security checks from yemen

Departure hall at Sana’a airport

On the large table beyond the first x-ray machine, the security officer picks a toy car with giant wheels out of its box. “Can you take out the batteries for me please?” he asks the young woman who has bought it as a present. She does. “Can you show me how it works please?” At 03:30 in the morning, she politely obliges, grappling with the remote control until the car’s large wheels light up in a blizzard of fluorescence and start singing. “Thank you,” he says. “We have to check otherwise they say that we’re not doing our job properly.”

At the next x-ray scan, laptops are to be taken out of bags and displayed separately. A man in a long black coat stands unsmiling beyond the arch of the body scan. It beeps as I walk through, but I am let past. My two bits of hand luggage are checked again -- but not as thoroughly as the first time. This time, nobody opens my wallet to check for explosives between the YR 100 notes.

Cairo airport, transit desk

Tall Egyptian policeman in white: Good morning! Where are you going?

Me: Beirut

Policeman: Why?

Me: To meet friends

Policeman: What are zeir names? (Pulls out a pen and starts writing.) Give me zeir names!

Me: [Great, Egypt has become Israel.] Erm, ...

Policeman: (smiles) How many friends are you going to meet?

Me: (arms firmly crossed) I don’t know!

Policeman: How many?

Me: I don’t know, perhaps five, maybe more...

Policeman: Great! I’ll give you my telephone number and if you meet more than five you let me know! Ok? You let me know! (laughs)

Cairo airport, x-ray before gate to Beirut

"Is this your bag?" asks the policewoman. I nod. She struggles with the straps, then pulls out all 15 cm of my key to home in the old city of Sana'a. "This is a key?" she exclaims. "Hey look!" she calls out to her colleague busy behind the x-ray screen,"This is a house key!"

made in yemen

Inside a honey shop off the busy Zubairy Street in central Sana'a, the shelves are lined with honey, perfume, natural oils, and two mixtures called "Mixture to Increase Weight" (top right) and "Thursday Night Mixture" (bottom right).

"What's the Thursday Night Mixture?" I ask. The shopkeeper, a smiley man from Shabwa with pepper-salt short hair, grins. "Oh that, it's just to encourage the men," he says.

package company drive-by

Mini bus drives by the Sana'a DHL office.

Bus rider 1: Look that's the DHL office, the one from the package.

Bus rider 2: No, no, it was UPS.

Bus rider 1: Oh yeah, but no it wasn't UPS. What was it? What was it called? [Puts head in hands]

Bus rider 2: UPS

Bus rider 1: No, what was it called? ... (inaudible) Someone in the embassy in the US told me that people don't value Yemenis anymore. That's it, now a Yemeni is a terrorist.

sana'ani wedding (the men's version)

The groom's grandmother holds the lace curtain open just wide enough to peek down at the men's wedding celebrations across the street. Her left eye, inches next to mine, twinkles with excitement. Down the mafraj at the next window, more women from the family lean over cushions, whispering, to get a glimpse too.

carrying the shopping home

a parked car is a good car

saving the bag from the flood

Amid all the cars ploughing through rainwater to work on Sunday morning, one municipality worker stood on a mission. There was a bag of something. And he was going to save it.

dressed up for eid

It's the first day of Eid Al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan. Children play on the cobbled paths of Sana'a's old city. Girls wear princess dresses or bright outfits with matching handbags, while boys in shiny new suits run around with sunglasses and plastic guns.

The boy photographed above with two toy guns said that when he grew up, he wanted to be a businessman.

taxi drivers in the rain

With a lopsided smile, Naswan Masoud Al-Farza’i, 31, tells of how, during the heavy rain last May, he lost his source of income for his family.

It happened in the Saila, a paved road built in the natural course of rainwater that divides the Yemeni capital Sana’a from south to north. In Arabic, ‘saila’ literally means stream, and when it rains heavily, it soon becomes apparent why the road is called this.

It was late afternoon on a Wednesday when Al-Farza’i first drove down into the depression of the Saila. In the back of his white cab he had one Yemeni passenger.

“When we entered the Saila, there was no rain,” starts the father of two.

But then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, water was everywhere. His customer screamed, opened the door, and ran. Al-Farza’i debated what to do until the water was up to his chest. He tried to open his door, but the pressure of the water on the outside was too strong. His seatbelt was still on. He undid it, and tried again in vain. So he wound down his window and squeezed himself out of the taxi and onto the roof. As he stood on the top of the car, he looked up. The rain was pouring down.

Perched on the top of the 3-meter high wall of the Saila near Qubbat Al-Mahdi, he watched the spectacle in the water below.

“I saw cars come up behind my car, slide over the top of it, and continue on down [the river],” he tells the Yemen Times. He pauses, and holds up a hand to his cheek to convey how overwhelmed he was. The water, he says, was seeping up over the side wall of the Saila and into the adjacent residential areas. As he was cold and wet and he couldn’t see his car anymore, he went home.

When the taxi driver returned later that night, the level of the brown water in the Saila had dropped and the taxi’s luminescent roof sign poked out of the water. He breathed a sigh of relief as the car had not moved.

“The municipality came and towed the car out of the Saila and onto the side, but then they left it. There was no compensation, nothing,” he says.

Today, Al-Firza’i has cleaned his car and says that he has fixed the engine as much as he can. He is putting the car up for sale. In total, he says, he has lost USD 2,000 in the event. His number plate floated away.

They should set up a warning system, he says. If they also build good drains, then the water would be channeled through them and would not flood the road.

“The floodwater doesn’t come from Sana’a,” he said. “It comes from up in the mountains.”

Al-Farza’i asks for compensation, but says that if he manages to buy a new car, he will work again as a taxi driver.

“It’s my livelihood,” he says.

As published in the Yemen Times

yemenis go latino this world cup

It’s 10 pm. Behind the Great Mosque, in the back alleys of the old city of Sana’a, all is dark. But at the foot of a tall house in ruins, a make-shift cafe has sprung up. Cheers resound from inside. Behind the iron door, on mismatching carpets and improvised elbow rests, men of all ages are watching football.

Tonight, in South Africa’s World Cup 2010, Denmark is playing Cameroon.

Mohammad Faraj, 28, says that he built the cafe - a concrete block wall, iron door and colorful tarpaulin sheets for the roof - for his friends to see the Spanish League games and then the World Cup. Entry is YR 100, so that someone can clean it in the morning.

So who are all the men inside rooting for this evening? “Cameroon!” comes the resounding answer. “Definitely not Denmark!” The 2006 Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammad that caused such controversy in the Muslim world are still fresh in these men’s minds.

“It was a while ago, but then they repeated the insult,” said Saleh Ghuthaim, 35, the owner of the ruins on which the cafe popped up.

Instead Ghuthaim and his son Hussein, 13, who plays football at the Al-Wahda Club in Sana’a, hope that Spain or Argentina will win the world title.

Of course, says Ghuthaim, they are supporting Algeria as the only Middle Eastern team in the international tournament, but for them “there is really no hope.”

To read the whole article as published in the Yemen Times, click here.

running the water home

'i can't go home without five of these'

I hear noise behind me as I walk up the road. Akram, 10, appears at my side. He is handsome in a pair of dark blue combat trousers and a grubby tucked-in khaki shirt. He frowns and pouts, and lifts pinched fingers to his mouth in the universal gesture that means "food." He keeps up the pace next to me and repeats the charade until I stop.

"What do you want?" I ask, slowly opening my bag. "Money for lunch?" Recognition flashes through his face. In a perfectly normal voice, he says, "However much you want."

With a little more in his pocket, he overtakes me and continues proudly up the road. He makes no effort to escape me. We pass a restaurant and he pauses, but then carries on. "Where are you going?" I ask.

"Aaaall the way up Hadda Street," he says, waving towards its end a good 4 km away.

He holds up a YR 100 note, less than USD 0.50. "Every day, my mother wants me to come home with five of these." He says his father died and he is an only child. His mother does not work, so she depends on him to pay the rent.

He works in the afternoon until sunset. "But I can't go home without five of these. It's my mother. It would be shameful. And it takes a while, because people give me YR 10, YR 10, YR 10…"

I leave him to cross the road. He walks up to a parked car and speaks to the driver. Up the street comes hurtling a black 4WD, weaving dangerously between the heavy lunch-time traffic. As it passes, packed with young men, some leer out the window. "Hello!" they shout.

Akram says that in the morning he stays at home. Sometimes he watches television.

just add boiling water

A cardboard tray for eggs propped against his stomach, Mithaq, 9, calls into a small shop on the side of the souq's main path. "I have one egg left, do you want it?" he asks the men having kebabs for breakfast inside. The men politely decline.

Walking around the souq selling boiled eggs to passers-by, Mithaq is one of many Yemenis in the capital's old souq who have improvised easy street food to earn a living and support their families.

The recipe? Just add boiling water.

"One egg is YR30," the 9-year-old tells the Yemen Times. "I buy the tray for YR 500 and make YR 900."

With his single white egg, still to be peeled and dipped into salt and hot spices by his next customer, he soon disappears down the path.

At the souq's next cobbled intersection, Moath, 20, and his brother Mohammad, 18, own a corn-on-the-cob operation on wheels.

They say that they have been boiling sweet corn in their vamped-up wheelbarrow for the last two years. The set-up is nothing new, they say. A gas cylinder perched on the wheelbarrow’s handles feeds a small stove in its center, which keeps a giant saucepan warm.

On a good day, the brothers make about YR 1,000 (less than USD 5) selling the sweet-scented corn to passers-by. Fridays are busy, but during the Eid holidays they return to their village in the Ibb governorate and do not sell.

But water does not necessarily have to be boiling for Sana'a street snacks.

Just inside the Bab Al-Yemen gate to the old city, a man who appears to be in his thirties stands with his wheelbarrow of deep green cucumbers, wet and glistening in the sun. Each cucumber is sold individually for YR 20 or YR 30.

"Cucumbers with salt, cucumbers with salt," he calls to the morning crowd.

For each customer, he expertly slices the cucumber open in the shape of a cross, so that the vegetable gapes open like a square four-petaled flower. Into its center, he shakes salt from a water-bottle-come-salt-shaker.

His customers walk away crunching, until nothing is left but the stalk.

As published in the Yemen Times

off to work

imitating the grown ups

spring clean

The sun beats down on the cobbled path outside Enas’ house. With a hand on each front hoof, her brother escorts a reluctant white sheep towards her, two water basins, and the water hose for its weekly clean.

“Look, this one is beautiful,” says Enas, holding up its black nose as she scrubs it. “Her name is Fairouz ... no Haifa. Do you know Haifa Wehbe, the Lebanese singer?” She laughs.

One by one, each sheep is scrubbed down with laundry powder that her elder sister, in a black dress and brown cardigan, sprinkles from a small plastic bag. Enas combs each animal's fleece with a black hair brush.

Each sheep -Enas says there are 20- escapes as soon as it is rinced and, shaking itself down to the delight of the young children watching, slips back up the path to its clean friends.

yemen in our hearts

"Oh Lord, protect our Yemen," says this poster. The little boy is part of a government campaign to encourage Yemenis in Sana'a to be more patriotic. At the capital's main intersections, peddlers sell small Yemeni flags and flag-themed tissue boxes with the word "unity" printed all over them.

The tissue boxes, produced by "Shen Zhen for trading" and made in a "united Yemen," are inscribed with catchy phrases in love of the nation. "May every day come, and the nation be in a thousand well-beings," one says. "Complete trust," goes another. "In our unity is our pride," says a third. Only "Perfumed ... soft ... strong..." leaves the tissue user a little perplexed. The tissues definitely have no scent.

ten things to spot at a sana'ani wedding (the women’s version)

• The lady who confiscates mobile phones with cameras at the entrance of the wedding hall
• Two sisters / best friends wearing exactly the same dress
• The brightest shade of eye shadow matching the dress
• The highest pair of boots
• A hamburger in a see-through plastic box
• The greenest shoots of qat
• The woman selling fans to dancing guests
• The last person to cover her hair when the bride is being filmed entering the hall
• The bride when the male DJ, who cannot see her, announces that she is the most beautiful bride ever
• The male DJ’s booth on the way out

the walk to unity

Mohammad, 45, walked to Sana'a from Abyan with his family in his early twenties.

Yemen was still divided at the time, so to enter North Yemen from the socialist South Yemen of the time, of which the Abyan governorate was then a part, they had to walk across the mountains for several days.

“There was a war in the south,” he says, because some of the southern governorates opposed their new president’s push to open up towards the west. They tried to kill him, he explains, and war broke out.

He points towards a small bottle of mineral water, “Even this we didn’t have,” he says. “We had nothing from outside. Everything came from the Soviet Union.”

Today Mohammad lives in Sana'a, the capital of a united Yemen since 1991.

He works as a taxi driver after his job as a policeman, he says, because he refuses to take bribes to finish people's paperwork faster. He rents the car from a friend and works as much as he needs to to support his four children.

“Each one is first in school,” he says proudly.

the mini balto

To better blend in and to keep cool in the heat, I ask a tailor to make me a short version of the balto, the long black synthetic gown worn by most Yemeni women. After a week of eager anticipation, I finally pick it up from the shop. It is knee-length as I have asked, but the collar is very tight. “You’ll get used to it,” the young balto salesman says. I pay and hope he is right.

A few days later, I decide to test it. I slip it on, and head out to catch the minibus to work. Will I be stared at for wearing an indecent version of a modest garment? Will I be laughed at? On the fifteen-minute walk to the minibus queue, absolutely nothing happens. When I climb into the cramped six-seater bus, no one flinches. I am almost disappointed.

The minibus is nearly full. Huddled together, two men and a school boy sit opposite me. A man reclines at the end of my bench, but the space next to me is free. Outside, a man crosses the queue of minibuses to where we are chugging, ready for take off. “Get on!” yells the driver, and he gestures to the school boy to move over next to me.

The new passenger takes his place in the doorway, staring firmly away from me and out onto the street. My new neighbour, a secondary student in his beige uniform, settles next to me. As he does, I realize that he and I are wearing exactly the same trousers. Forget about indecent. I am half woman, half teenage school boy.

As we speed along the roads behind the main square, we cross hoards of lanky adolescents on their way to secondary school. Some stroll with the shirt of their uniform open, the Yemeni flag on their beige breasts flapping in the wind, to expose fashionably tight t-shirts underneath. The street is aflood with the color of my trousers. At one corner, beige has invaded a popular restaurant for breakfast.

At the next turn, a woman fully dressed in black stands on the side of the road, clutching her handbag. Two restaurant jackets, in deep red and mustard, hang on the iron shutters of a small shop not yet open. A taxi overtakes the minibus. A chain of Arabian jasmine, slightly browned, hangs from its rearview mirror.

A week later, I wear the mini balto again, this time without the teenage-beige trousers. In the women’s room at lunchtime, I take off the scarf around my neck. My lunch companions gape. “Is it a...?” one asks, catching a glimpse of my typical balto neckline. “It’s my mini balto,” I say, giving them a twirl. Peels of laughter all around.

la brouette

friday morning at the market

a husbandless tree

Enas stands in front of two slim cypress trees at the edge of the garden. The trunk of the first sweeps up gracefully towards the sky, but the second, a slender double trunk, soars up meters above it.

She gently taps the bark of the double trunk. "You see this one?" she says. "It's much taller."

"It's normal," she explains, with a twinkle in her eye. "It's married."

"The other one is a spinster."

planting mint at dusk

the peace envoy is watching

The hero of Tin Cup and Dances with Wolves beams down on Sana’a morning traffic. The fallen Hollywood star is part of Turkish Airlines’ latest ploy to lure unsuspecting Yemenis to the land of the Ottomans on holiday.

The ploy might work better if people knew who he was.

“Tony Blair!” grins my taxi driver, pointing at the huge sign in the middle of the road beyond the intersection. "Kevin Costner," I reply. "Yes, yes, Tony Blair!" he says. His enthusiasm is contagious.

Unlike larger Middle Eastern cities like Beirut and Cairo where massive billboards of pop stars adorn the sides of main roads, in Sana'a giant portraits are usually either of a lady in hijab advertising a sweet biscuit, or of the president.

"I think he's an American actor," I venture. "Tony Blair!" he cries.

I give up, and start squinting to find the resemblance.

buying basil at half past eight

“My name is Enas and I am a spinster,” she says, re-adjusting her black scarf around her head. “Do you have a mirror?” I do, actually. A small multicolored spotty one I was given for Christmas. Should I whip it out in the middle of this dark garden?

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she says, waving her sickle towards the dimly-lit houses at the edge of the large green patch. “It’s dark, no one can see me anyway.”

“What about you? What is your name?” she asks. “Are you married or are you a spinster?” I consider this. I am 27. In my book that is not old, but then again I am not married. “I am a spinster,” I announce. She likes this. We become friends instantly.

She asks why I want basil. I explain it is to cook with, not for a bride or a dead man’s shroud as is usual in Yemen. She takes this in her stride. She knows this because she has American neighbors who do the same.

With her sickle, she gathers two large bunches of mint and one of wild basil. We step back over the damp earth mounds separating the lettuce, marjoram and radishes to the edge of the garden. Her elder sister, wrapped in the same red an blue cloth with nothing but her eyes and hands showing, is waiting.

She introduces me. The same question again. “I am a spinster, but God willing there is still hope,” I say. She laughs, “Not in Yemen!”