my building

This is the courtyard behind the guard station (a small room behind the brick wall straight ahead). I am standing in a hall area lined by cushioned benches that leads into the buildings. The cushioned area serves as a meeting place, a smoking place, and as a nap place for the family of cats that has been adopted by some of the students here. Cats and dogs are generally not house pets here but live on the street, subsisting on garbage scraps. They are generally afraid of people (because they are favorite targets of little boys' rocks?). But some of the crazy Westerners at the school have taken in a number of sick, pregnant or ridiculously cute cats in the neighborhood. A couple of the current kittens were born in the mafraj/living room at the top floor of our building.




These two pictures are of the hallway to get to my room. I am on the fourth floor and the stairs are steep and dark.




The top picture is my desk, the bottom is my bed (with Amelie's map in Arabic).

the school

The school is spread out between a number of buildings. I live in one dorm building - there are maybe 20 students here. There's another dorm building down the road where breakfast and lunch are served and there is a third building that holds the school offices and classrooms.

Most of the buildings in Sana'a are in the same gingerbread frosting, mud-brick/brick style, even the new ones, and all the doors are raised up so you have to step to get in.

The picture below is of one of the classrooms in the school building. The stained glass windows above the "normal" windows are typical in Yemeni architecture. The pattern is created by applying plaster to create the design. Then, the different sections are - painted?- to give the window color. An additional 'screen' - a frilly plaster designed cover is hung outside the window to allow in light and obscure all views in.






Picture of the building: I took the picture above from one of the windows in the hallway of the classroom and office building. I am looking over part of the courtyard. At the table sits Nasser who serves tea and other goodies from a window to the left of the door you see behind him. Black tea is 10 riyals (200 riyals to a dollar); 30 riyals for milk in your tea. The windows above him are the library. His brother works as a guard for my building. They are both lovely, lovely people (who happen to have seriously funky teeth).








It is cold this morning. I will need to put on a sweater in addition to my black dress and head scarf. There are feral cats everywhere. The oleander and hibiscus are blooming. Everything smells like gasoline.

I had breakfast with a bunch of the students who were saying that everyone, after two or three days here has a hafla hamam which means bathroom party, ie. you get sick because of all the new germs, bacteria. Things do not seem particularly well washed here and the wash water is not necessarily clean. Looking forward to that.

This is the street that leads to the second dorm building (the large building on the left) and to the eating area. Since it never really rains here and it is warm to hot all the time (except at night), the eating area is outside.






The three photos above are of the eating area and of the garden next to it. In the bottom most picture, the shrubs in the background are actually giant geraniums. The garden was also full of enormous hibiscus bushes.



The shadows make this picture a little difficult to see clearly. The door on the right leads into the kitchen where the food is prepared. Breakfast and lunch are laid out on the tables above. There is also a steam table for hot lunch foods. Breakfast usually consisted of little individual bread loaves (on which I smeared delicious, sugary American peanut butter and strong Yemeni honey, topped with bananas), ful - a seasoned bean dish, plain yogurt and tea. Sometimes we were treated with omelets or pancakes.

Lunch usually consisted of rice, salad, cooked and seasoned veggies and a meat dish: either fish (Yemen has something like 700 types of fish off its shores), goat/beef, or chicken. The preferred dessert here? Creme Caramel.

You see in the picture above one of the cats that have made the school its home. They spend most of breakfast and lunch fighting over the food dropped on the ground. They are fairly unmannered (as you see above) and usually get shooed away by the Yemeni staff who, I think, may find the western habit of adopting them rather peculiar.

arrival

20 December. 08

I got to the school at 1 am Yemen time, instead of 6:30 because of flight delays and, of course, my suitcase did not come. So I am the female of no clothes and no books and no electronic adapters.

This, after 19 hours without sleep, was a bit much last night. It took me forever to fall asleep - 2:30 or 3:00? There's no heat and it gets very cold at night so I slept with my coat on. At 5 am the call to prayer began. It was quite a thing. competing prayer calls, timed gun shots. I wish I had brought my tape recorder. It is other-worldly.

Just woke up. I have a lovely roommate named Amelie from France who is here for 8 months to learn arabic. Her parents are visiting right now for the Christmas holiday. She is very friendly and has been generous. Right now I am sipping on Amelie-made coffee and eating a coconut macaroon that she gave me. Apparently Yemeni coffee is frightening, she says. She mostly subsists on instant Nescafe and goodies from France.

The people, so far, have been amazing. I have already made friends with a family who lives near the language school and with a young guy who goes to Cornell who is visiting his Yemeni dad over the break. The school folks, those I met at 1 am when I came in are also very very nice and welcoming. So far at the school I have only met men. Men here are tiny - smaller than me - and the older ones have terrible teeth from qat chewing. I will try to take some photos of Yemeni fashion to send when my power source arrives. The women on the streets are mostly entirely covered: long black gown, heads covered and a little black piece of gauzey fabric for their face below the eyes. Amelie is loaning me a black dress thing that I'll wear with my scarf. No one thought anything of my head being uncovered last night.

The school began twenty years ago and has expanded in the past few years. The picture above is of the street on which my dorm is located. The building directly ahead is a private home (if you can see the posters, they are of Ali Saleh Yemen's president, from the presidential election last year; he won with over 70% of the vote; he's been president for over 30 years). The school buildings on this street are the tall buildings to the right, in shadow. The mud wall in the foreground separates out another private home. The men's clothes are traditional, common Yemeni garb.

transit

19 December. 08

in transit:
I got stuck in the Cairo airport for about six hours. The flight to Cairo was nice and distracting - books, vapidly entertaining movies, and bad food kept the time moving. Didn't sleep at all. We arrived in Cairo at 5 pm NY time. Now it is waiting time. Bummer because there is
absolutely nothing to do here. No shops with magazines in any language - only chairs staring out a glass window onto the airport, brown land, and apartment buildings (it looks like the city has grown up around the airport which is kind of cool). There is, however, a Starbucks, a Cinnabon, and a McDonalds which, I find, is rather creepy. I'm avoiding them, opting instead for an Egyptian coffee shop: $12 american for a muffin, an espresso and a ginormous bottle of water.

My Arabic is responded to with soft English. Brown skinned English speakers are responded to in Arabic.

I don't understand the logic of the airport here. We arrived and I followed the crowd to passport control, missing the small sign off to the sign that said "transit". Stood in line and when I got to the front he told me I had to go to "transit" which, apparently, means flight transfers. I was herded into a little room with two young guys from the US who hold dual US - Sudanese citizenship wondering if we were to be forgotten or somehow we would get to where we needed to go. They study in North Carolina and were going home to see family. They were Muslim and seemed to feel that the Arab/Muslim expansion into Christian/animist black southern Sudan was the way it should go. They also talked about all the development and the new Chinese restaurants in Khartoum. Finally a bus came and we were shuttled to a new building to wait.

At the new building a guard took my passport and itinerary. They were apparently passed it onto the gate people- who only exist in theory at this point because there is no one at
the gate since the flight was delayed by hours. I am assuming that this will be a situation similar to the waiting in the 'transit' area - that there is a system and I don't know it. It is certainly not in Egypt's best interest to take the passports of foreigners and not return them. A bunch of passportless cranky people stuck in the airport would not be a good situation.

Flying into Cairo was cool. Gray sky - it may be smog? and brown flat earth, no trees or hills or anything to distinguish it. And then a clump of uniform square apartment buildings the same color as the earth - think like cubical project boxes but each with maybe 20 units? And then there'd be just flat again and then a few clusters, not connected, of the same apartment boxes.