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 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.

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?

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.

first sunburn

This is in part a response to Taryn's entry:
Last week on Thursday, which is our Saturday, a few of the teachers went with all of the ACCESS students to clean up debris from a bird sanctuary. The reserve is a beach and pond in a rectangular shape maybe a couple acres in size. I'm not sure the history of it, but one end is the airport and one side is a highway. On the other side of the highway is the port and the bird reserve apparently goes dry every summer. So I'm not certain if the highway was built with the intention of creating the reserve, but my guess is that the birds were an afterthought and the road was built during summer. The road is strange to drive on because you're surrounded by water on either side for a mile, and then you reach the airport.
We arrived early on busses and I handed out gloves and garbage bags to my group of around twenty students. Most of the gloves broke instantly because it was already brutally hot and their hands were sweating, and most of the bags broke too because the students (bless their hearts) easily overfilled the bags. The sheer amount of trash was really daunting, it would take days of committed preservationists to clean this beach. There was really just a deluge or rubbish. We couldn't have cleaned this beach if we went at it all month. The students filled up the bags in less than half an hour and the (dis)organizer skirted off to go get more while the rest of us just stood around in the sun and blistered. When the bags were full, most of the students took off their gloves and tossed them onto the recently-not-really-cleaned beach.
The mindset here doesn't really consider garbage, although there are a noticable amount of street cleaners which walk around with buckets and brooms picking up litter. The whole scene was a farce: the country doesn't care about the wildlife on the beach much less a group of teenagers faced with an impossible task and insufficient resources. When I told one student to help another carry a full bag to the road to be picked up by the garbagemen, he looked at me and said, "there is no reason teacher," and then a few minutes later he did go and help.
After standing around for over an hour with my students and talking about soccer and qat and universities, some well dressed men showed up and I was introduced to the governor of Aden. He talked to the students for a few minutes until our (dis)organizer showed back up and the students and I had our picture taken with him which I thought was pretty neat. Maybe if this beach clean up act is publicized it will garner more support and actually be successful in the future. After he left the students told me that he was new, but still a good governor for Aden because he's from here rather than being from the north like most of the politicians, so he's interested in the area and hasn't really had time to get too corrupt yet. I liked him because he shook my hand and then totally ignored me and talked to all of the student in arabic.
With the (dis)organizer back we were given more bags, which again took less than half an hour to fill, and then the students were yelled at. They were threatened with having their scholarships revoked for not working. After her tirade, she then asked us teachers for names of students who weren't working so she could personally chastise them. Clearly, we didn't give her any names, even if we could have. When we left on the bus, I looked back at the beach and saw that we didn't even make a dent in the litter. However, there was a single bird flitting about on the water.
A week later there was an article in an arabic newspaper about the clean up with a picture of Taryn shoving trash into a bag. This was really disheartening, partly because I really wanted my picture with the governer in the paper, but also because I felt that the differences between the two picture options result in differing public opinions of the beach clean up. Showing a white woman engaged in this activity I feel removes the locals from the ethic of preservation which were at least the intentions of the clean up even though the actually task was far from accomplished. Whereas if there were a picture of the governor supporting all these kids cleaning up areas in their home, it might actually resonate with the city and inspire more people to value activities like this. And even though the task didn't really do anything, a story in the paper with a picture inducing relatability would be a start.

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.

AMIDEAST

To say that the Yemeni public school system is the worst on the planet is a gross understatement. Children start school when they're seven, continue for a few years, then give up and drop out. It isn't uncommon for them to stop before high school.
A few years ago Yemen had to make a financial decision to either fund education programs or anti- terror/militarism. Of course they chose the latter. A typical scenario that plays out is the government promises tribes to build a school or well or clinic and then just doesn't. So the tribes arm themselves, kidnap some foreigner, and ransom them to build their own school or paved road or cell tower. So the government now is just buying the tribes' munitions instead of making good on their promises, and the tribes spend the money to build a school or satellite or bridge. I hear there are huge munitions depots in the north just crammed with weapons that the government isn't doing anything with. The good news is that the education is improving, or at least becoming more wide-spread and institutionalized. The bad news is that tribalism is still proving to be the better system and more autonomous, which isn't really such a bad thing unless you're the US and are hell bent on prosthelytizing democracy by which you're more easily able to maintain an iron curtain. I mean without the US's financial influence to root out "evil" there wouldn't have been funding for tribes' infrastructure, educational and otherwise.
AMIDEAST, where I teach, is an American based non-profit started in the early fifties with schools all over in the Middle East and Northern Africa. They've had a presence in Yemen since the fifties but didn't get an actual school until the eighties. Now there are three, the original in the capital Sana'a, where I teach in Aden, and a small satellite at Al-Mukallah in the Hadramawt region. As a teacher here, it's bittersweet. The resources available to us are meager, but the best in the region; the students, view the school as nothing short of phenomenal. Most of the students at AMIDEAST are on scholarship from various programs like ACCESS or YES and must do well in public school to keep their scholarship. Our students are supposed to be at least sixteen, but I have one who is fourteen, so the rules are slippery. AMIDEAST teaches only English, but offers test preparations to get into English speaking universities and to do foreign exchange at the high school level. So all of our students come out of this shoddy public system. For lower levels, the students essentially have to learn two things. Obviously, the students learn the English language, but they also learn how to be real students, how to think for themselves, form opinions and use their own creativity. So it's tricky to teach here because we use a different approach from what the students know, that is, we use what the rest of the educational world uses. But, once started, the two lessons work in tandem to reinforce each other. The students are motivated because they're either afraid of losing their scholarship or because they shell out for the classes from their own pockets, but they're also encouraged to learn once they stop using the backwards epistemology they know from Yemeni public schools and find that learning English is easier than anything else they've studied. The upper level classes are a breeze.
I should add that after talking to a number of current and past AMIDEAST students, I have a lot of hope for the country and its infrastructure. The people are inspired to help their home enter the twenty-first century, they think about the global future, and what that holds for Yemen. But, I'm only getting a small demographic that distorts the Yemeni population as a whole. The majority of people here are grossly undereducated and just don't have a concept of how bleak their own future is, much that of their country, especially within a global context. Leaving the the insular AMIDEAST bubble can be severely depressing.