I have gotten a few panicy emails asking if I’m OK. Yes, I’m fine, I’ve just been busy with work. I have made the decision to come home in June and not come back here. It’s not so much that I’m worried about my safety, but those attacks were just one more thing that got on my nerves. In the end, this place just isn’t worth the hassle. Every day, everything, and i mean almost everything, is a total, complete, pain in the ass. Going shopping, eating lunch, walking down the street, doing the laundry, everything is much more difficult than it should be.
And it isn’t the really big things that wear you down, it’s ALL of the little things. After a while, you get used to the poverty, the racism, the sexism (it helps that I’m a white guy of course…), the corruption, etc. It’s the fact that the Yemenis are total assholes on the road, the plumbing is laid out in such a way that the things I rinse off of my dishes end up all over my bathroom floor, the paint in many houses is water based so it rubs off on your clothes, the milk is sold in bags making it extraordinarily likely that you will get it everywhere, you can’t get water to drink after 11:00 PM without a major undertaking, and a zillion other things that come up repeatedly every day. I still think that Yemen is a great place to visit, but it’s a total pain in the ass to live here.
What about the Arabic? Well, I came to several conclusions a while back. First, my initial feelings of not being a very good language student have born out, the language itself just doesn’t interest me. That hasn’t stopped me from accumulating a fair amount of it mind you. I can have conversations and with the help of a dictionary I can read the newspaper. So didn’t the things you could read and talk about make me want to learn more of the language? Well, that brings up the next point, I have been totally underwhelmed with the culture, the religion, and frankly, most of the people I’ve met here. Maybe it would be different if I could talk to the women here, maybe it would be different if I found some followers of sufism or really any other sect here in Yemen, but I doubt it. My students have been the best Yemenis I have met. Of course, they are the only ones that seemed to be interested in learning anything and had at least some concept of the rest of the world. Whenever I talk to the locals (always men of course), they strike me as a mass of racism, sexism, and general ignorance. I can forgive ignorance, but it’s the self-satisfied feeling that they don’t need to know anything else and that knowing more might actually be dangerous that drives me crazy. Call me an elitist asshole if you must (it might be true), but I’m done dealing with “the man on the street” here in Yemen.
Don’t get me wrong, I have met some really decent people here, but they inevitably speak English. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my Arabic, it seems that I could get a job with it but I’m not too sure that I would want one. It seems like all of the jobs that need Arabic involve either giving them stuff (via the numerous NGOs) or fighting them (via the various departments of the federal government). Neither of those options appeal to me. Not that I’d necessarily turn down a good paycheck mind you, I’ve been poor for too long:-) My hope of finding some business that needs an English/Arabic speaker is almost dead. All of the businesses that I’ve heard of in this area that deal with the rest of the world speak English…
That brings me to the big thing that I’ve learned during this trip. I’ve really enjoyed teaching English. The students are hungry for knowledge, and most of them are very hard workers. I’ll leave the comments about it being the only place I can meet and talk to local women off to the side… This experience makes me wonder if I would enjoy making it an actual career. Of course if I did pursue that, I would do it in a slightly better place, maybe Tunis, maybe Damascus, hell, maybe Yokohama. As disappointed as I am with the Yemeni culture overall, I am very glad that I have experienced it. I do think that it would be nice to plop down into some other culture for a while, but I need to be recharged back home first:-) I’m also always happy to expand my knowledge, so learning Arabic was definitely a plus.
I’ll blog more about these general sentiments later on, right now I have to go proctor some exams…