rice and nice things

On the first day of classes I played an ice-breaker game where everyone told their name, their age, where they're from, what kind of music they like, and what is their favorite food. The responses, for the most part, were not helpful. "My name is abdulkhaleq, I am nineteen, I am from aden, I don't listen to music, my favorite food is meat."
"Okay, what kind of meat is your favorite?" And then they would stare blankly at me and just not say anything. This is something we've been working on in class and now when they don't understand what I'm talking about they at least let me know, that first day it was a little disconcerting. Half the class said their favorite food was rice, the other half meat, and one or two suck-ups said Italian because that's what I said my favorite food was when I modeled the game.
In a later class we did a writing activity where the students imagined they were on vacation and they wrote a postcard to a friend back home. It took a couple tries before they were able to actually imagine being somewhere not in yemen before it proved to be a worthwhile activity (also, apparently postcards don't exist here, I haven't found any and whenever I ask after them nobody knows what I'm talking about, so if you're waiting for one from me, don't hold your breath). On at least half of the postcards the students turned in they wrote to their friend that they ate meat on their vacation.
Most yemenis eat meat so rarely that they can't tell a difference between different animals. Going to restaurants, we generally order rice and hobs (this pancake bread thing that doubles as a utensil used to eat everything else) and they ask if we want chicken or meat to go with. Meat can be goat, sheep, or beef I've learned, and, unlike chicken, is wicked expensive.
The majority of my students are able to study thanks to the ACCESS program's scholarships. They come from extremely low income families, even by yemeni standards, and are able to eat meat once a month if they're lucky. Almost everybody is very skinny, which may be partly cultural, I am coming from a place where obesity is encouraged. Rice is obviously the staple, it's always served with meals and the hypermarkets all have a very abundant rice aisle. Rice prices in the states were going up when I left, and here, even with a saturated rice market, it isn't cheap by any means either. Some of my students come from far away and are living by themselves in order to take advantage of the ACCESS scholarship. I had a phone message one morning from a student's father asking whether or not he's going to class everyday and how he's doing in general; he's actually one of my best students, and I see him around khor all the time, happy and hungry.