Month: May 2008

I just read an article about how Yemen’s wheat production has increased by over 30% this year. Keep in mind that Yemen imports over 90% of its wheat, it’s relatively easy to get a big percentage jump if you start from a low level. What caught my eye was the fact that the article said that the increase was due to the implementation of the new “food security” program instituted by the government. As usual, there were no details as to what that might mean, but I have some guesses, and as usual, I have a feeling that the program misguided.

Yemen imports 90% of its wheat. Bread is a staple here, the Yemenis eat an amazing amount of it every day. My last teacher told me that he eats about 14 to 15 pieces of “Cadam” (a type of bread) every day. I would say that’s about a loaf and a half of bread back home every day. Wheat prices have gone up all over the world and that has caused the price of bread to go up as well. The people here are poor, and they put up with all sorts of shenanigans by the government, but if you raise the price of bread too much, there will be riots. There have been before, and I’m sure there will be in the not so distant future. I assume that this is what the “food security” program is all about, keeping the price of wheat low to keep civil unrest under control.

But how are you going to keep the price of wheat low? There are several ways a government can do this, and there are problems with all of them. The government could try to force the farmers to sell wheat at below the market price. There are some obvious problems with that. If you aren’t allowed to get the market price, you either don’t grow it to begin with or you sell on the black market. That program isn’t going to work, and I think even this government knows that. The government can pay subsidies directly to the farmers to grow wheat. Subsidies are headaches. Once you give subsidies, it’s very difficult to get rid of them. Just look at the US’ farm subsidy bloat for proof. Subsidies are hidden taxes, in other words they raise the price which is the opposite of what you’re trying to do. The much more popular approach is to raise the price of imported wheat (through a tariff) in order to make the local stuff seem like a bargain. It wouldn’t surprise me if the government already imposes an import tax on wheat, they tend to grasp at any money they see. Raising prices on food in a really poor country is pretty evil, but I’m sure that’s what’s going on here.

The big problem is that Yemen will never grow as much wheat as their booming population wants. I’m sure the idea is that with an import tax, the locals would be protected from foreign competition until Yemen can become a player in world wheat production. There are several problems with this. First, Yemen just doesn’t have the geography for large scale wheat production. There are few places here that have the flat, open fields that are best suited for growing and automatic harvesting of wheat. Even if they used every available acre, they would never produce enough to have any impact on worldwide wheat prices. The wheat fields in central Canada are several times the size of all of Yemen…

The big problem is water. Yemen is running out of water, they are running out of it at an alarming pace. It is estimated that Sana’a will be out of water in 10 years. Other parts may run out sooner. The papers here always talk about the booming population as the culprit but agriculture uses 90% of the water supply. A lot of that is due to qat and inefficient irrigation techniques. The government has gone to great lengths to stimulate the agriculture sector here. Since water is “free,” it seems like the ideal way to put people to work. Of course it also means that everyone will keep using it until it’s gone. As it turns out, the Saudi peninsula is not well suited for large scale agriculture production, who knew?

If Yemen gave up on agriculture, there would be more than enough water for the people here. “But what would they eat?” You can import all types of food relatively easily, water not so much. I’m pretty sure that the “food security” program more or less equals a water scarcity program. Yemen’s food security “program” should be similar to The UAE’s, Qatar’s, Taiwan’s , and Hong Kong’s, i.e. make enough money that you can import whatever you want. If the economy is working well, you can buy food from places that are better suited for it. Instead of doing that, the Yemeni government is giving people incentives to stay on the farm. This not only stunts the economy, it will ultimately lead to a full blown water crisis. Trade is good, why don’t they use it?

My students have their writing final exam tomorrow so I thought we’d do a practice run. The idea is that they can try and then we’d look at the mistakes that were made. In theory, that will prevent them from making the same mistakes tomorrow. I told them to write a 6 sentence paragraph, two sentences had to be in the present continuous tense, and they had to use one adverb of frequency (usually, occasionally, etc.). I told them that the topic was “school.” They could write anything they wanted about school.

Bilquis, a rather chatty student of mine said, “But teacher, what should we write about?”
“Anything about school Bilquis.”
“But what?”
“Anything. You can write about any school you’ve been to.”
“But what do I write?”
“You don’t have any opinions about any of the schools you’ve been to?”
“Ummm?”
“Just write something, whatever comes into your head.”
“No, tell me teacher, what do I write about?”
“Anything!”
“No, let me write about something else.”
“No, just write!”
“But what…?”
“THINK FOR YOURSELF!”

Honestly, it was only 6 sentences, and she did eventually have six sentences of opinions to turn in, but she didn’t think she could do it. She was paralyzed when I didn’t give her something definite to do. It’s common enough here, they are petrified about the thought of coming up with their own material. The students have been pestering me for a week, “Please teacher, tell us what the topic is!” Of course that would negate the whole test aspect of it. If they can prepare and memorize something with the help of dictionaries and textbooks, it wouldn’t tell me how well they know the material. I always assign something general and easy like, “Why are you studying English?” but they are worried that it will be “hard.” I have told several of them that I will expect a history of the formation of the government of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (aka the PDRY aka south Yemen. North and South Yemen were reunified back in 1990.), but only 6 sentences worth… That made them freeze with fear, but I made it clear that it was a joke.

And it’s not as though we’re doing high power writing right now. I would be ecstatic if a student turned in the following:

I am studying English because I want to get a good job. I go to the school every day. English is hard but I study a lot. My brother takes classes too. I am writing this paragraph so I can get a good grade. I love English!

A lot of the things I get have the same, basic sentiment, but with a lot more grammatical errors… Anyway, not all of my students have a problem, but some of them have zero imagination. I’m hoping that with a little pushing I can make them do more than they think they can.

Nothing symbolizes Yemen like the Jambiya. It’s a curved knife that the men wear, front and center, with their more traditional clothes. When someone thinks of a souvenir from here, the Jambiya is at the top of the list. There’s a wide range of prices, they start with the el-cheapo ones made in India for tourists and kids and go up to the ultra expensive Rhino horn ones. All of the value is in the handle, the blade is a total afterthought. They are for show only, not for being used. You can put an edge on them, but the blade isn’t up to my mother’s cutlery, and the handle is fastened to a really thin extension of the blade by two rivet things. Even the best ones feel like they could be broken in half with a little effort. Any $20 knife back home is more useful, and feels better than these things. What’s the best knife you can buy here? People sell the bayonets from their Kalishnakovs pretty cheap, and they make excellent knives…

The Jambiyas I thought about getting are from Tihama. They have silver handles and usually have quite a bit of work done to them. I have finally found some in the $90 range that I liked. The good ones are in the $200-$600 range and that’s out of my price range. I should have something from here, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want a Jambiya. I just can’t bring myself to spend $90 on a useless knife. True, they have cultural significance, but I really don’t like the culture they represent. They are the epitome of the “You can tell what kind of man I am by who my father/uncle/grandfather is. Just look at this Jambiya!” The Jambiya shows what class you belong to, the nicer the one you have, the more respect you are given. The most esteemed are the ones with handles made from the horn of black rhino. Yeah, that rhino, the one that is almost extinct, it’s still in demand here. It’s much more important to have an ostentatious display of wealth and class than to preserve the animal… In a nutshell, it sums up what I don’t like about Yemen. The knife may look interesting, but it’s useless…

I have decided instead to buy something that reminds me of the culture here that is silent to me. I am getting a wedding dress. It’s about 80 or 90 years old, it’s from Sada’a, and it’s in amazing condition. There are many traditional wedding dresses available here, but this one is noticeably different. It’s a deep, cobalt blue and it has silver embroidery around the neck area and some more a little lower on the dress. The weddings usually go for 3 or 4 days, so the bride would have worn this on one of those days around the other women. The dress is actually pretty plain, it is customary to bury the bride in tons of jewelry, the dress isn’t really seen very much.

Anyway, I think that this is a much nicer souvenir than a useless knife. It also is a part of the culture that is fading away, the brides like newer dresses these days. The Jambiya has been around forever, and there’s tons being made now. These dresses won’t be around too much longer…

There have been moments that my students have come up with things that I never would have guessed that they would know. One day, we were talking about vitamins and I asked, “What is vitamin C?” A voice came from the back, “I think that is Ascorbic Acid…” Another time, we were outside practicing “This is,” and learning some new vocabulary. It was a fairly low level class, so were were learning words like brick, flower, grass, pipe, etc. I pointed to a column and asked them if they knew what it was. One of my students said, “I think that is the pediment.” I was pointing at the base if the column, so I shouldn’t have been surprised…

Today, someone asked me who Martin Luther was. I’m pretty sure he had only heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but I figured the other one was important enough to talk about as well. But how to explain? I told them that at the time, there was only one Christian Church. Martin Luther thought that there were some things wrong with the church, and so he came up with ideas to reform the church. New churches sprang up based on his recommendations, and we now call those churches Protestant churches. The church that they broke away from we now know as the Catholic church. They seemed to understand well enough, but then Saif, a student in the class raised his hand. “Actually, there were two Christian churches before the reformation, the Catholic and the Orthodox churches…” I was totally blown away. He is the first Yemeni I have ever met that even knew there was a difference between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, let alone know when they were formed. I had to agree that, yes, there were two churches by the time of the reformation, but that was more detail than the class needed to understand who Martin Luther was. You never know what people are going to know….

I take a cab to work every day. We go along the Sailia down to 70 meter rd. (sabaeen to the locals) and then to Medina Hadda where I work. The saila is roughly 4 and a half lanes wide for most of it outside of old Sana’a. Not that there’s any lanes, even if there were lines painted on the road, they would be ignored…

Anyway, on the way to work, we came up on a slightly slower moving car. My driver honked, as is the custom, as he passed on the left. I noticed that the driver of the other car wasn’t paying attention and was slowly drifting to the left, into us. Sure enough, he smacked into the rear passenger side of the taxi I was in. We had been going about 45 MPH, so we fishtailed a bit. It wasn’t that bad, although we were coming up on one of the many overpasses and the thought of us running into the supports flashed through my mind. Anyway, the impact messed up my cab’s fender, but it totally ripped off the cowling and all of the plastic bits on the front of the other car. My driver got out and started yelling at the other guy. He came back long enough to tell me to get another cab…

My next guy was funny. He told me over and over again that he wasn’t crazy like everyone else because he didn’t chew qat and smoke. He seemed to take pride in his safe driving. It was quite a relief. This was the 4th accident that i have been involved in since I got here and it had the most potential for being dangerous. I have driven in the US for about 22 years and have been involved in 4 accidents despite there being many more cars and much faster traffic in the US. Traffic here is nuts, I’ve never been so worried being in a car before…

I was out in the courtyard of the school where I work before I started teaching. I was using the internet and just killing time. All of the windows in the school are open and I could hear the teachers trying to teach and sometimes corral their students. One woman was having difficulty with her class. She kept trying to quiet them down, and then they started doing the wrong thing because they weren’t paying attention. I heard her lose her patience. “No no no! I said that is homework, close your book! Ahmed! Close your book! No! I said that’s homework, we’re doing something different now! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!”

LOL, I haven’t actually said that yet, but I’ve thought it plenty of times….

One of the other teachers works for an oil company here. She teaches English and trains their employees in a variety of things. Today, she was telling us about the reason that the manager has to have an armed bodyguard. Because God has a sense of humor, all of Yemen’s scant oil fields are in the most tribal, backwards areas. The government has auctions to distribute drilling rights in various parts of the country, but it is then up to the company to work things out with the locals where they want to drill.

Usually, the way it works is that the tribe demands not only money, but they also demand that a certain number of their tribesmen be hired as well. And they don’t want to be drivers or security guards either, they want decent jobs. Fair enough, but these people have very little (if any) education, so the oil company has to give them a lot of training just to get them up to functional, let alone useful. I’m not exactly sure what the company does with these people, but they need to do something in order to avoid unfortunate things happening to their pipeline/drilling operations. The government has little actual control of these area, so the company is on its own…

One of the first things that employees need to do is learn English well enough. The company is English or Canadian. I bet all of the instructions for the equipment, safety and company procedures, etc. are all in English too. On the one hand, it seems a little silly to not make that stuff in Arabic but on the other hand, the new recruits wouldn’t be able to read that either…. One particular new guy was going through the English program but he didn’t do too well. He’s from Marib, a particularly lawless (by the government’s standards), mostly bedouin area. Needless to say, he had almost zero education. He showed up about a quarter of the time, chewed Qat (which is not allowed while working), and didn’t learn a bit of English. He scored a 2 out 106 on the English test. So the manager looked at this employee’s work ethic and the result and did what any sane manager would do, he fired him.

Big mistake.

It turns out that this guy is the nephew of one of the Sheiks in the area. He did what any of us would do if we were fired for not working, he threatened to kill the manager… The manager was a little upset about this, so he went directly to the sheik and asked him to intervene. This is common procedure when dealing with tribal problems. The sheik can put a stop to damn near anything in his own tribe. After explaining why the nephew was let go, the sheik told the manager that he shouldn’t have fired his nephew. When the manager objected, the sheik pointed out that the manager did not fire anyone from the other tribe in the same area so he shouldn’t have fired his nephew… A lot of tribal politics boils down to “I have more than you do.” If one tribe is seen benefiting more than another, you can be sure that the tribe that is “behind” will not only do something to catch up, but they will try to get more so they can be “in the lead.” Plus, members of the sheik’s family are not used to being turned down for anything, the sheik really can’t allow the precedent to be set that it’s OK to shame one of his family members…

The manager is in a tough place. He has the nephew of a sheik threatening his life and the sheik isn’t going to intervene. The manager could just let the guy back into the company, but how could that ever work out? He could also fire someone from the other tribe (one that apparently doesn’t deserve to be fired), but then he would face reprisals from that tribe…

According to my friend (the teacher), the tribes don’t understand how close the companies are to just pulling out of Yemen altogether. The oil fields in Yemen aren’t that good and the death threats and tribal shenanigans are getting to the point where it isn’t worth it. It’s the classic example of a group trying to “protect” their workers but they end up killing the golden goose instead. The tribes keep upping their demands, and when they don’t get them, they blow out part of a pipeline or something. The real problem is if you sat down with the sheiks and tribesmen in Marib and explained how they are making doing business in Yemen almost impossible and making Yemen look like a land of animals, they wouldn’t care. All they see is what is in front of them and don’t care about the consequences of their actions.

The manager now has a full-time, armed bodyguard. Marib makes Sana’a look like a cosmopolitan, urbane, educated city, and that’s saying something!