Rereading the last post makes me want to vomit so here is something else:
Aden has a fairly small expatriate community, most of whom know of each other, if they haven’t met a few times anyways. On Thursday (which is like Friday in the west) my Italian friend Federica who was just recently let back into the country hosted a dinner party for about fifteen people. I went with my friend Faie who was the only Yemeni person attending, I was the only American person and one of just two not working for a development or relief organization. The other was a Somali-Italian named Mohammed with an interesting story I will share.
Mohammed looks ethnically Somali with the typical high cheekbones, large front teeth, close-set eyes, and a skin color darker than you can imagine. Until recently though, for most of his 23-year life, he has carried an Italian passport. He grew up in Italy with his family and started playing basketball on the Italian national team. Somehow, while he was visiting friends or family in Somalia (probably Puntland not Somaliland but I’m not certain), his passport was stolen or lost or expired or something. For a year and a half he hasn’t been able to return to his family and friends and girlfriend in Italy. Despite knowing only Italian and English, knowing neither the Somali language nor Arabic, he’s spent time in Somalia, Djibouti, and now has come to Yemen as a refugee.
There are a number of refugee communities around Yemen, mostly along the coast. They are primarily fenced-in camps where refugees await some sort of living or work permit in-country. Within the Aden municipality there is a neighborhood, Basateen, designed specifically for refugees, mostly Somali. The schools are overcrowded fitting eighty students into a classroom designed for twenty; there is a clinic providing healthcare for those proving they are identified refugees; there is a community center where relief and aid workers spend time; the neighborhood lacks running water in nearly all the clapboard homes and shops but it has been made available to the madrassa or Islamic schools.
On occasion my school makes activities for the scholarship students, one of which a few months ago was to tour Basateen, and then engage in a cultural exchange with the refugees. It was rather hot and dusty wandering around the neighborhood and the students absolutely hated it. In the community center after the tour, the students had brought food to share with the refugees, and the refugees brought treats to the students to complete the cultural exchange and broaden understanding. My students did not partake in the Somali food and the conversation was pretty limited, although it wasn’t entirely their fault. We were hosted by a Somali woman who was too shy to really talk and a man who mostly wanted to kvetch about conditions instead of sharing a story to personalize his experience and to practice his English despite there being a Somali-Arabic translator. The students could not have cared less, and with a decent reason they all identified later in a forced writing session. Yemen has enough of its own problems it needs to deal with.
Even for non-Yemen standards, Federica’s dinner party was exceptionally good fun. She brought real cheeses from Italy, different pork products, and red and white wines which we all appreciated a bit more than we probably should have, especially Mohammed. And let me tell you, after a few glasses of wine he became the most Italian person I have ever met. His emphatic gestures and lyrical accent are unmistakable, practically a caricature. He lives in Basateen and predictably, he hates it. He told us some about living in the especially devout neighborhood, “I watcha a movie and they saya ‘Whya you do that?’ I listen toa music and they ask ‘Whya you do that?’ I playa a basketball and they saya ‘Whya you do that?’ Fucka man! What I asupposed to do?” He’s been away from Italy for about eighteen months already. He can’t get a job here in Yemen because he doesn’t know Arabic (or Somali). He can only wait for the Italian embassy in Sana’a to hear from Italy about his passport approval which probably isn’t going to happen on his own due to Italian xenophobia and racism. As he succinctly puts it, “Burlesconi is justa Mussolini witha another name.”
His story reminds me of course of Taryn’s incident during our first couple months in Yemen. Her passport was stolen and she was not allowed into the American embassy despite having registered. Our friend Matt wasn’t admitted then even though he had registered and was carrying his passport. Recently, the American and UK embassies have closed some days due to threats. Additionally, scheduling an appointment for something as simple as getting extra visa pages in my passport (which I need before I can get an exit visa to leave Yemen), is something I have been trying to do since before Thanksgiving. These stories beg the question: just how well is the social contract working?
Through this year in Yemen I have learned intimately the inner-workings and goings-on of a foreign body politic. This knowledge is a perspective gained which I will be able to draw upon all of my life when combating the political malaise throughout America. I, too, am often guilty of this stultifying apathy because it is more often difficult to see just how political decisions affect you without seeing an alternative. For this I am very grateful, it has been an unforeseen reward to my experience.
08 February 2010
01 February 2010
thou doth protest too much
Yemeni society is a very walled culture. The most obvious example is architecturally. Every home has a wall around it at least ten feet high, often with broken glasses cemented into the top to prevent burglary, which is unheard of. Behind the walls are sparse gardens of potted plants and broken tile floors. Geographically, the majority of the Yemeni population has been isolated in high mountains for millennia, developing an extremely unique society. Somewhat surprisingly, they are less prone to xenophobia than to an incredible fondness for sharing their culture.
The largest wall exists between genders. All aspects of society here are divided between men and women. Many, although not all, restaurants have blocked off a family section where women can sit. The paradigmatic example of this is that even at a wedding there are two parties. The civil union of a man and a woman is celebrated by the men throwing one party for the groom where they eat and eat and eat and chew qat and dance and drive around in caravans blocking traffic. Meanwhile the women throw a party for the bride where I hear they wear revealing clothes and dance and ululate and put on excessive amounts of make-up to counterbalance the majority of the time when they are oppressed. Many marriages are still arranged by the parents, with only an iota of informed input from the couple.
Technology is a force acting to break down some of the walls constructed. At least once a day, my phone rings from mystery numbers, but I never answer. Sitting at home the other day, I received a text message from an unknown number that read:
TEL L ME WHEN YOU SAW ME DID YOU CRY
This one came maybe two weeks after another memorable text from the same number:
THERE’RE SEVEN HEAVANS. I HOPE SEE YOU IN FOURTH and YOU FEED ME A HEALTHY FRUITS
And before that:
YOUR sea of knowledge is my strength,,, THANKS YOU TEACHER
There have of course been others from wherever of lesser note, mostly where they spell my name wrong. I have not responded to any of them. I suspect they come from students, and I make sure to include their spelling and grammar errors in a class warm-up activity where I write some things on the board and have the students correct the mistakes.
The wide availability of western television and movies has broadened the minds of the youth, but in a limited way. Western movies that play on television here do not include kissing between unmarried couples, sometimes to the discredit of the plot. For example in the chick flick Never Been Kissed, the movie leads up to the obvious ending which is cut out and goes straight to the credits instead, leaving the plot in a mild state of suspense. (Yet rape is shown no problem in more graphic detail than I am comfortable with, as long as the couple are married.)
As a result there is a very small scene of dating. AMIDEAST is the only school in Yemen with coed classrooms, and in staff meetings we are told to clip the wings of fledgling romances, lest we make ourselves to be a target. A couple students have confided in me about their having a girlfriend; the first to do so in fact has recently married.
For others who are not given the advantage of forced coed conversation, there is Bluetooth hotspots, most notably Aden Mall. I was at the mall with my Moldovan friend months ago when, with his Bluetooth on, he received a message that reads something like this:
If I were to put you into my heart it would surely explode
One thing I haven’t heard about here are free parties like you hear about in Iran, but I have my suspicions. Even at the for-lack-of-a-better-word brothels most of the prostitutes wear abaya (black dress) and higab (headscarf), if not the burqa (veil) as well. The coverings are definitely a constructed wall, one that hides a mystery of anonymity. And through this there is a definite safety. The Muslim world is often criticized in the name of female liberation on the issue of modesty, but this condemnation comes easily from those who do so without understanding. Women here do not victimize themselves like they would in the west, they instead smartly focus on the freedoms they gain by wearing coverings. In fact, the only times people here compare their culture to that of the west is when they illustrate how it is so good.
This perspective among Yemeni people is perhaps the greatest challenge of living here. When faced with an issue, I think about ways of dealing with things until I find a solution. Yemeni people do the same, but it is always a different solution than I would have found, and so I never understand their thought process until it is finished and they present their solution. This is the most challenging aspect of life in Yemen, and of the walls, but simultaneously the most rewarding.
The largest wall exists between genders. All aspects of society here are divided between men and women. Many, although not all, restaurants have blocked off a family section where women can sit. The paradigmatic example of this is that even at a wedding there are two parties. The civil union of a man and a woman is celebrated by the men throwing one party for the groom where they eat and eat and eat and chew qat and dance and drive around in caravans blocking traffic. Meanwhile the women throw a party for the bride where I hear they wear revealing clothes and dance and ululate and put on excessive amounts of make-up to counterbalance the majority of the time when they are oppressed. Many marriages are still arranged by the parents, with only an iota of informed input from the couple.
Technology is a force acting to break down some of the walls constructed. At least once a day, my phone rings from mystery numbers, but I never answer. Sitting at home the other day, I received a text message from an unknown number that read:
TEL L ME WHEN YOU SAW ME DID YOU CRY
This one came maybe two weeks after another memorable text from the same number:
THERE’RE SEVEN HEAVANS. I HOPE SEE YOU IN FOURTH and YOU FEED ME A HEALTHY FRUITS
And before that:
YOUR sea of knowledge is my strength,,, THANKS YOU TEACHER
There have of course been others from wherever of lesser note, mostly where they spell my name wrong. I have not responded to any of them. I suspect they come from students, and I make sure to include their spelling and grammar errors in a class warm-up activity where I write some things on the board and have the students correct the mistakes.
The wide availability of western television and movies has broadened the minds of the youth, but in a limited way. Western movies that play on television here do not include kissing between unmarried couples, sometimes to the discredit of the plot. For example in the chick flick Never Been Kissed, the movie leads up to the obvious ending which is cut out and goes straight to the credits instead, leaving the plot in a mild state of suspense. (Yet rape is shown no problem in more graphic detail than I am comfortable with, as long as the couple are married.)
As a result there is a very small scene of dating. AMIDEAST is the only school in Yemen with coed classrooms, and in staff meetings we are told to clip the wings of fledgling romances, lest we make ourselves to be a target. A couple students have confided in me about their having a girlfriend; the first to do so in fact has recently married.
For others who are not given the advantage of forced coed conversation, there is Bluetooth hotspots, most notably Aden Mall. I was at the mall with my Moldovan friend months ago when, with his Bluetooth on, he received a message that reads something like this:
If I were to put you into my heart it would surely explode
One thing I haven’t heard about here are free parties like you hear about in Iran, but I have my suspicions. Even at the for-lack-of-a-better-word brothels most of the prostitutes wear abaya (black dress) and higab (headscarf), if not the burqa (veil) as well. The coverings are definitely a constructed wall, one that hides a mystery of anonymity. And through this there is a definite safety. The Muslim world is often criticized in the name of female liberation on the issue of modesty, but this condemnation comes easily from those who do so without understanding. Women here do not victimize themselves like they would in the west, they instead smartly focus on the freedoms they gain by wearing coverings. In fact, the only times people here compare their culture to that of the west is when they illustrate how it is so good.
This perspective among Yemeni people is perhaps the greatest challenge of living here. When faced with an issue, I think about ways of dealing with things until I find a solution. Yemeni people do the same, but it is always a different solution than I would have found, and so I never understand their thought process until it is finished and they present their solution. This is the most challenging aspect of life in Yemen, and of the walls, but simultaneously the most rewarding.
10 December 2009
not exactly open sesame
People are unbelievably in love with Allah here. There are a handful of phrases they use all the time, "inshahallah," "maashahallah," "humdoolillah," "al-hamakallah," and the most popular "bismillah," or translated "in the name of Allah." I fully support doing things in God's name, no problem there, but the hackneyed use of it drives me crazy. On a good third of all of my students' work, be it writing assignments quizzes worksheets, they have written on the top of the page either in English, "In the name of God," or the same translated in Arabic script. That is easy to deal with, when they begin speeches by saying "bismillah," in Arabic and under their breath, it's then that I really don't know what to do. Sometimes I chastise them for using Arabic in the classroom, but most often I just let it slide.
The time that irritates me the most is on mass transit, which are these Toyota Hiace vans which need more than a little TLC. The dabub experience is something that words will never do justice. To flag one down you stand on the street and wave a pointed finger in one of three directions which means practically nothing but everybody does it anyways. Then they'll stop and you get on and climb over two fold down seats to sit in the back where the ceiling is low and you have to crane your neck or hunch over and the springs of the seat are sticking into your cheeks. Then it takes off at breakneck speed and detritus from the ceiling or seats or just the dusty road are blowing into your face on a hot wind, before the driver slams on the brakes twenty yards after they started because someone wants to get off (and here, get off is more correct than get out because the sliding van door is permanently open). But it's the person in the very back and four people must get out to let them off which requires folding down two seats and then everyone must pile back in before the dabub goes again. And repeat twenty yards later. When full, the dabub can uncomfortably seat fifteen people including the driver. But, there is an etiquette for public gender mixing. Men and women do not sit on the same bench, or row of three. So to accommodate a boarding woman there is a big shuffling and consolidating of men to clear up seats for the ninjas. Then, when you want them to stop to let you off all you do is tap coins on some metal which they hate, just knock on the metal which most of the time they don't hear so well, or shout "nazil," which I have no idea what that means but it seems to do the trick because then half of the passengers also shout "nazil" to the driver and he slams on the brakes, four people get off and seats are folded and you squirrel out onto the street and give anybody in the front seat (driver or passenger) your twenty riyals. Today, as I was riding in a dabub to somewhere, this shuffling to let people off occurred a bunch and the man closest to the road had to reboard four times. Each time, as he was climbing in, he said, "bismillah." Piousness has ceased to impress me.
The other common phrase is "inshahallah," which means, "if Allah will allow it." It is used everywhere at all times. In the classroom it's really annoying:
"All right class that's it for today, see you tomorrow."
Followed by sixteen voices, "inshahallah teacher."
Or, "No homework tonight, just study for the quiz tomorrow."
"Inshahallah teacher."
Or, "Remember that your writing homework is due at the beginning of class on Saturday" (like a Monday, after the weekend).
"Inshahallah teacher."
This really gets on my nerves. I think, "No, not 'inshahallah teacher.' If you don't do the homework then there will be consequences handed out by me, not Allah." Teaching is not a great megalomaniac rehab. Recently though, I've learned how to use this magical phrase, on the dabub. Leaving certain busy areas, the dabub waits until it is completely full before going, and for some reason I'm always the first person on so I climb into the far back and wait ten minutes until it is full with a good multiple of three gender ratio. Coming from the mall to my house is too far to walk but still a short distance. When I shouted "nazil" and the following chorus urged the driver to stop, these three women sitting on the folded down seats glared at me through their burqa slits and contemptuously asked me, "nazil?" As in, are you really serious that I have to get up and off to let some white punk in the back off?
So I replied, "inshahallah," and there was no more animosity. These are magic words.
The time that irritates me the most is on mass transit, which are these Toyota Hiace vans which need more than a little TLC. The dabub experience is something that words will never do justice. To flag one down you stand on the street and wave a pointed finger in one of three directions which means practically nothing but everybody does it anyways. Then they'll stop and you get on and climb over two fold down seats to sit in the back where the ceiling is low and you have to crane your neck or hunch over and the springs of the seat are sticking into your cheeks. Then it takes off at breakneck speed and detritus from the ceiling or seats or just the dusty road are blowing into your face on a hot wind, before the driver slams on the brakes twenty yards after they started because someone wants to get off (and here, get off is more correct than get out because the sliding van door is permanently open). But it's the person in the very back and four people must get out to let them off which requires folding down two seats and then everyone must pile back in before the dabub goes again. And repeat twenty yards later. When full, the dabub can uncomfortably seat fifteen people including the driver. But, there is an etiquette for public gender mixing. Men and women do not sit on the same bench, or row of three. So to accommodate a boarding woman there is a big shuffling and consolidating of men to clear up seats for the ninjas. Then, when you want them to stop to let you off all you do is tap coins on some metal which they hate, just knock on the metal which most of the time they don't hear so well, or shout "nazil," which I have no idea what that means but it seems to do the trick because then half of the passengers also shout "nazil" to the driver and he slams on the brakes, four people get off and seats are folded and you squirrel out onto the street and give anybody in the front seat (driver or passenger) your twenty riyals. Today, as I was riding in a dabub to somewhere, this shuffling to let people off occurred a bunch and the man closest to the road had to reboard four times. Each time, as he was climbing in, he said, "bismillah." Piousness has ceased to impress me.
The other common phrase is "inshahallah," which means, "if Allah will allow it." It is used everywhere at all times. In the classroom it's really annoying:
"All right class that's it for today, see you tomorrow."
Followed by sixteen voices, "inshahallah teacher."
Or, "No homework tonight, just study for the quiz tomorrow."
"Inshahallah teacher."
Or, "Remember that your writing homework is due at the beginning of class on Saturday" (like a Monday, after the weekend).
"Inshahallah teacher."
This really gets on my nerves. I think, "No, not 'inshahallah teacher.' If you don't do the homework then there will be consequences handed out by me, not Allah." Teaching is not a great megalomaniac rehab. Recently though, I've learned how to use this magical phrase, on the dabub. Leaving certain busy areas, the dabub waits until it is completely full before going, and for some reason I'm always the first person on so I climb into the far back and wait ten minutes until it is full with a good multiple of three gender ratio. Coming from the mall to my house is too far to walk but still a short distance. When I shouted "nazil" and the following chorus urged the driver to stop, these three women sitting on the folded down seats glared at me through their burqa slits and contemptuously asked me, "nazil?" As in, are you really serious that I have to get up and off to let some white punk in the back off?
So I replied, "inshahallah," and there was no more animosity. These are magic words.
12 November 2009
not worth $18
This is something I wrote that I didn't intend to post here on the blog. But, it's mildly relevant and is easier than writing something new for you. Also, accompanying photos that went with this writing sample into the application.
The Insects Are All Around Us
Where I've been, Portland Oregon, is obsessed with apocalypse. It’s impossible to go anywhere without seeing at least one zombie. Oh, okay, all the barstaff are zombies this night. A zombie bicycle gang just rode by, sure. Your neighbor is killing the aphids on her organic heirloom beefsteak tomatoes and bellowing for all the neighborhood to hear, "BRAAIINS!" The usual crazy screaming guy of big cities, the one who stands on a street corner talking about prophecies and the rapture to anyone who will listen and even to those who won't: he isn't in Portland. Impending doom is just too real there for that public decrying. My university offers a Philosophy of Disaster course (which I aced). My roommates and I used to drink wine on the porch and talk about what will happen when transportation collapses, while our neighbor with the bad hip takes 45 minutes to unload her groceries into her house. We schemed escape plans. When the food riots start I'll know exactly what to do. I'll know where to go, how to get there, and who I am going to take with me. This is why my generation rides bicycles, not because we are over concerned with emissions, which of course we are, but because with bikes and my wilderness survival training I will be able to get me and my select friends home to my parents’ ranch in eastern Oregon in just a few days. This is why I don’t move to New York. Instead, I moved to the place I thought to be a hinterland, where the Sword of Damocles doesn't hang over our heads like a pendulum of time running out.
When I got off the plane in Yemen I noticed that there were more burqas then when I boarded. Ninjas are stealthy like that. At first, they are glaringly obvious. Ninjas selecting the best eggplants at the produce stand, ninjas bowling a perfect turkey at Bowling of Islam, the ululating of ninjas echoing off the crater walls as they zip by on jet-skis. But after a while they began to be unnoticed by me, which is the main purpose of wearing abaya, higab, and burqa. And then there was a brief period where it was seemingly all I could do but to make lusty eye contact with them before finally mellowing out and realizing that this is my real life here. To get here is a whirlwind tour of desertification, decrepitude, and dilapidation. From the airport, don’t get a taxi but instead walk over a few dunes to avoid paying the airport exit tax and wave down a yellow and white van, there’s a million and they're impossible to miss (no, really, spend some time here and you will get hit by one). Don’t worry about shutting the door behind you because it’s probably tied to the frame of the van with the seatbelt cut out from your seat. The van will make one turn around a roundabout by the rusted military jet and then when you see the largest picture ever of the mustachioed president tap a few coins on something metal and get out. Cross the plaza where the shoeless children are playing soccer on the cobblestone to the giant burnt out tv. Don’t feel guilty about not giving alms to the beggar, the old man is probably a spy and seems happy enough so he must be well paid by the police, a passing "salaam alaykum" is all that is required. Next make sure to walk on the right side of the street to avoid the white rain of the Egyptian ravens, then over the rope speed bump and through the cement blockade. Don’t mind the skinny dogs sleeping on the piles of sand, Scabies and Rabies are more afraid of you. Find the blue metal door on the white wall with the broken green glass on top and press the button to make the sound of screeching falcons and alert the guards. Don’t fret about their interrogative remarks, just drop my name and they’ll let you in through the metal detector. Here, if you wish, you may remove your burqa. The path splits where the termites are devouring the corner of the building, turn left there and follow the corridor past the prayer rooms and around the corners of the building’s exposed visceral wires and ducting which lead to a dead end. Find the wall with the door handle and pound loudly so I can hear you because I am in the basement flat, or the Bellows as its name is known here. My music is turned up and I am drawing pictures of robots and imagining someplace where I don't have ants in my pantry.
This is where I am. I just killed the biggest cockroach on the planet. Normally they get away from me but this one was too fat to escape down the drain. Seriously, it was like a small horse, you could have put a saddle on her. She was in my kitchen, the scuttling of her feet muted by the gas leak, a sound which is in turn softened by the muezzin’s call, reminding me of my shameful walk home. Every day, I am able to clock out just in time for my colleagues to pray at Maghreb (sundown). This means that as I am walking home, the prayer room of the school is full and often overflowing into the narrow corridor behind, blocking my pathway. Rather than highlighting our religious differences by watching and waiting for them to finish, I simply walk behind them when they bow to prostrate themselves before Allah. Normally this goes off without a hitch. Today however, the last man stood up before I could slip past. Okay, no problem. I turned around and would just wait for them to kneel again. But, here too the man on the end stood up before I could make it by, and like Pharaoh in the Red Sea, I was trapped with no way to escape short of divine intervention. In a cadence they stood up, obliviously, closing me in until I knocked a few over like pious bowling pins. After this holy awkward moment, I took a cold shower.
Aden is hot, let me tell you. In Aden I had been saying to myself, there is nothing worse than a hot wind in your face. But yes, yes there is. I know this because a while ago I took advantage of an opportunity to go to Dubai. The 45 degrees Celsius Gulf sun mixed with a balmy four hundred thousand percent humidity and then a peppering of brutal dust blowing off the Empty Quarter and right into your face make a most unpleasant sandy, sweaty tourist-underpants stew. After my fourth change of clothing, sometime late evening, I had a moment. I found myself riding alone in the backseat of a massive air-conditioned suv going through the desert from old Dubai to new in what my dad would call two-dot fog (as in, the fog was so thick you couldn’t see more than two dots on the road ahead of you), but was actually a sandstorm. When the Da Rude song Sandstorm came on the stereo, the two German men in the front seat started talking about their “yout.” I sort of rolled my red eyes and that was when the towers of new Dubai came into view. The vivid neon, blurred through the sand, disappeared three-hundred feet up into the haze. In unobstructed daylight, that was about the elevation where the construction is still ever-so-slowly completing these surreal monstrosities. The song changed to some other techno hit and my moment was over, but in that moment I simultaneously came to three conclusions: 1: I am on drugs. 2: I have been abducted by aliens. 3: The apocalypse is upon us.
New Dubai is clearly extra-terrestrial, the most unearthly thing about it being the lack of green space. There's a timeline in the Dubai Museum detailing where traditional Emirati life diverged by the arrival of the aliens. You can see explicitly when they landed their spacecraft, now called towers. The omnipresent feeling of being drained, or probed, is thrust upon you by the twinkling lights juxtaposed in the hostile environment. Somewhere, I thought, a mistake had to have been made.
My error was not in guessing how the apocalypse would happen or when, but in what would occur afterward. Like vultures, insects wait for us to undo ourselves, knowing now as well as we that the end is nigh. And we humans sit passively as if on display in an alien zoo. We sit in our ivory towers of academia, mindless and zombie-like, feeding on brains. We seclude ourselves stealthily like ninjas daring the world to pass us by just one more time. Well I’ve seen the coming apocalypse with my own bloodshot eyes, there’s little more speculation. If it happens the way it's panning out then the cockroaches can have it, they deserve it. But as for me I'm not going out this way, I'm going feral and creating a future where I belong. This is where I'm going.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33702271@N05/sets/72157622621763127/
The Insects Are All Around Us
Where I've been, Portland Oregon, is obsessed with apocalypse. It’s impossible to go anywhere without seeing at least one zombie. Oh, okay, all the barstaff are zombies this night. A zombie bicycle gang just rode by, sure. Your neighbor is killing the aphids on her organic heirloom beefsteak tomatoes and bellowing for all the neighborhood to hear, "BRAAIINS!" The usual crazy screaming guy of big cities, the one who stands on a street corner talking about prophecies and the rapture to anyone who will listen and even to those who won't: he isn't in Portland. Impending doom is just too real there for that public decrying. My university offers a Philosophy of Disaster course (which I aced). My roommates and I used to drink wine on the porch and talk about what will happen when transportation collapses, while our neighbor with the bad hip takes 45 minutes to unload her groceries into her house. We schemed escape plans. When the food riots start I'll know exactly what to do. I'll know where to go, how to get there, and who I am going to take with me. This is why my generation rides bicycles, not because we are over concerned with emissions, which of course we are, but because with bikes and my wilderness survival training I will be able to get me and my select friends home to my parents’ ranch in eastern Oregon in just a few days. This is why I don’t move to New York. Instead, I moved to the place I thought to be a hinterland, where the Sword of Damocles doesn't hang over our heads like a pendulum of time running out.
When I got off the plane in Yemen I noticed that there were more burqas then when I boarded. Ninjas are stealthy like that. At first, they are glaringly obvious. Ninjas selecting the best eggplants at the produce stand, ninjas bowling a perfect turkey at Bowling of Islam, the ululating of ninjas echoing off the crater walls as they zip by on jet-skis. But after a while they began to be unnoticed by me, which is the main purpose of wearing abaya, higab, and burqa. And then there was a brief period where it was seemingly all I could do but to make lusty eye contact with them before finally mellowing out and realizing that this is my real life here. To get here is a whirlwind tour of desertification, decrepitude, and dilapidation. From the airport, don’t get a taxi but instead walk over a few dunes to avoid paying the airport exit tax and wave down a yellow and white van, there’s a million and they're impossible to miss (no, really, spend some time here and you will get hit by one). Don’t worry about shutting the door behind you because it’s probably tied to the frame of the van with the seatbelt cut out from your seat. The van will make one turn around a roundabout by the rusted military jet and then when you see the largest picture ever of the mustachioed president tap a few coins on something metal and get out. Cross the plaza where the shoeless children are playing soccer on the cobblestone to the giant burnt out tv. Don’t feel guilty about not giving alms to the beggar, the old man is probably a spy and seems happy enough so he must be well paid by the police, a passing "salaam alaykum" is all that is required. Next make sure to walk on the right side of the street to avoid the white rain of the Egyptian ravens, then over the rope speed bump and through the cement blockade. Don’t mind the skinny dogs sleeping on the piles of sand, Scabies and Rabies are more afraid of you. Find the blue metal door on the white wall with the broken green glass on top and press the button to make the sound of screeching falcons and alert the guards. Don’t fret about their interrogative remarks, just drop my name and they’ll let you in through the metal detector. Here, if you wish, you may remove your burqa. The path splits where the termites are devouring the corner of the building, turn left there and follow the corridor past the prayer rooms and around the corners of the building’s exposed visceral wires and ducting which lead to a dead end. Find the wall with the door handle and pound loudly so I can hear you because I am in the basement flat, or the Bellows as its name is known here. My music is turned up and I am drawing pictures of robots and imagining someplace where I don't have ants in my pantry.
This is where I am. I just killed the biggest cockroach on the planet. Normally they get away from me but this one was too fat to escape down the drain. Seriously, it was like a small horse, you could have put a saddle on her. She was in my kitchen, the scuttling of her feet muted by the gas leak, a sound which is in turn softened by the muezzin’s call, reminding me of my shameful walk home. Every day, I am able to clock out just in time for my colleagues to pray at Maghreb (sundown). This means that as I am walking home, the prayer room of the school is full and often overflowing into the narrow corridor behind, blocking my pathway. Rather than highlighting our religious differences by watching and waiting for them to finish, I simply walk behind them when they bow to prostrate themselves before Allah. Normally this goes off without a hitch. Today however, the last man stood up before I could slip past. Okay, no problem. I turned around and would just wait for them to kneel again. But, here too the man on the end stood up before I could make it by, and like Pharaoh in the Red Sea, I was trapped with no way to escape short of divine intervention. In a cadence they stood up, obliviously, closing me in until I knocked a few over like pious bowling pins. After this holy awkward moment, I took a cold shower.
Aden is hot, let me tell you. In Aden I had been saying to myself, there is nothing worse than a hot wind in your face. But yes, yes there is. I know this because a while ago I took advantage of an opportunity to go to Dubai. The 45 degrees Celsius Gulf sun mixed with a balmy four hundred thousand percent humidity and then a peppering of brutal dust blowing off the Empty Quarter and right into your face make a most unpleasant sandy, sweaty tourist-underpants stew. After my fourth change of clothing, sometime late evening, I had a moment. I found myself riding alone in the backseat of a massive air-conditioned suv going through the desert from old Dubai to new in what my dad would call two-dot fog (as in, the fog was so thick you couldn’t see more than two dots on the road ahead of you), but was actually a sandstorm. When the Da Rude song Sandstorm came on the stereo, the two German men in the front seat started talking about their “yout.” I sort of rolled my red eyes and that was when the towers of new Dubai came into view. The vivid neon, blurred through the sand, disappeared three-hundred feet up into the haze. In unobstructed daylight, that was about the elevation where the construction is still ever-so-slowly completing these surreal monstrosities. The song changed to some other techno hit and my moment was over, but in that moment I simultaneously came to three conclusions: 1: I am on drugs. 2: I have been abducted by aliens. 3: The apocalypse is upon us.
New Dubai is clearly extra-terrestrial, the most unearthly thing about it being the lack of green space. There's a timeline in the Dubai Museum detailing where traditional Emirati life diverged by the arrival of the aliens. You can see explicitly when they landed their spacecraft, now called towers. The omnipresent feeling of being drained, or probed, is thrust upon you by the twinkling lights juxtaposed in the hostile environment. Somewhere, I thought, a mistake had to have been made.
My error was not in guessing how the apocalypse would happen or when, but in what would occur afterward. Like vultures, insects wait for us to undo ourselves, knowing now as well as we that the end is nigh. And we humans sit passively as if on display in an alien zoo. We sit in our ivory towers of academia, mindless and zombie-like, feeding on brains. We seclude ourselves stealthily like ninjas daring the world to pass us by just one more time. Well I’ve seen the coming apocalypse with my own bloodshot eyes, there’s little more speculation. If it happens the way it's panning out then the cockroaches can have it, they deserve it. But as for me I'm not going out this way, I'm going feral and creating a future where I belong. This is where I'm going.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33702271@N05/sets/72157622621763127/
17 October 2009
not an admissions essay
So I’ve registered to take the GRE, and I’ve been studying for them, which is... soporific, and... exegent? And I hate it; I’ve forgotten how to do long division (Einstein complex?). This is a really nice activity though, for Yemen. It makes a good use of all my solitary hours, and AMIDEAST happened to have three current GRE study books in the library. Scores are good for five years, and I assume that within the next five years I will want to attend grad school.
My interest is to study Conflict Resolution. Which we all knew was coming because a) I’m a squishy hippie and b) if you remember the story, my very birth was an act of peace. My older brother and sister claim that the last time they fought was before I was born, arguing if I were to be a brother or a sister.
At my university most people were overly idealistic bleeding hearts, and I really prided myself on my common-sense agrarian background, on having being rooted in reality and not some utopian dreamscape. One of the things university espoused was that militarism exists as one of the greatest causes of environmental destruction throughout the globe, a fact to which I totally agree. After spending time here, I realize that this axiom means American militarism exactly.
America was birthed out of violence. From the advent of European settlement, practically every step of our history as a nation is hinged upon violence: The slaughtering of the natives; the war for independence (whereas Canada achieved independence comparatively peacefully); the virulent and obscenely racist, classist, heterosexist, etc. prison-industrial complex within our borders; to our imperialist military expansions outside of our borders.
Not just our collective history, but our personal histories also are overflowed with violence. We are inoculated to violence in our so-called children’s television programming like Tom & Jerry. When my students learn that in high school I had a gun and would go hunting, they are totally bewildered, they think I’m part of some fascist militia. The sad thing is that it's partly true, in elementary school I was in the paramilitary organization Cub Scouts of America before my folks got better sense and yanked me out. Our textbooks project this violence onto everywhere else too, like when describing tribal warfare in Afrika; reading a high school history text you would think that wars are the only events in human history. Violence resonates in nearly every aspect of American society, extending especially to our military and its expensive weaponry.
However, the entire concept of military and weaponry between America and the rest of the world are distinctly different. The military here performs a different function, a more practical role as a peacekeeping organization. Here, there are many different political factions (as opposed to the US's blighted bipartisanship), each with their own agenda and often with their own small militia. The state’s military allows the different groups to have there disputes, which are admittedly frequently bloody. However, the military does not step in until the warfare extends to unwilling participants, or the public. It is used to maintain a sense of order, used to preserve the social contract, uphold the theory that government makes everyone’s lives better. The military bests us when we resort to our brutishness. There is even a reverence among the people for the soldiers, an admiration that does not stretch to include government groups or the police, both of which are egregiously corrupt.
What’s strange to me is when the Yemeni people (well, and anybody else really) explain to me and warn me about the dangers within their country. The risk of kidnapping (which I hear is almost always given as a choice) is minute compared to the eighteen people kidnapped every day in Mexico. The threat of random violence or even typical tourist annoyances like being pick-pocketed is extremely minimal compared to Detroit or even Portland. As a foreigner generally and a white American male specifically, I am acutely aware of myself here anyways, but most prominently I recognize my inbred malice. Comparing myself to the ordinary Yemeni, I am Pol Pot. I see red in my worldview and it is more than a little disconcerting.
My current question though, is whether studying Conflict Resolution in America is a good choice. The programs are not very renowned or reputable outside of the states, and rightfully so. They were spawned from within a violent system and can deal only within it. International programs are head and shoulders better than American. Would it be more prudent to study outside of America to get a better education or would it be foolhardy since I’m going to be working within the American framework? I don’t know yet. I still have five years.
Quoting addendum: I couldn't really find a good spot to fit this quote into the text, but I really really like it so here goes: "'Give me liberty.' There really shouldn't be another choice here."
My interest is to study Conflict Resolution. Which we all knew was coming because a) I’m a squishy hippie and b) if you remember the story, my very birth was an act of peace. My older brother and sister claim that the last time they fought was before I was born, arguing if I were to be a brother or a sister.
At my university most people were overly idealistic bleeding hearts, and I really prided myself on my common-sense agrarian background, on having being rooted in reality and not some utopian dreamscape. One of the things university espoused was that militarism exists as one of the greatest causes of environmental destruction throughout the globe, a fact to which I totally agree. After spending time here, I realize that this axiom means American militarism exactly.
America was birthed out of violence. From the advent of European settlement, practically every step of our history as a nation is hinged upon violence: The slaughtering of the natives; the war for independence (whereas Canada achieved independence comparatively peacefully); the virulent and obscenely racist, classist, heterosexist, etc. prison-industrial complex within our borders; to our imperialist military expansions outside of our borders.
Not just our collective history, but our personal histories also are overflowed with violence. We are inoculated to violence in our so-called children’s television programming like Tom & Jerry. When my students learn that in high school I had a gun and would go hunting, they are totally bewildered, they think I’m part of some fascist militia. The sad thing is that it's partly true, in elementary school I was in the paramilitary organization Cub Scouts of America before my folks got better sense and yanked me out. Our textbooks project this violence onto everywhere else too, like when describing tribal warfare in Afrika; reading a high school history text you would think that wars are the only events in human history. Violence resonates in nearly every aspect of American society, extending especially to our military and its expensive weaponry.
However, the entire concept of military and weaponry between America and the rest of the world are distinctly different. The military here performs a different function, a more practical role as a peacekeeping organization. Here, there are many different political factions (as opposed to the US's blighted bipartisanship), each with their own agenda and often with their own small militia. The state’s military allows the different groups to have there disputes, which are admittedly frequently bloody. However, the military does not step in until the warfare extends to unwilling participants, or the public. It is used to maintain a sense of order, used to preserve the social contract, uphold the theory that government makes everyone’s lives better. The military bests us when we resort to our brutishness. There is even a reverence among the people for the soldiers, an admiration that does not stretch to include government groups or the police, both of which are egregiously corrupt.
What’s strange to me is when the Yemeni people (well, and anybody else really) explain to me and warn me about the dangers within their country. The risk of kidnapping (which I hear is almost always given as a choice) is minute compared to the eighteen people kidnapped every day in Mexico. The threat of random violence or even typical tourist annoyances like being pick-pocketed is extremely minimal compared to Detroit or even Portland. As a foreigner generally and a white American male specifically, I am acutely aware of myself here anyways, but most prominently I recognize my inbred malice. Comparing myself to the ordinary Yemeni, I am Pol Pot. I see red in my worldview and it is more than a little disconcerting.
My current question though, is whether studying Conflict Resolution in America is a good choice. The programs are not very renowned or reputable outside of the states, and rightfully so. They were spawned from within a violent system and can deal only within it. International programs are head and shoulders better than American. Would it be more prudent to study outside of America to get a better education or would it be foolhardy since I’m going to be working within the American framework? I don’t know yet. I still have five years.
Quoting addendum: I couldn't really find a good spot to fit this quote into the text, but I really really like it so here goes: "'Give me liberty.' There really shouldn't be another choice here."
11 October 2009
price of life
Last weekend, I bit the bullet and went to a barber. Or rather, a "saloon." (I taught my class the difference but they didn't think it as funny as I did. Typical.) The Iraqi barbershop is rumored to the be the best and I had been wanting to go for some time. The barber spoke minimal english, so I used a lot of gestures to explain what I wanted which of course didn't happen. I don't think I've ever gotten what I wanted when I pay for a haircut so I wasn't really feeling at such a loss. I was more feeling that I should grow a goatee and start coaching women's lacrosse. But, I showered and look/feel less like a creep now. The amazing part was the price, two hundred riyals, which is only a dollar. Still more than dad would pay. I was shocked though, that's dang cheap. At this rate I can fulfill my personal dream of getting my hair cut every week (if I can settle on a decent look) for a year for the price of two cuts at Bishops, but minus the High Life.
In general, things are cheap here. The exchange rate is roughly one US dollar equaling five hundred Yemeni riyals. But the biggest note is a thousand, or a five dollar bill, and prices generally reflect this.
Food is inexpensive for the most part. I buy produce from the vendors on the street corners. I'm faithful to one stand in a cluster of stalls. For an eggplant, a koosa, a couple carrots, and a chili it's fifty or a hundred riyals and enough for dinner. But to cook I have to buy gas, which is done by waiting around for the kid with the propane tanks in his wheelbarrow to come down the street, banging on the tanks with a stick so you can hear. Haven't had to buy yet so I'm not sure how much that costs. Food in most restaurants is wicked inexpensive and delicious mostly. Taryn and I get lunch together often at a traditional place. Waters, sometimes a soda, two small bowls of brothy soup, a salad which is just cucumber and tomato slices, zahowiq which is this delicious pink salsa with cheese, a boiling-lava hot stew called falsah, another broth to pour in the cast-iron stewpot, khobz which is the bread made from just flour and water to eat the falsah and zahowiq, a couple bananas dipped in orgasmic honey, two cups of shai (tea, and not chai), and another banana each to go, all for 8 hundred always, or four dollars. Dinner is even cheaper.
Meat of course is very expensive, as it should be. Chicken is cheaper (and real, unlike the American anti-agriculture freaks). Some places you can bring your own, which is definitely what to do with fish. The fish market is awesome, but a rip-off when you're a foreigner. You buy your red-at-the-gills fish and take it across the street to the mukbazza and they bake it or something with red spices in this big kiln sort of. I've had the most amazing shrimp of my life here. A few hundred riyals.
Unfortunately, buying water is necessary. The most inexpensive way to go is by filling up a tank if you live close enough to a store with a bigger tank (you have to carry it, I guess you could toss fifty riyals to a kid, but my conversation skills/ macho pride prevent me from doing this). Otherwise it's all bottled. I spend maybe two or three hundred riyals on water every day. The tap-water is safe to drink, no bacteria or anything, but its salt content makes it terrible, along with other metals which destroy the teeth. But cooking and brushing your teeth is fine with the tap (except at places with a really big water tank with crows that fall in and drown and then people start getting typhoid, like at the school). I'm not sure about dental services here, haven't looked into it and probably won't; you can sometimes tell where people are from by how brown their teeth are from the awful water. Dental floss is about four or five dollars for a spool, so most people use a miswak, or stick that you sharpen and scrape against your teeth, which is probably cheap. My students just give them to me because they're so tickled I use it. About once every month or so one of the older students is in hospital with kidney stones because of the salt content in the water, so I've been keeping cranberry juice in my fridge, at 8 dollars for a liter. It's worth every penny, and I'm pretty sure the price reflects an actual cost. Where is cranberry juice from? New England or the Pacific Northwest? Really the only other things I keep a stock of are peanut butter (which, according to these two adorable French girls who were backpacking through and sleeping in my mufraj, is ridiculously American) at two dollars a jar and Nescafe which is maybe four dollars for a month's worth. You can buy local coffee which I'd really like to do since coffee originally comes from Yemen, originally exported from the port town of Moka, where the drink gets its name. But to buy local beans you go to the real market and pay per kilo from a burlap sack, which is what to do for most grains and spices. Also, coffee pots are wicked expensive, filters are nonexistent, and for just one cup of joe in the morning, I'm willing to forego this for a year.
Booze, is forbidden, and expectedly expensive. You can find it of course at a couple tourist hotel restaurants, at the Chinese restaurant, and at the so-called brothels for lack of a better word. A can of Heineken at the Chinese restaurant is four dollars. A bottle of bath-tub grade alcohol can run as cheap as twenty bucks at the brew-thru or upwards of sixty (after bartering) at some of the brothels. You can however, buy just a half or even quarter of a bottle. The cheap, grow-hair-in-your-throat whiskey is Teacher's brand.
Transportation makes a lot of sense here. The yellow and white Toyata Hiace vans, or dabub, are everywhere and can get you to almost everywhere for between twenty or forty riyals. The dabubs are really really great for so many reasons. They can fit fifteen people plus a driver who is almost always chewing qat, and there are no seat belts. Sometimes even, a seatbelt has been cut and is used to tie the side door to the frame of the van to keep the door permanently open. The dabubs are almost always total pieces of junk, dented and smelling like they've rolled off a cliff and into the sea, sputtering, sweaty-sticky hot, and the seats are always too small for me. This is mass transit though, and not public, reflecting an organically grown infrastructure to fill the failures of government. There are buses which run, and are thirty riyals if you want to save a nickel, but the one time I tried the bus it went the wrong way. Taxis exist, and aren't too bad, maybe three or four hundred riyals to get pretty far. Long-distance bus is cheap too, as are the shared taxis. I can't remember exactly how much we paid for the five hour bus ride to Ibb, but much less than a thousand riyals. Airfare can be inexpensive in the region also. I've seen deals for round-trip flights to Dubai for under a hundred (but with a six-hour layover in Kuwait (look on a map)). Some travel agencies in Aden will comp your flight to Sana'a if you must connect through there.
I was researching sending stuff home, like for Christmas, and was shocked and dismayed to discover that to FedEx 8 kilos from Aden to Oregon would cost minimum of six hundred dollars. I sent some postcards in June for a dollar each, but I don't think any of them ever arrived. So, like in America, Quail Mail is still the best option.
Rents are comparable to America. A decent place is around three or four hundred. You can find cheaper, but you definitely get what you pay for. My last place was three hundred for two rooms and air conditioning in the living room and I'll have permanent scars from the termites. Utilities are cheap: ten or twenty dollars for water and electricity every month, five bucks for phone units every few weeks. However, it's 79 cents per minute to call Oregon, and since I can only load 8 hundred riyals on my account, the most I can get is a five minute call.
Enough. I'm attempting to keep the blog up, for this session at least, since I have stumbled upon a decent connection to the internet.
In general, things are cheap here. The exchange rate is roughly one US dollar equaling five hundred Yemeni riyals. But the biggest note is a thousand, or a five dollar bill, and prices generally reflect this.
Food is inexpensive for the most part. I buy produce from the vendors on the street corners. I'm faithful to one stand in a cluster of stalls. For an eggplant, a koosa, a couple carrots, and a chili it's fifty or a hundred riyals and enough for dinner. But to cook I have to buy gas, which is done by waiting around for the kid with the propane tanks in his wheelbarrow to come down the street, banging on the tanks with a stick so you can hear. Haven't had to buy yet so I'm not sure how much that costs. Food in most restaurants is wicked inexpensive and delicious mostly. Taryn and I get lunch together often at a traditional place. Waters, sometimes a soda, two small bowls of brothy soup, a salad which is just cucumber and tomato slices, zahowiq which is this delicious pink salsa with cheese, a boiling-lava hot stew called falsah, another broth to pour in the cast-iron stewpot, khobz which is the bread made from just flour and water to eat the falsah and zahowiq, a couple bananas dipped in orgasmic honey, two cups of shai (tea, and not chai), and another banana each to go, all for 8 hundred always, or four dollars. Dinner is even cheaper.
Meat of course is very expensive, as it should be. Chicken is cheaper (and real, unlike the American anti-agriculture freaks). Some places you can bring your own, which is definitely what to do with fish. The fish market is awesome, but a rip-off when you're a foreigner. You buy your red-at-the-gills fish and take it across the street to the mukbazza and they bake it or something with red spices in this big kiln sort of. I've had the most amazing shrimp of my life here. A few hundred riyals.
Unfortunately, buying water is necessary. The most inexpensive way to go is by filling up a tank if you live close enough to a store with a bigger tank (you have to carry it, I guess you could toss fifty riyals to a kid, but my conversation skills/ macho pride prevent me from doing this). Otherwise it's all bottled. I spend maybe two or three hundred riyals on water every day. The tap-water is safe to drink, no bacteria or anything, but its salt content makes it terrible, along with other metals which destroy the teeth. But cooking and brushing your teeth is fine with the tap (except at places with a really big water tank with crows that fall in and drown and then people start getting typhoid, like at the school). I'm not sure about dental services here, haven't looked into it and probably won't; you can sometimes tell where people are from by how brown their teeth are from the awful water. Dental floss is about four or five dollars for a spool, so most people use a miswak, or stick that you sharpen and scrape against your teeth, which is probably cheap. My students just give them to me because they're so tickled I use it. About once every month or so one of the older students is in hospital with kidney stones because of the salt content in the water, so I've been keeping cranberry juice in my fridge, at 8 dollars for a liter. It's worth every penny, and I'm pretty sure the price reflects an actual cost. Where is cranberry juice from? New England or the Pacific Northwest? Really the only other things I keep a stock of are peanut butter (which, according to these two adorable French girls who were backpacking through and sleeping in my mufraj, is ridiculously American) at two dollars a jar and Nescafe which is maybe four dollars for a month's worth. You can buy local coffee which I'd really like to do since coffee originally comes from Yemen, originally exported from the port town of Moka, where the drink gets its name. But to buy local beans you go to the real market and pay per kilo from a burlap sack, which is what to do for most grains and spices. Also, coffee pots are wicked expensive, filters are nonexistent, and for just one cup of joe in the morning, I'm willing to forego this for a year.
Booze, is forbidden, and expectedly expensive. You can find it of course at a couple tourist hotel restaurants, at the Chinese restaurant, and at the so-called brothels for lack of a better word. A can of Heineken at the Chinese restaurant is four dollars. A bottle of bath-tub grade alcohol can run as cheap as twenty bucks at the brew-thru or upwards of sixty (after bartering) at some of the brothels. You can however, buy just a half or even quarter of a bottle. The cheap, grow-hair-in-your-throat whiskey is Teacher's brand.
Transportation makes a lot of sense here. The yellow and white Toyata Hiace vans, or dabub, are everywhere and can get you to almost everywhere for between twenty or forty riyals. The dabubs are really really great for so many reasons. They can fit fifteen people plus a driver who is almost always chewing qat, and there are no seat belts. Sometimes even, a seatbelt has been cut and is used to tie the side door to the frame of the van to keep the door permanently open. The dabubs are almost always total pieces of junk, dented and smelling like they've rolled off a cliff and into the sea, sputtering, sweaty-sticky hot, and the seats are always too small for me. This is mass transit though, and not public, reflecting an organically grown infrastructure to fill the failures of government. There are buses which run, and are thirty riyals if you want to save a nickel, but the one time I tried the bus it went the wrong way. Taxis exist, and aren't too bad, maybe three or four hundred riyals to get pretty far. Long-distance bus is cheap too, as are the shared taxis. I can't remember exactly how much we paid for the five hour bus ride to Ibb, but much less than a thousand riyals. Airfare can be inexpensive in the region also. I've seen deals for round-trip flights to Dubai for under a hundred (but with a six-hour layover in Kuwait (look on a map)). Some travel agencies in Aden will comp your flight to Sana'a if you must connect through there.
I was researching sending stuff home, like for Christmas, and was shocked and dismayed to discover that to FedEx 8 kilos from Aden to Oregon would cost minimum of six hundred dollars. I sent some postcards in June for a dollar each, but I don't think any of them ever arrived. So, like in America, Quail Mail is still the best option.
Rents are comparable to America. A decent place is around three or four hundred. You can find cheaper, but you definitely get what you pay for. My last place was three hundred for two rooms and air conditioning in the living room and I'll have permanent scars from the termites. Utilities are cheap: ten or twenty dollars for water and electricity every month, five bucks for phone units every few weeks. However, it's 79 cents per minute to call Oregon, and since I can only load 8 hundred riyals on my account, the most I can get is a five minute call.
Enough. I'm attempting to keep the blog up, for this session at least, since I have stumbled upon a decent connection to the internet.
11 August 2009
i hate blogging
in case you didn't know. A blog is like a plant you get as a gift and feel obligated to water but eventually, like everything else done out of good intentions, it just dies. Sorry.
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