My Yemen Blog

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!

I’ve calmed down some. As usual, it is the sheer amount of ignorance that has gotten to me. Poverty begets ignorance, and ignorance begets more ignorance. I can usually keep all of that in perspective, but sometimes it wells up and crashes down on me. I’m hoping that I can be Mr. cool for the next 35 days or so, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I have several more Yemen moments before I leave…

I don’t think that western women that visit here really understand the level of frustration I have achieved with dealing with the men here. Western women can talk to both the men and the women, but I can assure you that they have very different conversations with the men than I do. While women can talk about their brothers, husbands, and fathers, the men are totally silent about their female relatives. I don’t get to meet them, and if I go to their house, I don’t even get to see them. The implicit assumption that they are totally off limits to all other males makes my skin crawl. Somehow their honor would be compromised if I even saw them. What does that say about what they think of me? BTW, this isn’t necessarily an Islam thing, it’s a Yemeni thing.

Anyway, this stuff has been building in me for a long time, and I’m tired of being all PC about it, I hate it. I hate how they treat “their” women like possessions and I hate the fact that I can’t even be trusted to see or talk to them. Whatever, I’m done with this place…

We were about to listen to a conversation in class about asking about someone’s family. I felt that it was necessary to explain to the class that it is very common to talk about our families to our friends and acquaintances. As a man, I would even talk about my mother, my sister, or my wife and even mention her name. Here in Yemen, you do not tell men about your mother, wife, or sister. You certainly never tell another man her name. There’s a perfectly good reason for that of course. You see, as soon as he told me her name, I would rape her in front of him and his entire family… Just for you non-native speakers reading this, that last sentence is dripping with sarcasm, go look up what that means. Who do they think they are? Keeping “their” women wrapped in secrecy, like they were some sort of valuable commodity that might be stolen offends me deeply. Women are, indeed, sentient and are perfectly capable of maintaining their morals on their own, there’s no need for them to be sequestered away to the point where people can’t even know their name…

Seriously, it’s incredibly stupid, degrading, and insulting to women. Asking a guy what his wife’s name is here would at the very least result in a black eye. With some hot-heads, it might result in a gunshot wound. I do not, and to be honest, will not, understand the secrecy about women relatives here. But what can you do? It’s a deep part of their culture and it’s not going away. It’s best to simply accept it as a given. So I explained how our cultures are different in this regard and told them not to be surprised when people just tell you the names of their mother and sister and actually introduce their wife. I also told them that they shouldn’t be surprised if they want to know the names of their mother, wife, and sisters.

One of my students interrupted me and said, “That’s because you eat pork.” I understood immediately. For those of you that are not intimately familiar with this culture, or for those of you that think in a logical fashion, let me explain what that comment meant. It is a widely held belief here that if you eat pork, you will not care if your wife has sex with another man, and you will in fact start cheating on your wife. You also lose any interest in your sister maintaining her “honor.” Yes, many people think that eating pork makes people promiscuous and we lose our capacity to be jealous or even care about the sexual exploits of our sister/wife.

I have heard this many times. Usually, I just laugh it off and tell them that they have obviously never met an Italian or a Puerto Rican. Those men are famous for both their pork intake and their insane jealousies. This time it was different. I was already seething beneath the surface about the whole, “I can’t tell you I have a mother” routine, but his comment sent me over the edge. He was saying that not only was it a bad thing for us to blithely tell people our sister’s or mother’s name, but that somehow what we eat was to “blame” for that terrible sin.

I’m surprised my lip didn’t start to bleed I was biting down so hard. I will tell you what went through my mind. A word of warning, if swearing bothers you, skip to the last paragraph… Right, eating pork is what makes us so loose with “our” women. I guess eating salta (a uniquely Yemeni dish) is what makes you so fucking stupid. In your eyes, we may be “immoral” in the west, but we don’t treat women like possessions, we ended slavery back in the 1880’s. I assume that your God forsaken, pathetic excuse for a culture is only maintaining the moral high ground, protecting “your” women from God knows what, by assiduously avoiding eating the flesh of swine. Usually we say you are what you eat, but you’re a big enough idiot to become what you don’t eat. Fuck you, fuck you and your whole smug, pathetic, insular, ignorant, abomination of a culture.

OK, so I wasn’t that coherent at the moment. Mostly, it was just “Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you.” I was seething and I briefly fantasized about walking over and making him lose a couple of teeth. When someone starts at a level that I despise and then uses a moronic excuse to tell me how bad my culture is, violence does indeed spring into my head. Maybe I could beat some sense into him… If he had said that Americans didn’t know God, or didn’t have the correct religion, I’d think he was crazy, but at least he wouldn’t sound like a total moron. Blaming our “shortcomings” (how dare we include female relatives in our conversations?) on eating bacon is the height of idiocy. What drives me nuts is that so many people here are stupid enough not to question the causation of sexual promiscuity on eating pork. I’m not even going to go into the absurd jump from telling people the names of female relatives to them whoring around. Usually, this culture assumes that men are total animals and cannot control their sexual urges but apparently women are totally helpless if you know their name. If a man knows a woman’s name he can apparently see her at will and we all know that the only thing that men and women can do together is have sex. God, this culture is so screwed up…

Anyway, after all that bile went through my head, I told him that that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. I was about to go on, but I decided that I probably wouldn’t stop. So I went back to the present continuous tense and object pronouns. I need to get out of here, their idiocy might turn me into a sociopath…

I mentioned in an earlier post how reading doesn’t seem to very popular here. I recently gave one of my classes a writing assignment where they had to describe their favorite story or book. Predictably, 4 out of the 14 said the Qur’an. That’s fine, if you’re in a religion based around a book, that book should be important to you. Another three wrote about how they don’t like to read. I then asked my other class to tell me what their favorite story is. 4 out of the 12 could not give me a single title, in English or Arabic. They were all women incidentally… We’re talking about people that have graduated from high school and are at least 20 years old. One of my friends pointed out that I would be saddened by a similar poll in the US. I don’t doubt that, but I’m positive that if we asked Americans what their favorite story is, we would have a far greater percentage of people responding with an answer. I am now trying to emphasize how important reading is to my students. I figure that even if the ones that don’t read now don’t start, at least the ones that do will make sure their kids do…