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.