desert rose

Last night I dreamed it was raining in Sana’a. Big, heavy, round drops of rain that came in sideways through an open window. And until I remembered this dream on my way back to my apartment tonight, I hadn’t realized just how much I miss rain and changes in weather more generally. Every day since arriving in Sana’a the weather has been clear and in the upper 70s or low 80s in the day, dropping down to the 50s and now increasingly the 40s at night. It’s nearly perfect weather. And it's driving me a little crazy. Perfection becomes boring after a while. Perhaps, perversely, we only come to appreciate and savor perfection or beauty or peace when we are deprived of it. Or maybe there is beauty and perfection in rain that I never appreciated before and am only realizing now in its absence.

I suspect most people are expecting me to comment on the recent events that have once again connected Yemen and the United States (and London and Dubai) in troubling ways. This might be hard to believe if you are sitting in New York (or Cittanova!) but honestly, not a lot has changed in Sana’a. There were increased police checkpoints stopping people in cars yesterday, but for the most part those were gone by today. People at work are mainly concerned about whether the embargo of shipments in and out of Yemen will affect our ability to deliver humanitarian relief (since you can’t deliver supplies that you don’t have). I keep thinking of the great guys at UPS up on 116th Street in Harlem who were so wonderful to work with when I was shipping my things to Sana’a…impressively, my boxes arrived in 4 days. They didn’t bat an eye when I handed them the Yemeni address, since that part of Harlem is home to a growing Yemeni community of shopkeepers who regularly send much-needed remittances and goods home via UPS. I wonder how the families they left behind in Aden, Sana’a and Saada will cope with their double loss of an absent male head of household AND no remittances. In a country where a large percentage of the population lives on less than $2 a day, most cannot adjust to shocks like this, and so get pushed into relying more and more on the kind of humanitarian support that organizations like mine struggle to give as our supplies dwindle.

That’s what the current crisis looks like from here.