I eventually got back to my place at 12:30!

The moral of the story, if you’re going to run out of water in Sana’a, make sure it’s before 11:00!

My teacher was in a weird mood today. He started out asking about various relationships that appear to be common in the US but are all but illegal here. Many Yemenis are curious about this, they find it odd that relationships, especially sexual ones, between the sexes out of marriage are tolerated in the US. The news that there are no laws against them comes as a surprise to many. He then went on to ask if they were Harram in Christianity. I didn’t really know how to respond. Christianity is complicated, there’s that whole forgiveness thing, and the “rules” are subject to wild interpretations.

Then he started to ask about same sex marriages in the US. He was one of many who thought that the entire US was swamped with guys wanting to marry each other. After clearing that up, he thought for a second and asked why men and women want to marry people of the same sex. It seemed odd to me that he would ask, but I did my best to explain. He thought a little more and asked me, “But how do two women have sex?”

There are some things I won’t do, and explaining lesbian sex to someone is one of them. Google will give you plenty of results if you’re interested in that sort of thing… Arab men are not known for their amorous capabilities, let alone their knowledge of female anatomy. I have friends that have tried to talk about sex with some of the men here. Those conversations didn’t get very far because they were met with shock and disbelief when they told the Yemenis that women can have orgasms… It’s a sad thing to be a woman out here…

Anyway, my brief attempt at explaining the motivation of women for doing things to each other didn’t get very far. My gut feeling is that sex just isn’t seen as being about the other person out here. You do sex for pleasure, you get married to have sex. Yes, you need a woman for that, but it is her “job.” Like I said, I think that’s the underlying problem and not understanding what women could get out of it makes some sense if you come from that world view… It’s all very sad…

OK, so I’m sure that all of you have heard about the mortars coming down close to the US embassy the other day. They hit a girl’s school near the embassy, not the embassy itself. That had struck me as odd, after all, the embassy compound probably has the same area as 5 or 6 football fields, it surprised me that they couldn’t hit it. And they dropped 3 shells, it’s not as though they couldn’t have adjusted after the first one came up short/long. Well, the latest rumors floating around the city involve an ongoing dispute between the principle of the school and one of the leaders of the Isla party. I know, it sounds crazy, but this is Yemen. There was a “terrorist” attack a month or two ago involving a grenade being thrown into a restaurant during the lunch rush. Turns out that it was just someone who had a beef with the guy that ran the place. I’m giving even odds that politics and/or personal vendetta was involved in this as opposed to “terrorism.” This place is crazy, people are very friendly, but do not get them angry or insult them, there can be a lot of collateral damage…

UPDATE: From at least one report I’ve read, the school is about 500 meters away from the embassy. That’s half a klick folks. Either this was a personal grudge thing or they are some of the most incompetent “terrorists” I’ve ever heard of. Well, this is Yemen, either could be true…