political parallax

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.