Yemen #3: Dela Dela (Slowly Slowly)

She was not quite as stunning as I thought she would be. Her whole form was covered in a black balto, a long shiny black dress, and hijab. Quite pale skin actually, and her face was globe-like, as a baby’s. Half Kuwaiti, half Yemeni, you would think she’d have that olive color made by millennia of ancestors living under a harsh sun, but no. And no English either, even though our absent-minded landlord Husein said she speaks English better than any of us.

When she walked falteringly up the broad stone castle-like steps to our apartment, with a predatory-looking Husein behind her urging her on, I greeted her in casual English when she entered the room. She looked blankly at us: me, Tom Finn, and war correspondent Casey L. Coombs©, sitting at the kitchen table, and so I threw her another chunk of English. Nothing.

“bil 3arabi,” (“In Arabic”) Tom said, and I let my halting Yemeni dialect rip on her, and she responded to my dull questions with reservation. “What’s your name? Oh, Ghaida. Cool.” (I fudged it up. It’s Ghinē’.) “So, you’re from Kuwait? I heard you speak English really well. What, you don’t? But the Kuwaitis are like the British. I thought they all spoke English! What brings you here? Oh, you’re working at Yemenia Airlines, huh?”

I didn’t understand a whole lot of what she was saying because I’ve never been very good at understanding people, and because her Kuwaiti dialect is more different than I thought it would be. So ummi (“mother”) is coming out kind of like mmwi. Anyhow, she doesn’t look very present in the kitchen with us, and is not impressed with the plate of wilted spaghetti with sautéed vegetables that me and the boys placed in front of her. Black-toothed Husein, grinning and chuckling like a snake, squeezes lime all over her food, acting like sexual favors are imminent in return for his insincere courtesy. She picked through the spaghetti like a dissected frog in science class before letting the whole effort go.

Somehow, in the course of my friendly pestering, I found out that the parents of Ghinē’ separated, and it sounded like her mother is now living down in the city of Ibb, to the south. Not entirely sure if I got that right though. That, and the fact that she was on her own for the first time in the Arab world’s poorest country, coming from one of its richest, living in a house with a creeper of a landlord and a bunch of chatty Westerners, and about to start a job she seemed to have no interest in, appeared to be the things keeping her eyes low and her smile elusive.

Me, Tom, and war correspondent Casey L. Coombs© continued to talk amongst each other about Husein’s creepiness while Husein, with his huge belly and clammy brown skin, continued to chat up poor Ghinē’. A tossed a few other less-prying questions towards Ghinē’, she responded weakly, and it was not long before she was quietly moving out the door, her balto trailing after her, with Husein guiding her like a father does a small child.

We decided, with the evening’s first hint of seriousness, that we’d do what we could to help out this young lady, so out of place in our little castle of foreign folks. Then Tom, in his thin blondness, went up to his place to finish a piece for Reuters, abounding as he does in work after journalizing for nearly two years in Yemen. Casey retired to his room after his long ritual of applying skin-care products, and I got caught up in cleaning various parts of our new apartment, not completing any of the bits I set out to make tidy. It stayed up later than it should have, and I went to bed.

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BEEEEP. My alarm clock hit me like a hammer in the face. It was 6a.m., and I hadn’t gotten my full 8 hours of beauty sleep. Shards of orange light aplenty were already coming in my windows, and the walled-in agricultural plot/garden out my window was glowing green in the dawn light. Slow as a sloth, I headed to the bathroom downstairs which is not clogged as ours is, came back up, and breathed and meditated my stress away for an hour.

Out into the kitchen, where roommate Jacqueline had prepared a smattering of sliced vegetables and boiled eggs. I consumed them, and as she left, Jacqueline chided me for constantly talking about visiting other countries, about how excited I am to see my girlfriend again, about making plans for other times, and told me to take a deep breath, and be where I am. People have been telling me to do that my whole life, a key critique of one of the principle causes of discontent in my life. I grabbed my bag, snaked out the door and through a maze of crumbling stone alleys where tiny children played with deflated balls, and out to the screaming bus station where men in skirts yelled constantly for no reason at all, and we all packed into vans too small for our dignity.

As we sped along and I read Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, it was strange to think that I hadn’t left the city limits of Sana'a since the end of March, when I came back from a two-day trip in Thulaa', a friend's home city about 50km northwest of Sana'a. Almost 5 weeks now I have been shuttling to and fro' on foot and in taxis and minibuses, entirely within the cracked embrace of Yemen's capital city.

Strange, also, to think that between my return into the eternity embrace of Sana'a so long ago, I've found steady employment. These days the municipal mini-buses roll me to the office of Yemen Times newspaper every morning, 5 days a week, Saturday through Wednesday.

I hopped out along a hissing highway, scramble across the highway trying to avoid the violent rush of cars, and into the office. It’s almost empty these days, what with all the new pretty college grads off for reporter training in Egypt. Only Fatima the Ethiopian secretary at her desk, Bessam the translator at a desk next to mine, Ali the stick-like managing editor hunched over his computer, and a few other employees whose names I don’t yet know remain.

Thank god, the fluorescent lights were not yet on. Shards of light crept past the backs of ugly buildings outside, and around the partially drawn curtains. The Yemenis in the office get enough sun, I guess, and don’t want it invading their working hours. I muttered Șabāħ l Ķheir (“Good morning”) under my breath, but everyone caught it, as they always do, and muttered Șabāħ n nūr automatically back at me.

Sit down at the desk, turn on the computer, and yell to Ali’s desk across from me, “Good morning Ali. You got something for me?”

With heavily-rolled cat R’s, “Yes OK I have something for you in 10 minutes.”

And so on and so forth like this for hours, me editing grammar and asking the translators, bewildered, what some of their Arabic-like eternal run-on sentences (like mine, I suppose) mean. Long spans of time between some articles, me not fulfilling my creative duties of creating story ideas, reworking the submission deadlines, redesigning the page layout of the paper, nor sitting with the journalists to discuss their beats. I read articles about the old “socialist” republic of south Yemen on Wikipedia instead.

Lunchtime comes, and me and the fellas, Ali, Muaadh, and, well, no one else head down the highway to a little joint tucked in a tired side street serving roiling pots of feħsa. I talk English with Ali, and Arabic with Muaadh, the brown-skinned communist from the southern city of Ta’iz, yet long stretches of quiet break our conversation about stories and journalists and Muaadh’s incomprehensible jokes. Pull feħsa from the hot iron bowl with hunks of bread, wash hands with laundry detergent, and we’re out again on the empty street. Take a comfortable full-belly seat at the desk and begin copy editing with renewed vigor.

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Up in Asmir’s apartment, the high energy and always immaculately groomed student from Montenegro living a couple of levels above us. To commemorate Tom’s coming departure from Yemen, after what I call a damn successful stint of almost two years’ writing and reporting, Asmir spent all day cooking up heavy and deeply fried foods for us whose roots lay in his native eastern Europe. He said they’re all original recipes, but they've got more than a hint of Tito’s Yugoslavia to them. Fried liver, fried breaded chicken, fried breaded zucchini, and on and on.

I deeply enjoyed the massive hunks of chicken for the rare nutrition they gave in this country leeched of protein, and a couple of other Americans at the other end of the candle-lit table heartily talked up my roommate Jacquelyn about how much they love her home country of China. “Guong Jo. I loved that place. I taught at the experimental high school there. It was like, so cheap. Oh dude, it was niiiice,” or something similar, is what spiled from one Californian guy, who latched on approvingly to a few things I said about Chicanos, his people.

Tom and Casey’s eyes shifted to the ground behind me, and I turned to notice that Ghinē’ joined us, accompanied by a well-dressed old Yemeni in thawb, a long smooth white robe, his skin browned and leathery by years of Arabian UV. The guy sat next to me and uttered things in old-fashioned English. He told me that the parents of Ghinē’ divorced, and that she came here because her mother is in Yemen, if I heard him right.

The guy was a little humorless, and I remember him as quite a bore, though that might not be right on. Ghinē’ sat by his side in her hijab and black balto, looking dejected and unmoved as ever, her eyes far away from us. A few smiles cracked her face, and she made pale glances at people whose conversation drifted in her direction. Not much I could think of to say to the old fella, nor Ghinē’, so I turned back to the Californian, and Tom and Casey at the other end of the table, sipping Pepsi to make the heavy Balkan cooking settle in my stomach. In the middle of a conversation on freelancing and the how-to-dos of the whole thing, I was gripped by diarrheic spasms in my gut and jumped up straight as a scarecrow, frantically grabbed some tissues from the table, and tiptoed stiffly to the bathroom, Tom and Casey crying with laughter.

Back on the scene, at the dinner table, a woman in tight sweatpants and died hair with tremendously grown-out roots crept into my vision, joining a group of gringos at the table. Tom noticed how my eyes leapt wide when I realized it was Ghinē’, bare of balto and hijab. Voluptuous, dressed like a young woman from Orange County might in the fall, but still ill at ease. I kept glancing over at her while talking to others. It was so strange to see a woman, usually covered, uncovered among a bunch of people she didn’t know. I couldn’t really believe it. Dinner went on, folks started drinking alcohol smuggled in from Djibouti across the Red Sea, and a few of them tried their Arabic on Ghinē’, who would nod and speak with them like she was in an interview on the news. Then the power shut off, and we all applauded broken old Yemen in the dark dark dark.

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Climbing up the big stone steps in the dark, using a lighter with a flashlight on it to help me find my way, I could hear the hard clack of high heels on the steps a flight above me. Huffing and puffing, I slowed down. I could tell those high heels were Ghinē’s. It was only us in the stairwell, and it seemed like she was headed up to the roof like me. It was so quiet; it felt like a murder mystery. I didn’t want to catch up to her in the stairs because I was kind of scared of that, and so I stopped a few times to let gain a little distance. I was sure she knew I was behind her, but she didn’t seem to pay me any mind—just continued on deliberately.

Finally, the sound of the heels clacking disappeared onto the roof. I took my time going up the stairs. When I got out onto the roof white with moonlight, Ghinē’ was sitting on one end of it, facing the dark old city of Sana’a, dotted with light from generators in a few places. I took a look around on the other side of the roof, and looked out over the ancient brown and white building around me, and Casey appeared on the roof with me. Coming out to my end, he said “What’s going on with our lady over there?” said he.

“I don’t know man. But it felt like a scary movie coming up the stairs behind her. Ominous.”

We chatted for a while, making dumb jokes and inventing whole scenarios like little kids do just for laughs. But our energy, like the lights of the old city, died off, and we tired of looking out into the dark. We began to migrate back to the stairs, to head back down to Asmir’s apartment, from which we could hear the obnoxious drunken voices all the way up here. Before stepping into the stairs, Casey looked over at Ghinē’ still with her arms wrapped around her knees on the end of the roof, and asked me, “Can you say something to her in Arabic to help her out?”

“Me 3aterja3īš le nēzil tēkuli ħilwiyēt ma3na?” (“You’re not going to come downstairs and have desert with us?”)

She turned her head, big tears muddled with eyeliner rolling over her baby cheeks. “Le, šukran.” (“No, thanks.”)
The tears kept rolling, and she turned her head again to look out over the dark city.

Yemen #2: NO HOME IN ABYAN, NO HOME IN ADEN

NO HOME IN ABYAN, NO HOME IN ADEN

The faaSuuliya, as usual, was mud on my tongue, and the bread I shoveled it off the pan with was not crispy the way they make it at the little joint I go to almost every day in Sana'a. But the red tea was just right, and I was getting my breakfast fill as the young, tired looking guy in purple ma3wūz, the fine cloth skirt wrapped around the waist which men wear in areas on both sides of the Red Sea, brought me a second pan of bubbling hot faaSuuliya. I continued scribbling questions into my little journal, ones I hoped to pose to IDPs (Internally Displaced People) from Abyan, the far southern province just to the right of the city of Aden on any map of Yemen. I had no idea what their situation was, how many of them there were, but I'd spoken to the high-energy Laura Kasinof, reporting for the NY Times, on the phone yesterday, she said there were new IDPs fleeing the renewed fighting between the Yemeni military and al Qaeda in Abyan, and that they were easy to find, so damn it, I was going to see them.


Dropping some Yemeni Ryal on the counter of the well-ventilated little joint and grabbing a toothpick from the tray, I just gave it a try: "3afwan shebēb, ta3rifū wein fi lēji'īn min Abyan?" (Pardon guys, do you all know where there are refugees from Abyan?). They scratched their heads for a moment as though I had just asked them where I could buy a pack of smokes, and then recommended I go to a particular school down the road. "You sure?" I asked. "Yea yea, everybody knows this," they replied.


Out I went across the broad parking lot in front of the little restaurant, which sat in a building that looked like any tumble-down strip mall on the edge of a small Midwestern city. In other words, it was a dull, soulless-feeling place, perpetually filled with Somalis, mostly young men black as arctic night who sat around and waited for a car to wash for the price of pennies, and a few beautiful women who guided their children around as they begged for money from anyone who would give it. I stuck my hand out on the street, a van came to a rolling halt, I pulled myself up, and we rode towards krītr, the center of old Aden, built in the crater of a collapsed volcano, which gives onto the sea.


..........


It took some riding back and forth between schools, marching through the red dust of courtyards with friendly soldiers at my side, asking where, if they did in fact exist, could I find recently arrived refugees from Jaar, a city in Abyan province under Al Qaeda control. I battled the humidity, and the growing weight of the seaside sun, and finally made it to a provincial military post right next to my hotel. The big guy with beret and sweat pouring off his pale brow, the chief, told me I needed armed guys to escort me to the refugee camp. Told me to wait a while he had a meeting. I stood around under a terrace, took pictures of submissive Somali men washing army trucks, which I was promptly ordered to erase, and chatted a bit with tired guys in skirts, sporting Kalishnakovs. An hour or so passed, the chief finally emerged from his meeting, and I found I didn't need escorts at all.


..........


The bus raced along a causeway throughout one of the many sea inlets perforating this city like potholes, then through a quarter called Skeikh Uthman, filled with industrial space and shattered apartments, half-buildings everywhere, bleached bone white by the sun and fine dust. BOOM. "Hey young guy! This is it. This is the school," yelled the driver.


I loped from the bus' sliding door, and skipped up to the gate. An old black woman, face uncovered and draped in maroon cloth, seemed undisturbed by my presence--wisely calm, in fact. Two men in conversation, also looking like they'd been plucked straight from the depths of Ethiopia, responded reverently when I greeted them gravely: "esselēmu 3aleikum." "wa 3aleikum selēm." I told the guys, and the old wise-woman, my mission in my stammering Arabic which I strain to conform to the rhythms of Yemeni speech, and they guided me by the hand to the dirt courtyard within.


A small man, composed, and also of the color that suggests the highlands of Ethiopia, half wrapped in a ma3wūz, approached me like a statesman. I told him I was here to speak to people who'd fled from Jaar, from the recently ratcheted-up bombing campaign of the American-backed Yemeni military. He affirmed, slowly, that all the people crammed into rooms in the school-turned-shelter behind him were from Jaar. I was so psyched to have found my target, I never thought through what he uttered then: "Yes, we're all from Jaar. We fled last summer during the military's offensive." Looking back, I wince a bit thinking that I was looking for IDPs from Jaar, at the behest of Laura Kasinof of the NY Times, because they'd arrived the most recently. Thought I could write a news piece. But they'd also arrived in waves over the last 9 or 10 months. These people were those who had arrived long ago, not recently. Not news, sadly.


I stood around talking to the little man, whose speech, though controlled, often evaded my comprehension, under the high metal roof, like a plane hangar, that gave shade to a slice of the courtyard. Young men, and the old woman who seemed curious now, built upon around me as coral does over a rock foundation while I spoke with the little man . Another man sauntered up, body moving more with passion and nervous thought, darker still in color and squinting eyes like a leopard's.


The man with the leopard eyes, named Abdulqadir, lead me into the yawning opening to the school-shelter behind the dirt courtyard and the strange hangar-roof above the courtyard. In we went, the crowd which had formed around me having dispersed minutes before. Through the wide passage, into the courtyard of the school, and sights which excited my eye and made my heart swell and soften. Children running at me like soldiers in a charge, many of them dark brown like burned grassland, some olive in color, all of them smiling, some with little bullet holes in the teeth formed by the lethal too-much-flouride gun. Women walked around in heavy covering, but brightly colored and flowing, unlike the black khimmār covering that has become the fashion for many urban Yemeni women. The women, many of whom were lightly colored, carried bright green ħenna designs on their faces. A beautiful sight.


I don't know what made these people have such dark, Ethiopic features other than the fact large pockets of the southern coast must have been settled by people from the Horn of Africa. Whether in the time of Ethiopian empire rule over the rich lands of Yemen in millennia past, or from more recent migrations of aħbēsh (people from ħebesh, or Abyssinia, the fertile highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea), I don't know. But it was clear they are not from the akhdēm ("servants") class, black Yemenis of distant Ethiopian origin, who live in devastating poverty, and have virtually no rights in Yemen, and who never mix with non-black Yemenis. 


They did not come from crushing poverty, though this is what they find in the camps here in Aden and elsewhere in Yemen's south. They tell me that Jaar, their town, is fertile, and one can easily find a livelihood in agriculture. They lived well in their town before the crisis, they say. And they mix. White and black Abyani children playing and bleeding in and out of crowds of white and brown Abyani women attest to this. All of the light-colored women were linked in marriages, or some other relation, to the black members of the group.


I stepped through the open courtyard of the school, and towels and dirty laundry hung from the railing of the second floor. A light-skinned man with epic rock-star hair in ma3wūz brought me up the stairs to the upper level. With an excited outrage, as though happy to show off the deplorable conditions they lived in, he spat at me hasty Arabic in his rough native accent, motioning hurriedly for me to enter one of the little classrooms now bedrooms. I stepped in, confronted with bunks that looked too small for human occupation crammed together in the middle of the room. A tiny child layer on the bare floor, sleeping. When I went to photograph the baby, a mass of little kids rushed to stand in the frame of the photo, with flat smiles. It's nice to be in a country where most (men, at least) like to have their picture taken, but it gets maddeningly old and pointless seeming when people call out to you, beseech you, to take their picture, make some boring pose, and then walk away without caring to see the photo, satisfied that their image has been recorded.

The Abyanis kept the rooms in nice order, but 15-20 humans were not meant to inhabit 20x20 foot classrooms. The man with rock-star hair spoke to me with incredulity, condemning the NGOs and local Adeni government for forcing them into such humiliating conditions. The man rushed me into another room, where a shirtless guy lay under a blanket against the wall, his arm over his face, blocking out the sun. My rock-star friend told me the guy on the floor was sick, waiting for treatment. I went to the other side of the bunks, trying to snap pictures that conveyed the miniature conditions they lead their lives in. A few young Abyani women stood against the wall, smooth-skinned and black and beautiful. They pulled bright fabric over their faces when the shutter flapped. 


Back downstairs, I went out to the back of the building where women cooked a single small fish over a throw-together grill made of tires and old tin. They tried to make poses that looked natural, as I captured the poverty with my eyes and camera. 

Somewhere along the line, I reconnected with the leopard-eyed Abdulqadir. He took me to an ancient-looking outbuilding of the school, all cube-ish and grey concrete. He tapped the clingy metal door, and yelled a greeting (or warning) to the ghosts inside. Enter. A dim room, vast and open and naked, windows mostly covered, divided only by a small partition of laundry hanging on wires. In the far corner behind it, a woman built of cloth folds crouches by a little stove, preparing some of the inadequate and irregular supply of rice and flour that UNHCR and other org's provide them, looking over her shoulder at the pale intruder with a face that says, "Alright, but I'm busy now." I step under clothes lines, around stacks of foodstuffs, and greet the two women. A coffee-skinned man with smāTa (light scarf/head-wrap) with big belly saunters up, and talks lighting Arabic about his deplorable conditions. Deplorable indeed, though I wonder how he and his family got this whole building to themselves. He has about nine children, he said, and the two quiet women behind him are both his wives.

The sun continued to cook there little refuge for these limbo people, and my energy bled from my steadily like water might from a boiling teapot with a hole in the bottom. I ended my hours with my one-day Abyan friends with fast, frustration-and-spittle filled interview with Abdelqadir. As his leopard-eyes squinted and he painted pictures of bombs and bullets of the Yemeni army finding a home in his hometown, where Al Qaeda had settled in, I asked him if he thought of returning to Jaar. Selim, a tubby friend of his, jumped in between us before he could respond, shouting: “If there was security and stability, we would return even to a camp.”

Yemen #1: The Crush of Self and Support of Others

"No, ekhi. No, no I don't want a taxi. Go on," I mumbled to myself with increasing volume as I walked down a shaded side street in Sana'a today, peering ahead at a taxi that'd stopped at the intersection to desperately await a fare from a foreigner in sunglasses." I shook my head and the white and yellow taxi pulled out into the trickle of other cars and floated away mournfully.

I felt alright, actually, my belly almost full with authentic Ethiopian food that I inhaled while Atiaf Wazir, the well-respected Yemeni-American blogger, took respectful little bites. My mind was full, too, of a little hope and a lot of calm. How could it not have been? Atiaf had just taken me out for lunch, and as I pulled bits of t'ibs off of a hot metal goblet with hunks of injera bread, she listened to me go on about my block: the paralysis that takes grip in my stomach, keeping me from taking a task  in manageable pieces, which makes me want to crumple up in depression and go to sleep.

She listened, and without a hint of impatience or frustration, excitedly threw out small steps for me to put on a list: Go chew qat (the stimulant leaf so deeply enshrined in Yemeni social rituals) with regular old Yemeni folks in Change Square and ask their opinions on politics and Yemeni current events, start working on my blog, let news outlets know I'm in Yemen and ready to do whatever for them, read Yemeni politics 'til my eyes hurt, network with expats, get working with a local newspaper, and so on. She actually waited as I wrote them down in my Arabic lesson notebook. Sometime before all that, she'd suggested I reach out to Ben, her husband, and get him to connect me with France24.

We wrapped up talking about Yemeni politics, about the necessity of a deeper revolutionary process that expels the old vested interests from the regime, and the omnipresence of foreign interests, like the US especially, in Yemeni affairs. She knows so much more than I do, I GOT to get on the books. As she spouted analysis of Yemen's rainbow politics main opposition party, Islah (Reform), her hijab's many folds and rolls came undone one by one, and as the fabric collapsed on her head, she folded it back up and adjusted her glasses with small fingers automatically.

Out on the street as she waited to hop on a debbēb (communal city transport van), I let a story spill about a taxi I took yesterday. I told Atiaf about the woman in the back seat, wearing a completely black unrevealing khimmār, who despite her attire spoke flintily with me, joked constantly, and kept putting her arms around the neck of the cab driver while he let go of the wheel for seconds at a time while we burned along traffic trenches in the Old City. It turns out she was a prostitute, according to Atiaf's analysis. A strange encounter for me on a Friday afternoon in Sana'a.

Hopefully that's just the beginning of the unusual encounters that get me under the surface of this place.