Yesterday morning, really early, I heard what sounded like a group of school children chanting and walking down the street. I looked out of my window and saw that it was a funeral procession. A large group of people were carrying a bed over top of them with a body on it. You could just see the person’s hair peeking out from underneath the sheet. They took the body down to one of the mosques and the prayer was carried over the loudspeakers for a couple of hours. I don’t really know what they do at the service or afterwards, do they cremate the body, bury it, or what?
I was sitting in a classroom waiting for my teacher to come back from his break when I noticed a little girl sitting in the window across the way. Since this is the old city, the street was barely 10 feet across. She waved at me and I smiled and waved back. Then I went back to some work that was in front of me. Just a couple of minutes later I heard her not exactly screaming, but making universal distress noises. I looked over and saw that she had pushed her head through the bars of the window and could not pull it back. Her mother ran up behind her sounding both exasperated and sympathetic, but she was unveiled. She ran back into the room and came back with a towel and started to do something to the kid with it, then she saw me. I got the impression that I shouldn’t be looking over there so I turned my head and the noises stopped just a few seconds later. Looking back, the girl and the mother were gone. I have no idea what technique the mother used to free her daughter, the bars looked fine and the daughter didn’t yell or anything. All of the houses have bars in the windows here. One of my teachers told me that they were there to prevent children from falling out of them. In traditional Yemeni buildings the windows are quite low and have large sills and kids sit in them all the time. Kids falling out of them is apparently a real problem, so they put bars in all of the windows. Amin was shocked when I told him that it isn’t mush of a problem in the states… I see quite a few windows with one bar bent 2/3 of the way down, I guess kids getting their heads stuck in the bars is pretty common as well…