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.