Jun 2007

Every developing country that has security problems always has one of THOSE hotels. The hotel where everyone always knows what going on all over the city, with the really odd mix of foreiginers and locals, with everyone on some seemingly shady business. Well, it would appear that the Hilltown Hotel is THAT hotel here in Sana'a. It has a very Casablanca in WWII feel. One day, the lobby will be filled with tribesmen in from the Hawdramaut, meeting to discuss their plans for the next session of parliament, dressed in sports coats over top of their dishdashas, with jambiyas shover in the belt. The next day, the elevator will open on the way down to the lobby and a Yemeni officer in full dress uniform, toting an AK-47 (which apparently do not need to be checked at the hotel desk), will get in. Or two Yemeni businessmen will be chain smoking in the lobby, while chewing qat, discussing the latest in Sana'ani real estate. And of course, the erstwhile hotel managers at the desk will always be smiling, and can hook you up with qat, and probably some substances or services otherwise illegal in this strict Muslim state. Then, not to mention, there is the two floors of Americans, not just us State Department kids, but assorted American scholars researching 10th century Zaydi munscripts and Arabian oud music. All of the Americans are suspect, because they think we are either CIA spies, or all the blond haired, blue eyed girls that are running around without covering are, umm, available, so to speak. The only thing really missing is a couple of crazy journalists trying to get to Sada to interview the leaders of the Zaydi rebellion and find out if they are, in fact, being supported by the Iranians like everyone here thinks. With it's slightly ramshackle appearance, and location right near the parliament, defense ministry compound, and Tahrir Square, the Hilltown is definitely the place to be. All the tourists and governmental delegations might crowd (well not really crowd since this IS Yemen after all), but the Hilltown has the real pulse of Sana'a

Yemen really is beginning to resemble the American Wild West in my mind. Just as the Wild West was not nearly as violent as people think, so too is Yemen. This probably has a good deal to do with the fact that Yemen is the perfect example of how an armed society is a polite society. Guns are everywhere, espcially with the armed forces and police, which seems to make up about 20% of the working population. Most store owners have one also. We went to Dar al Hajar yesterday, which is in Wadi al-Dur, and there is a place over looking the wadi where you can take pictures with Yemeni falcons and shoot off guns. Unfortunately, we arrived during lunchtime, and only the falcon people and beggars were there, which made me sorely disappointed.
The other overwhelming difference between Yemen and the other Gulf countries I've been to is the prevalence of qat. With the Yemeni accent, the qaf in qat becames a 'g' sound, like the way the Egyptians pronounce the jeem. Thus, qat becomes gat in the local dialect. The reason for this local adaptation of modern standard arabic is because it is almost impossible to pronounce the qaf properly with a tennis ball sized wad of gat in your mouth. Gat leaves litter the streets, and some Yemeni men have wads so large that the cheek is stretched to the point that you can practically see through it. Of course, a lifetime of chewing gat has destroyed the dental hygiene of most Yemenis, and it's pretty nasty to see bits of leaves stuck in teeth and dribbling down the beards of the men.
The last part of Yemeni society that I've been having quite a bit of fun with is the currency. The exchange rate is $1 US for 199 Yemeni rials. Consequently, we've gotten very good at dividing by 200 to get an approxiamate price in US dollars. The advantage of the exchange is that when you exchange money, you get a huge stack of rials. I exchanged a couple hundred dollars at the airport, and got back a two inch thick stack of rials. It looked like a Tony Soprano-style gangster wad. Most of that is locked in the safe at the AIYS now. While the likelihood of getting robbed is next to zero, its just physically impossible to carry around a stack of bills that sized. Between the money I've exchanged, plus the stipend we're getting from the program, I've suddenly realized that I actually have more money than I can spend, for the first time in life. It seems like the only way to spend it all will be to take a trip down to Aden, the Dubai of Yemeni society. Even then, the $700 combined between the stipend is a pretty incredible sum of money. I think I could get used to life in Yemen.

Human beings are wonderfully adaptive when faced with changing circumstances. Or at least so it would seem after one full week here al'Yemen. It seems hard to believe that getting up at 6 AM is now what passes for sleeping in, and going to bed at 10 PM is a really late night. Nor does it seem unusual for random people speaking another language invite me into their home to chew qat. The fact that chewing qat seems normal now also reflects how quickly a person can adapt. Of course, the change in sleeping schedules has become an absolute necessary, since the call to prayer here, for some unknown reason, goes off a little before 4 AM, unlike dawn like most civilized Islamic countries. Thus, it becomes impossible to sleep past 4 AM due to the speaker from the mosque next door is pointed pretty much right at my window. Our hotel is listed in the ´top end´section of my Lonely Planet guide, which really makes me wonder what passes as ´budget.´ My roommate and I finally got a fan, so we can close the unscreened windows and stop getting chewed alive by the bugs. That we are living in a hotel shows how much of a presence American students are beginning to have in Yemen. I would normally be staying at the Yemen Language Center, but with the State Department program, the YLC is hosting over 120 American students and scholars. Consequently, the dorms at the YLC, the YLC guest house, and the Bab al'Sabah house which the YLC owns are all full, which is why the YLC has now more or less taken over the Hilltown Hotel(yes, the Yemenis are very creative at naming stuff, there is also a Starbunny´s, which rips off Starbucks and Bugs Bunny symbols). The YLC is more or less taking over the neighborhood, and looking to expand, since it will soon become the College of Yemeni Middle Eastern studies, which will offer full year programs, and content courses. To a certain degree, this is very disappointing. As anyone who has studied in a place off the beaten path knows, it´s always a little bit disappointing running into other people with white skin while studying in an exotic locale. It´s almost as if they´re ruining your unique experience. On top of that, a rivalry has emerged between the regular YLC kids and us Critical Language Scholarship types. The CLS people are here on scholarship, having everything paid for us, taking the best teachers, and pretty much having the YLC bent to our will, even though we represent only 28 of the 120 odd people at the YLC. Furthermore, most of us have had prior MidEast experience and obviously prior Arabic experience, while most of the YLC´ers are just getting their feet wet. Consequently, we can go wherever we want, when we want, and interact with a much larger segment of Yemeni society. In response, the YLC kids have decided to give us the cold shoulder. To those of us with the CLS program, we couldn´t care less, since the YLC kids mostly speak English, which does us no good, and don´t get out into the street much. And mostly we don´t have time to deal with it, since the program is running us ragged.

My five minute walk from the hotel to the Yemen Language Center includes passing by the street where the Yemeni Parliament is located. The last few days, the parliament has been in session, and oh has that been interesting. Every member of parliament comes in from their respective villages to attend sessions of parliament, and they bring their personal armed escorts with them. That means that the area around our school is suddenly filled with a lot of random guys carrying enough AK'47´s to outfit a small army. This includes the heavy machine gun I saw mounted on the back of a pick up truck, Somali technical style. Of course, this makes the area around our school probably the safest place in Sanaa since nobody would be stupid enough to start anything with that much heavy duty weaponry around, and it´s mostly for show. If any fighting started, I´d be pretty amazed if one out four guns actually worked. The other amusing part was that I saw really nice cars for the first time in this country. I had to do a double take as I was walking through a very poor neighborhood on the way to the hotel, and a Mercedes Kompressor drives by. I personally didn´t think there was enough wealth in this entire country for one person to amass enough to pay for and ship a Mercedes here. But, it was amusing in that this whole situation seemed to be the perfect caricature of Yemen, oddly dressed tribesmen armed to the teeth with Kalashnikov´s chewing qat and laying on the horn as the attempt to fit two cars through a lane only designed for one. It definitely made my week.

Well, Yemen sure isn't Oman. I've been in country for three days now, and it's definitely taking a little bit to get over the shock of coming from a country like Oman, and winding up here in Yemen. The flight over was decent, although we got stuck on the tarmac in DC for two hours with a mechanical problem. On the DC to Frankfurt leg, I was sitting next to an Army captain on his way to Afghanistan, and we compared notes on where we were heading. When an Army captain who has done two tours in Iraq and is heading to a third in Afghanistan tells you to watch out in Yemen, it makes you sit up and take notice. Of course, now that I'm on the ground here in Sana'a, all the hype and worry about Yemen seems really overwrought. We are living at a hotel about a five minute walk from the school. We've been walking all over the neighborhood, and yesterday we went to the Old City for the first time. Throughout all of this, we have yet to have a problem with anyone. But, walking around Sana'a, the differences between here and Muscat are pretty striking. It reminds me more of my time in China then my time in Oman. Yemen is definitely pretty poor. After being in Oman, it seems very odd to see idle people just sitting around on the street, using what little money they have on qat. Also, after the cleanliness, and well-designed city planning of Muscat, which Omanis take a justifiable pride in, Sana'a seems downright anarchic. There are no decent maps of the city, aside from a small one in my Lonely Planet book, and the streets shoot off in every direction, and they often aren't labeled. Consequently, Sana'a is much more disorienting. I had a handle on Muscat within the first four days of being there, due to its easy layout and being able to sit down with a map and memorize all the landmarks. Here in Sana'a, I'm still just trying to get a hold on the area around my neighborhood. As to the local culture and people, that is all pretty much falling into what I expected. While it is a bit surprising to see the level of poverty, that has more to do with the time I spent in Oman rather than any expectation of anything different. Many of the stereotypes of the country that I had read about certainly seem true enough. There are plenty of heavily armed guards running around the city. Our hotel is near the parliament, so we see a lot of AK-47's. And of course, the qat is ever-present. Qat is a plant grown heavily in Yemen, and chemically it is two parts amphetamine and one part narcotic. Chewing qat is a national addicition, and they estimate that up to 30% of the Yemeni GDP revolves around it. Of course, it is wrecking the traditional agriculture base, since it takes up a lot of water and depletes the nutrients in the soil in a country that already has very poor soil and is almost running out of water. Anyways, I'm off to my first day of classes, I'll have more thoughts of Yemen soon.