Those Darned Kids

A funny thing happened a while back when I was walking come from work. I was walking through a residential street when I heard a *knock knock knock* on one of the doors. I stopped and looked around, confused because I didn't see anyone knocking on any of the doors around me. I heard the knocking again and realized that it was coming from inside the gate. I walked to the gate and saw that it was bolted shut-- from the outside.

You see, Sanaa is a city of walls and gates. Watch coverage on CNN and you will notice that most major Middle Eastern cities (such as Baghdad, or rather what is left of Baghdad) is filled with walls that are interspersed with metal gates. In the morning, the shop keepers come out and unbolt the gates and pull them aside. Imagine that you are in a giant outdoor shopping mall, but with piles of trash sitting around and no helpful signs letting you know where the post office is.

The other strange thing about the gates that are on the houses is that they can be bolted from both the inside and the outside. I noticed this on our kitchen door in our house, and was told that this design was to keep the women in the kitchen when needed. What this means, of course, is that someone could theoretically go around the streets of Sanaa in the dead of night and lock a majority of people (the people who don't have guards outside their houses, that is) inside their houses and there would be no way that they could get out, unless a passing stranger, like myself, heard their cries and unbolted the door.

Which is what I did. A young girl, about twelve, peeked out and thanked me and ran away. It wasn't until I shared the story with my housemates that they pointed out that she was probably locked up for a reason. I hadn't thought of that, but I later decided that I was fine with liberating trapped girls from their houses as a form of protest. Plus, it was a fire hazard.

A few days later I discovered why perhaps these kids should be locked up. Ramadan is over, thank goodness, but during this month it was the custom to set off firecrackers. I had always assumed that the kids were tossing "poppers", those little bits of gunpowder wrapped in paper. I wondered why they always threw them so close to my window all the time. I later learned the hard away that they were not being set off in my proximity, the blasted things are just very, very loud.

I was on my way to work when a kid was lighting firecrackers and one landed about two yards ahead of me. "This is just great," I thought and stopped to wait for it to go off before I continued my walk. Little did I know that the little bastard had just thrown one a few seconds before that was about three inches from my shoe. It went off like a gunshot in my ear, I screamed and it felt like my head exploded. The kid thought that this was really funny and started to laugh (at least I think that's what he was doing since all I could hear was a loud ringing) but he stopped laughing when I dove across the road and started screaming at him, cursing the fact that I didn't know enough Arabic to REALLY give the punk a piece of my mind. A few minutes later some women came to my aid. I told them that I wanted the firecrackers. The kid said that he didn't have anymore. We frisked him and found about 20. The stupid kid really put up a fight when we took them away. I am not sure why he did, I know that he can get more. I was at the store buying a Coke the other day when some kids ran in and bought what I thought was candy-- when I walked out they were lighting a 911 call waiting to happen that flew around the sidewalk shooting off sparks. (Lets not forget that most of the cars around here leak.)

Speaking of cars, I also had a bit of a double take when I was walking home from work (for an area about two blocks long, a lot happens on that road) and two SUV's came bursting around the corner, obviously racing. I jumped and pressed my back against the wall-- one was attempting to pass in on a road that can only be described as one lane. Normally I would have assumed that they were drunk idiots, but people can't drink in this country. (I mean that, alcohol is VERY hard to come by unless you have a lot of money, and even then it's not easy.) As the cars passed I saw that the drivers were two kids, neither looked like they had hit puberty or even could reach the gas pedals.

I shrugged and continued on my way. Just another typical day in Yemen...