A Day In My Life

So what is a day like for me? Pretty busy, actually, and here’s my schedule.

I wake up at around 6:30 AM. (Actually, to be fair I am woken up at around 5:30 to do yoga and stretches and review my lesson plan but more often then not I just hit the snooze and go back to sleep.)

When I do make it up, I take a quick shower and have my tea and oatmeal. I have to be out of the house by seven to catch the taxi to work. MALI pays for a car to take us to and from the gas company where I work.

Once there, I have about a half hour to get my lessons together and get to my eight-o-clock class. I love my class. I have 14 students six days a week for about four hours a day. We spent about half of that working through the book and the other half working on activities. My students are there from 8-4 and they get pretty burnt out when they are in intensive learning settings every day. So I try to have a lot of games and other things to stir things up a bit. As I said before, when I am doing my job right it’s more like I am babysitting then anyone else.

Right now the schedule is a bit brutall; we have class from 8-12:30 then another class from 5:25-6. I don’t mind too much, as that extra time lets me do work such as planning lessons and working on the internet during that time, but by the time I get back to MALI I am pretty exhausted. I have an Arabic class from 6:30-7:30, and last week I just had to break down and cancel the thing because I was exhausted and hadn’t studied. Basically I am away for 12 hours a day and still need to find time to eat and study.

That is my schedule from Saturday to Thursday. Friday is my day off, and unfortunately it’s everyone else’s day off as well and so all the jobs are closed (Friday is the Muslim holy day.) But at the same time it’s nice to have a day where I can’t do anything. I get out early of work early on Thursdays and generally go shopping at this time. There is a store called Shamil Al-Hairi that I love… especially coming from Samoa! It’s basially the Fred Meyers or the Wal-Mart (depending on your region) of Yemen. I love to go there and just wander around the beauty product aisle, marveling that there can be so much different types of shampoos and soaps (especially for a population of woman who have shown there hair to probably only about a dozen non-family members, if that!).

A lot of ex-pats here complain about the lack of variety of goods, about the people and about the general decrepit state of the country. But coming from Samoa, it all looks great to me. We have at least ten different types of ethic restaurants in this town, including Chinese places and Korean. We even have a Pizza Hut! The only thing that really gets to me is the taxi drives who blow their horns for every occasion, including giving a honk when approaching intersections to warn any unseen pedestrians or motorists. A good idea, you might think, until you stand on a street and it sounds like the middle of NYC traffic jam 24/7.

I live with three other girls: Becky, Miriam and Sonia. They are from America, Australia and France respectively, so we are a pretty diverse group. We have what can best be described as a college dorm type setup—we each have our own rooms which serves as a living/sleeping/studying area and then we have a common kitchen and room that we share. This means that in order to hang out all I have to do is walk out of my room. The walls are made of concrete which makes them a bit challenging to hang pictures on but makes each room a virtual sound vacuum. I have different hours then the other girls so I even get a few hours all to myself after I get back from work.

Right now I don’t do much outside of work, mostly due to the fact that I am learning Arabic and can’t speak to anyone outside of my house and work. But I have made a few friends and we enjoying touring the local restaurants and hunting around the dozens of stores. Fortunately most of my friends already speak Arabic (giving me hope that I can learn it) and they can do most of the translating for me.

I know that I am still in my “honeymoon” stage with Yemen right now, but I am still in love with this country. No, no pictures yet, I will try to get some up soon I promise!!!