it's fucking hot

People really understate the heat and humidity of the Arabian peninsula. It's a sandy swamp where your skull becomes a furnace to roast your mind into a chiseled crisp. The torrid temperatures are often compared to a burning heart, browbeaten with unyielding love. To use that analogy correctly, it's really a kind of hotness that stems from a weekend of uncompromised lust, the kind that would leave you with an exotic wetness demanding you go see a specialist about. This burn is dangerous and you know it and you'd give anything, give up any part of yourself to be able to give in to it. But you just can't get used to it and so you fight it, and it just gets worse; it's only the beginning of July. Nobody here even jokes about it when they say, "just wait for the summer," emphasizing the article as if to indicate that each summer redifines the concepts of struggle and insufferability. It's easy to see why people here are so devout and pious, a brimstoned and fiery hell could be a consolation prize after a life lived here. What fresh devices the devil must employ to be effectively fearful. In the end though, the heat just epitomizes the fatilistic passive aggression. Human mortality is an empty threat the sun uses to tease us. That's probably the worst part about it: the heat is mere torture. It doesn't kill you, just makes you want to die.

powpowpower

Arabic is not an easy language to learn. For every rule, there are ten exceptions to it, at least, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
First, there are more than a handful of letters that don't exist in English nor in any other Occidental language. There are letters for the four 'k' sounds, two 'h' sounds, two 's' sounds, two 't' sounds, two 'd' sounds, three 'th' sounds; there are no 'p' or 'v' or 'ch' sounds. There is also the ordinary glottal stop, as well as the "violent, tense glottal stop" which is made by using muscles whose only other function is to aid vomiting. There is also the dark 'l' found only in Allah. The most difficult though, is the special H, which unfortunately is pretty common. Of the vowels: there are three written, two of which are also consonants, and three unwritten. They make 8 standard vowel sounds. More, certain letters are elided in pronunciation by their proximity to sun or moon letters. Arabic is phonetic, which would be nice if all of the sounds are written, and if it were physically possible to pronounce them all. But the phoneticism is still handy, although since it's script (or Squiggley as it is more aptly known) there are hundreds of accepted ligatures. Each letter has a few different forms depending on where it is in a word. Arabic reads right to left, except numbers. The numbers used in English are actually Arabic numbers and the numbers used here are actually Indian, don't ask me why. Transliterations are always different too, some are phonetic and some aren't, some use letters where others use apostrophes, and the apostrophe could mean any number of sounded or not-sounded consonants (really, I don't even know what a syllable is anymore).
Lexus depends always, entirely on context. There are three words which can mean yes or no depending on the question's context. I read a word the other day which could mean white, black, or light red. The joke is that most words mean one thing, the opposite, or something about a camel. Grammar structure is different than English, but I won't go into that.
That all is actually the easy part, first you must decide which Arabic to study. Fus-Ha, Quranic, Modern Standard (MSA), or whatever local dialect is spoken where you are. As I understand it, Fus-Ha is the traditional language that all current Arabic has stemmed from. When the Quran was being written, scholars decided that Fus-Ha wasn't adequate to write the holy scripture, so they pretty much invented Quranic Arabic out of love for Allah (which, good grief, that's pretty awesome). By studying Quranic you would inevitably learn Fus-Ha, but unless you're devoted to reading the Quran, there's not much point. MSA was formatted for the business world and as far as I know nobody uses it, but for some reason two-thirds of all learn Arabic books I found in the states were teaching MSA. What's spoken everywhere is any number of local dialects. In Aden they speak Adeni, and cannot be understood 100km away, at all. Moroccan Arabic is immensely different from Yemeni, as is Egyptian or Lebanese. The good thing is that newspapers and tv all use Fus-Ha, so most people understand Fus-Ha. The bad thing is that when you speak Fus-Ha only, you're responded to in the local dialect. A friend of mine who speaks Arabic actually just went to Morocco and said he relied on his French. Since humanity basically started in Yemen, there's a language tie here also. In Yemen as a country, and Ta'izz as a city there exists the purest Arabic and quite a number of people come to study as a result. That, and it's wicked cheap if you exclude the travel overhead. Having a native speaker is essential, so studying outside of the Middle East is fairly futile.
Arabic is difficult to learn for more than just linguistic reasons, but political as well. Within the American media industry there are only three Arabic translators, and given the geolinguistic issues I mentioned above, I find it hard to reason that those three can accurately interperet concepts coming from somewhere that is so foreign to American that it is almost its opposite. The three are all registered republicans, and they all recieved their language training from the military. In fact, outside of the military, there exist only three scholarships available to Americans for studying Arabic. As of 2007, there haven't been any American Fulbrighters awarded Arabic language study in almost ten years. This reeks. And I'll tell you why:
People here want you to learn their language. My students are always teaching me words. As soon as my classes learned how to give advice using 'should,' they all told me I should learn Arabic. Every single Adeni I've met has asked me where I'm studying Arabic and when I tell them I'm not they offer to teach me or to find someone who will. Whenever a foreigner says one word in Arabic, we are immediately met with the excited response, "Oh you know Arabic?!" People here are incredibly kind and helpful to begin with, but extravagantly so when it comes to their language.
So, I'm very slowly learning Arabic, both Fus-Ha and Adeni. I can count to six, I can tell people where I'm from and that I'm a teacher and that I don't know Arabic, I can buy produce mostly with pointing, I can use mass transit which strangely enough involves even more pointing, and I can tell people that I really like Yemen and think it's beautiful. Well, in so many words.

headlong

Ah. So everything here has returned to relative normalcy.

may be better than quail

Woa. Today, 16 May, I recieved my first batch of mail which included a package from Aunt Carol sent 20 March, and two postcards from my sweet friend Athena in the Eugene sent 6 May. So that's how long it takes. Write me letters. If you send packages, I hear DHL is the cheapest and quickest to get here. There's a rumor that I may be able to transfer to a different city for the next session, starting mid-June, but as far as mail and stuff, we can worry about that later.
The political situation is hairy right now. Next weekend on 22 May is the national holiday celebrating the anniversary of unification between North and South Yemen. In the past weeks the North-slanted government has been cracking down on separatist movement in the South. Separatist rallies have turned into riots then quashed by the military and resulting in some deaths. Seven newspapers have been effectively shut down for promoting disunity. They're still printing issues because the legal process to shut them down takes too much time or money, but the military has been collecting the printings before they ever reach their audience. The editor of one of these papers, al-Ayyam, centered here in Aden, has been wanted for a year in connection of a murder (the details on this, as always, are fuzzy) and the military on Wednesday sought him ought. They stormed the office in Crater, Aden which was protected by the paper's own guards/militia and resulted in three deaths and the arrest of the editor. Taryn's friend who works/ed for Ayyam is fine. I'm not sure what the coming week has in store, but I imagine that if nothing epic is triggered by the 22nd, everything will be alright after that... for a time.
PS: OMGZ MAIL IS AWESOME!

marginals

Unity between North and South Yemen was made in 1990 and there was a civil war in 1994 to little effect but the repeated marginalization of the south. Civil war in Yemen is going to happen again but nobody really knows for sure when. There has been some civil unrest here in the south which has prompted reactions from the governing north. Seven have died in Mukalla (where I'm trying to get transferred) during rallies held by secessionists that have turned into riots by the pro-government militia Guards of Unity. The newspaper al-Ayyam, the employer of a friend of Taryn, has been shut down along with six others for allegdly promoting a "harmed national unity." Revoking freedom of press and speech will undoubtedly fan the fire.
Yemen still has no cases of swine flu, or H1N1. Similar to in Israel, under sharia, referring to pigs is Haram. Unlike Israel though, we're not stupidly calling it the Mexican flu.

mayday

One session down. Matt's moved to Sana'a so I have a room to myself (with no view) now. Taryn went with him over the break and got her life stolen from her. Over lunch she told me the tale today -which is our first day back- and it sounds pretty horrific.
I on the other hand, spent a bunch of my time off nerdily reading about grammar and punctuation and usage (turns out the Guide to American Usage by Bryan Garner which I picked up in a thrift store in Bend of all places is the new Bible, or Linguinomicon rather, having pretty much ended the usage wars haughtily faught in the imaginations of dictionary and grammar editors). Not that that's going to do any good for my writing but it just means I'll have more self-confidence when I correct your terrible grammar. Which reminds me, this site is all around fantastic and you should check it out.
Anyways, Taryn got her passport stolen along with all of her banking information and any other personal information. And this happened in Sana'a, not Aden where she lives and works. Fortunately the American Embassy is in Sana'a, right? Physically, yes; effectively, it doesn't exist. How do you prove your citizenship without a passport, and how do you get anywhere in a beauracracy quagmired by bribery after you've lost all access to your money? Her situation right now is the nightmare of any foreigner; I'm feeling homesick, vicariously exposed, and am not taking this incident lightly. Her first vacation was ruined, decimated really, and basically invalidated her first three months of work here or at least that's how I would feel. After two months she should be able to get a new passport so that she can then reapply for all of the visas and not be living and working in Yemen illegally. It's a crappy situation for her right now that makes us all feel slightly unsettled until it gets sorted out.

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?