Part I: Mandering in Marib

This blog entry is part of a three-part series that I will be publishing in piecemeal as I write it.


Now that classes are finished Sonia and I decided to take an adventure in Marib, the kidnap capital of the world. Joining us again was Thameer, who was the one who escorted us through Al-Houdada. Marib was recently the target of an attack on oil interests, and it's sister kidnap consort, Shebwa, recently housed two French hostages (who were released without harm.) Therefore, foreigners are not allowed to enter Marib without an armed escort. To get around this, Sonia and I had to don niqabs (the cloth that covers the face) and go as two nice little devout Musim sisters. Sonia, who could speak passable Arabic, was often mistaken as his gentle sister while I was his illiterate, mute, deaf, and slightly retarded deformed sister.

Our first stop was Marib, where we stayed with my student, Hussein. Hussein's family was building a new farmhouse, where we stayed the first night. As you can see from the picture, Sonia was not particularly happy with the digs. The mattresses were bug-eaten and the air was filled with mosquitoes. In addition, there were some pretty impressive knuckle-sized ants that we practically had to jump over to avoid. The farm, however, was beautiful with a friendly dog and a very charming camel. We had to stay at the farm because Hussein's family was building a farm and didn't have space for us at the tent city where the rest of the people were staying until the farm had a roof.

Marib is also known for the famous Marib dam. Although not very impressive to see, the dam itself if very old and one of the first dams built. It is still in use today, and was recently renovated. Although this is the most touted thing in Marib, it was basically a large pile of rocks with water on one side and road on another. For more damn Marib Dam pictures click here.

After Marib dam we visited Belquis Palace and the Sun Temple. The Sun Temple was closed, but we manged to sneak into the Palace (also closed, but as adventurous and retarded Yemenis they let us in. I was a touch disappointed to see that there was a gated viewing platform, although I was also happy that they were taking the time to preserve the monument. My disappointment vanished when Thameer hopped the rail and started wandering around. I quickly followed him.

Balquis Palace was brought to Yemen by a Genie who transformed it to the place to prove to it's owner that he was indeed an all-powerful Genie. I will bow out to Google if you want the full history on this place. This is a pillar with some impressive carvings that can be found all over Hadromont. You can find more pictures of Belquis Palace and the Sun Temple here.

My student, Hussein, generally wore the YLNG uniform of a grey shirt and black pants, but for this trip he donned a traditional scarf, balto and jambia that most men wore and picked us up from Sanaa looking like a young sheik. To protect the jambia (a curved knife worn at the waste) from sand and rain, men will oven pull their white robes over the instrument, giving the unfortunate image that is seen here.

Marib is famous for guns and camels. I will get to the guns in a minute, but first let me talk about the camels. They are not used much for riding, the only camels that I saw were either standing around or doing work like this one. This poor camel is grinding sesame seeds. The reason that this one is wearing a hood is so that he can't see that he is actually walking around in circles all day. He spends his time plodding forward, looking for a way out of his eternal darkness. In addition, I was able to ride a camel. For pictures of camels, click here.

One can not go to Marib without seeing a gun, and one can not spend any time with a man who has a large gun without eventually asking to fire it. Everyone in Marib carries Guns-- it's "An Eye for an Eye" mentality in that city (another reason that foreigners are not allowed) and everyone carries a large weapon to protect themselves. Hussein's father was recently killed, and both him and Jabber (another student that showed us around) actually had people after him. Hussein's cousin, Abdullah, proudly showed us the bullet marks that we on his house. Sonia beat my ass when it came to shooting a tin can from the top of a sand dune (although I kicked her ass when it came to taking a picture of it.

The highlight of Marib was Old Marib. This was a town built 3,000 years ago and is currently in ruins. All the houses were built of of mud, straw and logs and most of them are still standing. Some of them we were able to crawl inside. Sonia and Thameer were wimpy about going into a building that was 3000 years old and made of mud but after I led the way they reluctantly followed. I pointed out that if it had help for so long it would manage for another fifteen minutes. Sonia was unconvinced. The man who owned the place came up and told us first that the place was haunted by genies. Then he pointed to another building and said that it has collapsed three days earlier, sending Sonia to scream at me to get out of the building that I was currently in. You really have to see this place to believe it. For more pictures of Old Marib, please go here.

After Mabib, we hopped a bus to Seiyun. Check back for pictures and stories in Part II: California Kim and the Lost Cities of Wadi Dau-ar!

Back on Sanaa, safe and sound

MALI didn't pay the DSL bill, so internet at school is out and I am at a internet cafe with a broken shift key that is driving me mad. Fortunatly I can touch-type because all the letters on the keyboard have been rubbed out. Needless to say, this will be short.

I realized that it has been quite a while since my last post saying that I had run off with Sonia to the kidnap capital of the world (OK, maybe not, not with Baghdad) but I am back safe and happy. We had a very good time and saw a lot of incredible things. Check back as I will be writing more about it when I have a computer that works.

Ho ho ho

How easy to forget that 'tis the season to be jolly. 5 days till Christmas and I haven't even begun my shopping yet.

To celebrate Christmas Sonia and I are taking a road trip to Marib and Sayoun. Foreigners arn't allowed in Marib, so we are going to have to wear a niqab (the cloth that covers the face). Fortunately for me, I have dark eyes so when wearing a scarf and niqab I can pass for a Yemeni providing that I don't talk, walk, stand up or move. In Marib they have the famous Marib dam as well as a bunch of camels that I am going to ride. We leave in T+11 (everything runs late here in Yemen.

But since I will be on the road, Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Dog, cat, cow...

The local TV station often shows reruns of popular sitcoms, and a few days ago I was watching an episode of Fraiser. In the episode, Niles is trying to teach a hopeless Daphne how to play the piano and having little luck-- after a few lessons, Roz is able to play a song while Daphne can't even handle a simple scale. He assured Daphne that he would continue teaching her as long as it took. "You're a lot nicer then my last piano teacher," she tells him.

Niles is shocked. "You've taken lessons before?"

Daphne goes on to talk about her old teacher, a master of piano, who instructed her every day for fifteen years. He eventually killed himself, she says, right after one of their lessons. She said that she was the last one to see him alive.

I know just how that piano teacher felt.

I had an exercise with my class to teach them relative clauses. Since the examples all focused around relationships ("I like guys who are smart"), which doesn't translate well into a society where mothers pick their future daughter-in-laws, I decided to let the students pick their own topics. I handed out pieces of papers and told them to write a noun on it. The students were baffled.

"What do we do, teacher?"

Write anything, I told them. Any thing. After 16 pairs of eyes continued to stare at me blankly I said: ""You can write anything you want... dog, cat, cow, whatever."

Happy, the students dropped their heads and started to write. After a moment I walked around to check their progress. Dog, dog, cat, dog, cat, cat, cow...

"No, no, no," I said. Write your own word!" I collected the paper and asked them to try again, and this time not to use cat, dog, or cow. "If I was doing this in Arabic," I told them, "I would write something like kitab (book) or qalam (pen)."

They started to write and I went around the room again. Book, pen, pen, book, pen...

Thank God this is my last day.

Wild Shouf

As my preparations for departing Yemen, approach, the most pressing problem that I am faced with, again, is what to do with the cat. Cats here are considered vermin, and I am trying to make an anology for myself to understand people aversion to them. I guess it would be if someone adopted a pet cockroach, fed it, and let it sleep in the bed and carried it around in thier arms. Anyway, all my Yemeni friends just laughed when I asked if they would take him.

So, after asking just about every expat that I could find, I gave up on a permanent home and decided that the best thing would be to let him go at MALI, where the other cats are fairly docile and (most importantly) very fat.

This has been a gradual process. I didn't want to just dump him, so instead I will drop him off in the morning before going to the gas company and would check on him while I was teaching classes during the evening. So during my breaks, I would stand outside and call out "Shouf! Shouf!" and he would run out to say hello.

"Shouf" is the imperative for "Look!" in arabic. So please imagine the following... you are in classes at your school, calmly sucking down a cigarette during your break when this six-foot tall foreigner walks out into the middle of the lawn and starts screaming "Look! LOOK!" I got a lot of strange looks and the first day people where pretty baffled at what I wanted them to look at. After Shouf showed himself people caught on.

Then came the annoying process of people educating me on the meaning of "Shouf." The first person who came up to me to jabber excitedly "Do you know what Shouf means bi-arabia, Teacher? It means look!" The first person who did that got a smile, the second person a polite smile, and the twenty-third person a look that could kill.

Shouf is doing well and seems to like his new home. I told the cafeteria guy (and my driver) Abdul about him, and Abdul just laughed at my suggestion that he keep an eye on the cat and give him scraps. However, the next day Abdul picked me up with stories of my cat, first telling me that the cat was speaking English and then saying that the cat was thirsty so he gave Shouf some cream (which gave the cat some pretty bad runs so I was really, really, really glad that he was outside). I think that this guy is now as attached to the cat as I am.

Goodby Sweety Kim

No, Mom-- I didn't spell the title wrong, as you can see this is how they spelled it. As they are my students, I only hope that they just ran out of room.

My students had a good-bye for me on the second to last day of class, and I was very, very touched. We had planned sort of an end-of-the-term thing but it was supposed to be about them, not about me. These are my 6B students, and so after this class they are finished with MALI and are moving on. I know that they are going to do great because they are some of the most talented kids I have ever met (except for Fouad, who isn't a kid, but is rather old enough to by my father.)

Assem wrote a great speech wishing me well and making suggestions for each person in the class. Fouad wrote a poem about the "Dancing Teacher" (I will do anything to get my students attention) that I was also very touched by.

The group shot is my entire 6B class. From left to right: Mohammed, Elvira, me, Fouad, Abdullelah, Mohammed with glasses, Afif, and Assem and Ahmed in the bottom row. They brought sparklers and drinks. Ahmed even brought a can of "fake snow" that he covered me with because he thought that perhaps I missed the snow in Seattle. (I didn't have the heart to tell him that there wasn't really any snow in Seattle.) It was a blast, and I will miss them terribly.

This picture is me and my two female students, Elvira and Khlood. I was teasing Khlood right before the picture was taken by telling her to wear the veil that covers her eyes over her face. She thought I was serious and pulled it down. I laughed and went to push it away when the picture was taken. You can see the light material that covers the eyes in the picture and the thicker material that covers the face. She rarely pulls down the eye-covering material but always wears the face veil-- I have no idea what she looks like, and neither does anyone else in the class. She's a great student and one hell of a writer. Elvira is the girl next to me, a student from Russia who I held dear to my heart because neither of us spoke Arabic. She pronounced her w's as v's and sounded like a little vampire. Although she begged me to, I refused to correct her accent. It was way too cute.

And here is me cutting the cake. It dawned on me that I haven't posted a picture of myself wearing a veil! I am really getting sick of it but I can't take it off. My students, most of which have seen me without it, asked me to take it off and I felt like I was stripping for them.

Teaching 6B alone made Yemen worth the trip. Thanks, guys.

(Check back, I will be posting Fouad's poem here in a day or so.)

Sawatdee Khrab!!

Get Thai'ed!
You're talkin' to a tourist
Whose every move's among the purest.

It's official, I am leaving Yemen on January 4th to a new adventure. This time I will going to Thailand to work with refugees on the Thai-Burmese border. I am terrified, especially since this is unpaid volunteer work and I really don't know what I am getting myself into. At the same time I am really looking forward to not making money for a change, and concentrating on people who really need my help, rather then people who are taking English to get a better job.

I am going to be based out of Mae Sot, which is about as far as you can get from Bangkok and still be in the same country. I am going to be teaching English although there are going to be chances for my to branch out into development related fields. Their website is here: http://www.geocities.com/maesotbvp/. As you can see, I won't be working with them directly but will actually be farmed out to an NGO or perhaps a refugee camp that needs an English teacher. Other then that, I really don't know very much which explains my fear!

A lot of people are curious to why I am leaving Yemen so soon. Well, one of the main reasons is that I am having a hard time with the conservative life here. I plan to come back to this area, but I think that I am more likely to go back to Palestine or perhaps to Jordon. But for now, I feel like I am ready for a new adventure. If you've been following my blog, you'll see that staying in this situation isn't really an option right now anyway.

More to come on this, you betcha...

Pearls of Wisdom from Level 6B

"If people had wings, there would be bad traffic in the sky."

"If people had wings, they would fly from the house to the restaurant"

"If water wasn't heavier then air, it would float everywhere."

"If I had been absent from class yesterday, I would have been killed."

"TV Ads tell us to buy creme from pimples"

"He should either be fired or move to another planet."

Al-Houdada

This weekend I FINALLY made it out of Sanaa and went to the beach town of Al-Houdada on the Red Sea. Joining me were my housemate Sonia, two Frenchmen (Olivier and Eric) and a guy from Madagascar (Tojo).

The purpose of the trip was twofold. The first was to have some sort of adventure outside of Sanaa. I haven't left the city since I got here, which is akin to going to LA and not leaving your hotel. Most you need is there but you have to get out anyway.

The other reason was to decide if I was going to stay in Yemen until March. I have a group of kids at the gas company that I feel obligated to be there for. They will be finishing in March and my heart tells me that that is the right thing to do. On the other hand, I am not really wanted here, things between me and Schmucko (see below) are getting worse and I really feel that I am ready to move on.

The trip actually made a good case for staying in Yemen (haven't decided yet, actually I have but I will save that for another blog entry) but in the wrong way. I chose Al-Houdada because my recent experiences have been so negative that I thought it would only be fair to make the decision while with a nice group of friends on a pretty beach. However, the minute I got off the bus I remembered something vital about living in a tropical climate that I apparently blacked out upon leaving Samoa.

Tropical climates are hot. And humid. And there are a lot of bugs.

I had forgotten what it was like eating dinner with one hand waving away the bugs and the other getting food into my mouth before something flew into it. Sonia ordered a tea at one point but 30 seconds pushed it away after a fly flew into it.

Do I really want to do this to myself again?

Hot weather aside, I had a great time. I will really let the pictures here do the talking. The trip up there was the best part (apart from my motion sickness partway through) and it was the most beautiful scenery that I have ever seen, although the road was terrifying with huge drops and pathetic guard rails to protect us. After a while I fell asleep, and awoke to a sight that was both familiar and strange- a landscape with no mountains. I don't think that I have seen anything like that since I left Iowa years ago!

Upon arriving in Al-Hodata, we were escorted to our hotel room. Turns out that it wasn't really a hotel room actually. I had worried about staying in a bug-infested hellhole but when I opened the door I found that we had been booked into what can only be described as a suite, complete with a kitchen and living room with Satalite TV. I was prepared to spend my break there.

Sonia went to pray and I found out later that hotel rooms come equipped with both a prayer rug and a helpful sign telling one where Mecca is. Something I would not have thought of were I in the Middle Eastern Hotel biz, but very important!! After a rest, we went out and had a meal of fish on the beach where I became reaqauinted with flies and more flies.

We went with a MALI student named Tamir who was a real gentleman. His cousin, Mohammed, showed up in his SUV (yes, Sarah) and took us on a whirlwind tour around Al-Houdata. With little care for his suspension he drove off-road onto the beach and we bounced around the dunes screaming our heads off. We hit a local fish market (not literally, but close to it) and Mohammed impressed me by telling off a guy who was beating a mule with a stick. The man was making the poor animal carry too much ice and Mohammed told him that he hoped that his ice fell into the sea for the way that he was treating the animals. We became quick friends and I told him that I would happy to be his second wife.

While cruising through town we encountered a few checkpoints. They looked at the car suspiciously until it became clear that they were traveling with an American, and then we were waved right through. Did they honestly think that I would get troops there if they didn't do as I said? One of the guards kindly asked if I needed bodyguards to join me in my travels. I told him no thank you, I left quite safe with my current escorts. The French were pissed at my royal treatment. (Perhaps if they had joined the Coalition of the Willing then they would have been offered bodyguards too.)

Another highlight of the trip was when Sonia and I got our hands henna-ed. I had shied away from this custom because when a friend of mine had it done she broke out into an ugly rash. Turns out that she got the black henna, I went with red. As you can see, Tamir's cousin did a bang-up job.

The next day when we hit the beach I stayed in the water for only a half hour and then vainly choose to sit in the sand and read a book. I said that I was tired but really I just didn't want the ink to fade. (That, and I am understandably not particularly interested in hanging out in the water after a year and a half in Samoa.) We took a boat to an isolated beach and the guy stopped and let us jump out and play in the coral reefs of the Red Sea.

Back to Sanaa for a week of work hell.

Can't wait until I can get out again...

The Yemeni Bridget Jones

A piece of advice: don't EVER shag your boss, no matter how lonely or desperate you might be.

At the time I figured that I could handle it. If things went wrong-- sure it would be uncomfortable but not unbearable. I've gotten along okay with my other ex'es.

But what I didn't forsee is the situation where HIS boss calls him into the office to ask if they should promote me to be his assistant. He has two possible answers: “No, because we used to sleep together” or “No, I don't think that she would be a good fit.” One way makes us both look bad and the other way just makes me look bad. So, all my hard work and long hours flushed down the toilet. So, if you are going to shag your boss, at least make sure that your boss has a shred of integrity first.

The only good thing that I got out of the relationship is that he walked off with my scale so I have stopped obsessing about my weight.

So the bad news is that I am being pushed out of MALI but the good news is that I have been accepted into a really exciting program that allows me to work in Thailand with refugees from Burma. It's a volunteer program that recruits English teachers, something that I feel confident enough to call myself now. Plus it is volunteer with only accommodations provided.

It will be nice to get away from the money market for a while. The boss is a really nice woman, which is more good news because that means I should be able to avoid getting myself back into this recent mess.

Unless I decide to go back to women again.

Which I might just do.