Thursday, October 28, 2010

driving as a (barely) organized form of chaos

As I begin to settle in, different people have been asking me for details about what it’s like living in Sana’a – requests to describe my living conditions, to the clothes I wear, to the food. I will post soon about the temporary apartment in which I am living, and about the food (which is delicious). This post, however, is devoted to the experience of being a passenger in a Yemeni car. “But Tammy, you are a New Yorker,” you might say. “How different can driving in Yemen be from getting into a taxi that is careening down Broadway in Midtown rush hour?” Good question. And part of my answer is to ask if you followed the link on qat chewing in my previous post. Qat is king in Yemen. In fact, the photo I most regret NOT taking recently was of a Yemeni taxi driver, pulled over in a way that blocked 2 lanes of traffic, with an enormous wad of qat bulging out of his cheek and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He had pulled over to ask if I needed a ride.


Where to begin? First, while there are lines on most roads that ostensibly demarcate lanes of traffic, they don’t bear much weight or significance. So driving in any given lane has the appearance of a manic game of bumper cars…only – and I’m still not certain how – accidents don’t happen as frequently as you might think they should. Passing occurs on either the right or the left. Signaling is for wimps. If you are feeling a lack of confidence in the car you are overtaking, you may honk your horn. Given what I have just described, it goes without saying that the result is a maddening cacophony, as nobody trusts anybody. Coming into an intersection involves a pretty big leap of faith, as drivers may turn ahead of you, alongside to the right or left of you, or in back of you. Basically, a driver will make a turn wherever there is space to squeeze in his (and much less frequently her) car.


No wonder the taxi drivers are all stoned on qat.


Given all of this, you may wonder how I am getting around. I’ve hired a driver to take me to and from work. For the rest, I take either a taxi or friends/colleagues pick me up. The hired driver is the friend of a colleague’s driver. He is very nice, but has very, very limited English. His solution to this problem is to teach me Arabic on the drive to and from the office. And he’s a pretty tough taskmaster. So far my vocabulary consists of things we see or experience along the way…good morning, thank you, tree, dog, cat, house, flower, cold, and directions for left and right.


It’s not much, but it’s a start.

Friday, October 22, 2010

venturing out of the cage



Finally, I've had a burst of interaction and exploration. Part of what has helped me to get out more is that I'm now working with my office assistant, who is equal parts sweetness and steel, to find an apartment. I am getting the feeling that she always gets her way, and so she's a fantastic person to have negotiating for you when it comes to things like real estate. And while we are looking for apartments, we are hanging out, eating lunch, and seeing a lot of different neighborhoods around the city.

So, the apartment search. I've seen a range of places -- and have found one possibility -- but am waiting to see a few more. I don't need to rush into this, and I definitely want to feel comfortable with wherever I land. In the meantime, it's been fascinating seeing what the interiors of some of these places are like. Some of the houses I have seen have been positively palatial -- one place had 8 bedrooms, 5 baths, and 2 full kitchens! Others just simply aren't "me," like the house that is in the middle of being renovated in a way that divides the house into a men's section and a women's section. Guess whose is nicer? Then there was the place that was beautiful, even if a little over done (do I need a series of carved marble pillars in my living room?), but had essentially no kitchen. I'm also struggling to get used to the idea that the nicest room in the house, typically, is a room reserved for men chewing qat, a semi-narcotic leaf that is a national obsession. More on qat another day, as this definitely merits its own post. In the meantime, to hold you over, here's a link to a National Geographic video on qat via a travel website:

http://www.gadling.com/2006/04/26/chewing-qat-in-yemen/

Among my travels in the past several days, we were looking at apartments in Old Sana'a, where I finally, unmistakably, found beauty. The photos in this post were all taken in Old Sana'a. Walking amid the narrow, ancient streets with no names or addresses, and houses that reach up instead of spreading out reminded me very much of Venice. The organization of the place is like Venice too -- you give directions to your place according to landmarks in certain neighborhoods. I may not end up living there, since the places I saw were almost uninhabitable on the inside...Dad, it reminded me of the interiors of some of the worst places that we saw in Rovinj, where we noticed that things were beautiful on the outside but rotten to the core on the inside. I am still waiting to see a bunch of other places, though, so if I find something that is a little more modern on the inside, who knows?

As far as the atmosphere of the neighborhood is concerned, it gave by far the best feeling: it was nice and cozy, very much in a neighborhood kind of way. Above all else, the greatest factor in the welcoming feeling of Old Sana'a was its children: school girls practicing their English and saying "hello" in shy but excited voices as they pass by; boys playing soccer in little courtyards looking after younger ones; and the little boy in this photo, who ran up to me and mimed the gesture for camera. He was adorable and it will be a small miracle if I make it through my time here without adopting one of these children. I know from my work that they are confronted with huge challenges that children should never face -- as many as 800,000 children in Yemen are acutely malnourished, and nearly 40% of Yemenis don't have access to sufficient clean water or sanitation. I may never encounter this child again, but I will likely always wonder about his welfare.

So, I am on the path to adjusting to being here and -- finally -- seeing the beauty of the place. I have broken out of the cage, even if just a little bit. And it feels wonderful.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

up, up and away

Before arriving in Sana'a I had done a bit of reading on the city and knew, in the abstract, that it is 2400 meters above sea level. I was happy, since the high altitude meant that not only is the weather just about perfect (in the 70s or 80s during the day, and down into the 50s at night), but Sana'a doesn't contend with pesky things like malaria that are an issue in lower elevations. So far so good.

What I had failed to appreciate, however, were the physical impacts of living this high up: jet lag isn't just jet lag, it's compounded by adjustment to the altitude; I am embarrassingly winded walking the two (short) flights of stairs to my office; my heart feels like it's beating much faster (or maybe that's just the anxiety of beginning a new job?); I feel like I am always teetering on the brink of being dehydrated no matter how much water I drink; relatedly, I have been unable to prevent foot and leg cramps at night; my appetite is really suppressed; and my sinuses are so dry they are bleeding. Apparently, it takes two weeks to two months for your body to fully adjust to this. As if all of this weren't enough of a downer, the BBC tells me that I will age faster as a result of living here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1940046.stm

As for other observations, I'm afraid they will have to wait. I still haven't broken out of the cage -- I've been in a 4-day training at my office ever since arriving and it has dominated my schedule. But the weekend is coming (that's Thursday and Friday in my part of the world) and I am planning to go on a couple of excursions around town with colleagues. And yes, I will try to take my camera...

Saturday, October 16, 2010

arrival

As most of my friends and family know, I do not come to blogging naturally. But I recently arrived in Yemen to take up a new job, and want to be able to share some of my impressions and reactions to living in a country that ranks 140th out of 180 on the UN's Human Development Index.

I arrived in Sana'a at about 2:00 early Friday morning...and I still don't have a sense of the place. And I'm beginning to feel like I will have to fight hard to have any normal contact with Yemeni people. So far, all of my experiences have been either at the hotel, or the office, or mediated through the window of the car that drives me to either of those two places. In essence, there is a bubble that separates me from the life here. And that is very disorienting. Maybe things will be different after I find an apartment and get a better sense of where I can walk by myself and explore a little. But right now I feel like a bird in a pretty cage looking out at a world that is much poorer and dirtier and chaotic than what I have inside my cage.

On the drive back from dinner tonight, I rode through what I think is one of the main commercial streets in a more expensive part of town. The street shops were fascinating and would make visually compelling photos. Hyper-modern and enormous pharmacies are located right next to filthy poultry shops selling live chickens that are killed and plucked in front of you. As expected, there are very few women on the street, and those that do appear are usually accompanied by men, and they are fully covered in black coats (and very often veils that cover everything but the eyes...even professional women in the office -- more on that later). Despite that, there is a whole section of town with shop after shop of very tight and low-cut Western-style wedding dresses -- in a rainbow of colors, with gaudy beads. I asked the driver if normal Yemeni women wear these things and he said yes, their wedding day is the one day in their adult lives when they don't have to cover. It wasn't until I was back at my hotel that I remembered that under-age marriage is a huge problem here. Girls as young as 11, 12 and 13 are regularly married off. Are they the ones wearing these confections of wedding dresses and told to savor the one moment in their lives when they will be able to walk around without being covered?

I keep thinking back to photos I saw before arriving here. Online photos of Sana'a that I saw were beautiful and breathtaking. And certainly, I have seen interesting things -- and given the poverty, some heartbreaking things -- but I haven't seen beautiful yet. It's possible that beautiful is right next to me, but I am cut off from it because of my cage. Hopefully, I will at some point be able to break free and experience life more directly here. Otherwise, I get the sense that I will feel lonely and a little isolated, even if my colleagues so far have been nice.

These are my first impressions. I know -- it's not the happy and excited report that I expected to have. But this is the reality.