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.