do i speak how i write?

Before starting this saga, I mentally framed it (created a mission statement so to speak) thus: I'm moving to someplace I've never heard of where I don't know anybody to do something I've never done before. Sink or swim. The school will buy me a plane ticket home or to wherever I want to go if I complete a year's worth of work, or seven seven weeklong sessions. But, I realized that this was a pretty aggressive and crazy plan and so, making good on a 2008 resolution, I set up a plan b. Actually, teaching English abroad was also a plan b which I'm really proud of myself for putting into effect finally. I will reconsider my year after two sessions, after fourteen weeks, after three months because "you can do anything for three months." Whatever my decision here, I will create a new plan.
Well, I've learned a lot about Yemen, met a lot of people, and as of this week have finished my teaching my first session. This last part was my greatest apprehension and I feel warrants some thoughts since I'm realistic about the future and pretty much I "gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job." *Wince. This is my halfway mark.
Teaching is pretty easy. I feel really comfortable with the students and they both seem to like class and are learning. All of my students passed and none of them said it was easy which I consider a good thing. Connecting to my students is probably my strongest suit as a teacher, which makes the material accessible for them. The problem is curriculum and what to do with all the time. The school is designed around a schedule of standardized tests and essentially my job is to get students to pass the tests, to give them what they pay for which is a certificate saying they know English and not the actual knowledge of English. This part annoys me because a lot of the time I have to slow down to adhere to this schedule rather than work at the pace the students are learning. I feel that the students could learn a lot more for what they pay if it weren't for the damn tests. My classroom is micromanaged. So my job is a lot of the uneconomical killing of time which causes me to think about it at home, which I loathe. Anyways, ultimately, the job's okay, I could do this for a year and could teach for the rest of my life but probably not English and probably not abroad.
Work, however, isn't the majority of my life and decidedly so. I've noticed that the things I miss most are nontangible and more than just inconveniences like brown outs and water shortages at night. There's quality of life issues stemming from the lack of freedom of speech, press, gender equality, and recognizable justice. The deep cultural differences are a taxing struggle that becomes more insurmountable with time. The tolerated, even promoted classist, racist, heterosexist cultural norms are an acid that eats away at my psyche. And that scares me, a lot. In the face of this, I don't know how long I can hold out before either I burst and say something imprudent or before my foundation of Americanism (which is admittedly ethnocentric and inherently flawed by the double standard of relative morality) is left in ruins. This begs me to wonder what precisely were my motivations for this endeavor?

pics

I've set up a flickr album which you can check out here I'll add pictures to this fairly regularly which you can check out. You can also see pictures from my other life if you dig around. This link is on my link list too, on the right side of this page, listed as My Flickr. -bencarver

the inevitable

With Matt and Taryn, due mostly to their social graces, we have made some friends with Adenis all seemingly named Muhammad. They espouse extremely gracious hospitality and have taken us around the area on various excursions. Most notably, finding Matt and I a place to study Arabic for free, finding Taryn a family to study with since the Islamic Center is for men only, and taking us (and a Spanish backpacker I met who was sleeping on our couch that weekend) on a boat trip to secluded beaches complete with meals on the beach. Matt and I chose not to study Arabic just yet because the timing is bad this term with our training at the school. And also, Matt has this fear of/ interest in being converted to Islam, which somehow always manages to come up into conversation at least once whenever we are kicking around with the Muhammads. One of the pillars of Islam is to talk about your faith with whomever will listen, not proselytizing or evangelism, but informing the interested, as far as I can tell. This led to them going way out of their way to arrange for the three of us (along with whomever else would go) to attend an evening prayer at a mosque followed by a discussion with the sheikh and a few elders from the school. We all agreed to go and Matt flaked out last minute which I probably won't ever forgive him for.
Taryn, dressed in abaya out of respect, and I watched the prayer from one of the classrooms in the school with a teacher. The mosque was pretty, but not very inspired. After the prayer and recitations from the Qur'aan, Taryn and I met with the sheikh and other imams in a room to have a discussion which was probably one of the most awkward and uncomfortable couple hours of my life. This meeting never would have occurred without Matt shewing interest in/fear of Islam all the time; they wouldn't have arranged it for Taryn because she's female, and I could really care less about religion in general much less Islam specifically. Not to say that I won't listen or learn about it, but I'm not going to go out of my way, nor allow other people to go out of their way, so I can know more about it.
The sheikh wanted to discuss the tenets of Islam and I wanted to talk about politics. I asked him how viable he though it was for countries to base their political system on religion in the midst of globalization, to which he replied that there won't be a problem when the rest of the world reverts to the natural state of Islam. Clearly. Then I was told I shouldn't ask questions about politics. So we talked about media bias and how everybody in the middle east believes that everyone in America thinks that everybody in the middle east is a suicide bombing terrorist. To which I responded that I certainly don't know a single American who believes that all middle easterners think exactly like bin Laden because nobody is stupid enough to believe that, just like how I've yet to meet a single middle eastern person stupid enough to believe that I think exactly like GWBush simply because I'm American. We're all just people, after all, and almost all of us are too busy living our lives to complicate things with malice. And yes, it sucks that there are fundamentalists and extremists like Al-Qaeda and the Westborough Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas that have tarnished the public images of religion. Well Islam could easily have good press if American media wasn't run by "the Jew," after all, Americans hate mice but they love Mickey Mouse. Right, but that Scandinavian paper made the prophet Muhammad into a cartoon and Islam got all butt-hurt about it. So maybe media isn't an even topic either. The third conversation choice was, of course, personal faith.
Islam, as I have understood it, is about a deeply personal relationship with Allah that is not mediated by a priest or pope or idol or what have you. This is partly why Muslims are not overly evangelical, because ultimately, faith is up to the individual. Taryn, wisely used her gender to just not have to talk about any of this as it devolved into an interrogation of my faithlessness.
No, I don't believe in God.
No, I'm not an atheist.
No, I don't think about what will happen to me when I die.
No, I don't know how I was created and that's not relevant anyways.
No, I don't know my purpose in life I don't wonder about it either.
No, I don't feel empty or lost or that something is missing.
Yes, I am perfectly content with my life in general.
At this point, they were dumbfounded and salivating. I explained as simply as I could, that I'm just not compelled for religious belief. I'm not interested in taking a leap of faith; if I can't by definition know, then I why I should care to find out is beyond me. I said I wasn't trying to be difficult and graciously, the sheikh said it was getting late.
We shook hands, I thanked them for their time and for going out of their way to accommodate Taryn and I, they gave us some books on Islam and some perfume, fed us, we went home, and I told Matt I converted.

amriikii francophilia

Aden is sometimes described by expats as a place that takes a lot of initiative. There's no safety seal on anything here. You can do pretty much anything you want, but it takes creativity and direction. Indecision just doesn't work. Most social activities here do not revolve around food, which is a novelty I'm still appreciate of, and tend to last three hours longer than I'm comfortable with. That said, I've been a little bored. My home-life is annoying, and there just aren't places to go that I'm used to, such as coffee shops, community centers, libraries, or bars. There's no place to escape in solitude. But, I've been making do. My colleage and friend Catherine, who is from South Africa and is generally awesome, and I have been talking about making a zine to cover the cultural and social events that do occur. It would, of course, be done tongue-in-cheek, because really, these happenings are laughable.
On Wednesday, which is the last day of my working week, Catherine and I went to the French cultural center a few blocks from AMIDEAST. After getting through security, we met a woman and man who worked there, were given a tour consisting of their classrooms and library, which is larger than the one at AMIDEAST, but all in French (or Arabic). The French center shares a shaded courtyard with the German cultural center, which we were also toured around. The Germans also have classrooms, a small German library, and a kitchen complete with espresso machine. Catherine and I were able to sit with the German cultural representative Christian in the courtyard and drink espresso and talk for almost an hour. Both centers hold events such as movie nights and dinners to spread cultural awareness, and do so in their compound to allow the removal of the veil and a less Islamic atmosphere. Because of this, it does however, exist as a target.
The nieghborhood where I work includes a couple English schools which allow coed classrooms, a couple foreign embassies, the UN, and a couple foreign consulates. Local threats (as opposed to specific) are made to the area continually. The UN has been running at half staff for a few weeks now, and just this week AMIDEAST installed a female security officer, as well as starting mandatory bag and ID checks, which is annoying.
So the French cultural center was a welcome discovery, providing me with the possibility of a place to forget and also to refresh.

maybe an apricot

There are five new teachers this semester at AMIDEAST, and the school director Edward has led us on excursions around Aden three times now. The first was a driving tour to show us the layout and familiarize us with the different subcities followed up with an afterschool special by the sea about the USS Cole and the perils of qat. The second time was a hike of the Tanks which are British built cisterns in the crater canyons and then a walk around the shops in Crater itself. While I don’t particularly like Edward, I do appreciate his company for a couple reasons, the first being that he makes an excellent guide of both the geography and the culture, if a bit jaded.
Whenever I start a new job I like to imagine what it might be like as a career, and this is fairly easily evidenced by looking to the older generation. From my perspective, things generally turn out two ways, each with good points and bad. For instance, while rafting, I looked at Charlie Baldwin and Rob Dees as one outcome. Both guys are happy and make excellent friends, but neither have achieved the kind of stability in life which I desire. The alternative I saw was Dave Slover and Carrol White (although I dreamt of Mark Angel). Both are secure with their lives, but have been embittered by years in the river tourism industry and lack a contentment of place. As I saw it, rafting was not the life for me.
Starting out in the TEFL industry, I am eager to consider my options. The school director Edward is the son of an American emissary in the Levant, came to Yemen on a Fulbright scholarship, and he and his wife have been living in Yemen for the majority of the past decade. I don’t know how they met nor how he came to take her job as the director of the school. As the only western person working within the TEFL industry who hasn’t reverted to Islam, he currently stands as the only guide I know to offer a glimpse into what it would be like should I choose this as a career path. Having said all that, he’s a real fruit.
On Friday, the holy day, the last day of my weekend, Matt and I went on a hike with the school director Edward and his wife in the afternoon. Taryn was sick, the sky was unusually overcast, and I was annoyed for no particular reason, so I let Matt do most of the talking with Edward and his wife as we hiked to a fairly secluded beach. They chatted about Yemeni politics after the civil war, Middle East viewpoints on the Iraq war, the relevance of the recent kidnappings in Sana’a, and (the lack of) contingency plans. Given the setting and considering the company, I was irritated less by the content of conversation than I was by the choice of topic. Everything came to a head for me as I was lounging on the beach staring at the point where sea becomes sky, and Edward, returning from a swim to block my view, asked me, “So what do you miss the most?”
“Uh,” I paused, “that’s sort of a loaded question.”
“No it isn’t a loaded question at all,” he scoffed. “I mean you can’t get a bacon cheeseburger or go see a blockbuster movie here like you could.”
“Sure. I miss bacon… bands, beer, bikes, blues, books, booze.”
What I miss the most though, are my friends. I miss being around people who would never ask me such an impossible question. I miss the rich history I had developed in Oregon, where my intentions could be understood with just a knowing look. I miss the bonds I have made that took years of tiring experiences and which as a result are stronger than I ever thought possible. That is to say, that I’m just impatient to form those connections with people here, and reluctant to do so knowing that my stay is intentionally temporary.

Corrections, Addendums

My friend Ryan has clued me into an error I've made regarding something I wrote. The arabic word lehm (لحم) means anything that isn't chicken or fish. Thus, meat. The statement I made that most Yemenis can't tell the difference between goat or sheep or beef probably came as a result of the few times I've had meat here. It's cooked to charcoal and I can't tell the difference, especially since it's all just "meat."
In my class last week we played Two Truths and a Lie. In teams the students wrote three statements about themselves, two true and one false and the other team had to guess which was the lie. One of the girls made a statement that she could cook meat. And the other team assumed correctly that she hasn't had the chance to try to cook meat, and they guessed that to be the lie, which it was. I asked her then, "So you can't cook meat?"
"No," she replied, "my family doesn't eat meat."