I’ve been back for a little while now and I’ve been trying to think of some way to “sum up” what I experienced in Yemen. I don’t think I can come up with a sentence like, “Yemen is X.” It’s just too complicated… It was a year and a half of my life after all. Even if it was boring (it usually wasn’t), summarizing a whole year and a half wouldn’t be easy.
There are a lot of good things about Yemen. The people are very hospitable, the country itself can be incredibly beautiful, and it is a fascinating place to experience. On the other hand, the political environment is rather unstable, there is a really rigid class system, and there’s always the crushing poverty to deal with as well.
I never did immerse myself into the culture. Call it being stuck-up, cultural elitism or what have you but I never felt that I should accept what I saw as the more negative elements of the culture. The racism, the sexism, what seemed like a love of ignorance at times, and let’s be honest, the general laziness. I’m not going to pretend that those things don’t exist here in the States, but the Yemenis take those things to a whole new level.
I’m not going to spend much time bitching here, you can read all of my older posts for that. I do feel like I learned some valuable things over there, but I’m not going to to be able to summarize them in a blog post. Suffice it to say, the whole experience was a positive one overall. I will continue to post things here about Yemen as they occur to me or as things happen in the news. Stay tuned, hopefully I’ll figure out what to do with these experiences over time…
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middle east, yemen