Yemen 1993
Sana’a, Yemen
June, 1993
October 2025 Note: I did not have internet email or anyway to write family and friends in June 1993 when I went to Yemen for a month. So I wrote physical snail mail which I sent back with postage thru the Company’s weekly pouch mail to the home office in Dallas. To the best of my knowledge, none of this witty repartee survived the admiration of my friends and family, so this is a recounting of those harrowing days in the Republic of Yemen.
When I joined the Audit Department in late 1992, I was desperate. I had finally made it through a four year degree in only 10 years, but then got busy and got my CPA. I settled down into an accounting role and realized I must have picked the most boring job in the world. I would get all this information for oil and gas sales, make revenue entries, adjust well balances each month, then do it again the next month. And the next. It was like someone took the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day and combined with with the Friday 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I had a friend that transferred to the Internal Audit Department and kept telling me I should give it try. What attracted me was the travel. Those guys traveled around Texas, the USA, and the world. So I applied and they mistakenly accepted.
The Audit Director was tired of the complaints about the audit schedule. Someone was always complaining that they couldn’t travel at the time he scheduled or they didn’t want to go to a particular destination or with a certain person. So he came up with a point system. He put up the audit schedule for the next six months on the conference room white board that listed each audit, how long the audit was, and how many auditors were required from our department of 20. Everyone was given 100 points they could use as either a positive or a negative. For example, you could bid 20 points to go on the Denver audit or you could bid 10 points to NOT go to Midland. I bid all 100 points for one of the six positions going to Yemen. I don’t remember if I was the only bid on the Yemen audit, but definitely the highest. So I can’t blame anyone but myself for being in Yemen.
Sana’a Yemen
June 1993
Kayfalic from Sana’a Yemen!
Other than a three day trip to Cancun I had won in a health incentive contest my company held, I had never been outside the USA and didn’t even have a passport. Growing up in North Texas, my family only took a grand total of two vacations, each about three days in duration: one to San Antonio because Dad wanted to see the Alamo and one all expenses paid trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas to visit a resort. Dad said the Army gave him all the travel he required for a lifetime and had no desire to see anything outside a small radius around his house. Now here I was in a large unairconditioned building (I didn’t want to use the word “terminal” because it seemed too prophetical!!) filled with mosquitoes and 16 year-olds in fatigues and carrying AK47s. We’re no longer in Kansas, Dorothy!
First some background on Sana’a. Legend has it that Sana’a was orginally settled by one of Noah’s sons, Seth, making it one of, if not the oldest, continuously occupied cities in the world. While a lot of the adobe type buildings appear old enough to be original, a lot of the newer ones appeared to be occupied, but had rebar sticking out of their roofs. Someone explained to me that houses are taxed once construction is complete. So anyone building a house leaves rebar sticking out of the top. If someone from the government comes along after a few years and asks if the house is complete, the owner just starts adding a new story on top, connecting to the rebar exposed on the roof to demonstrate construction is still in progress. I saw very nice houses with rebar sticking out and a lot with four or more floors. I’m trying to figure out how this logic could be applied back home. As someone once said, you don’t really by a house in Texas, you simply pay for the privilege to lease it from the state, but instead of rent, they call it property tax. Another thing I noted is that Sana’a sits in a valley with mountain peaks surrounding it. I could see several huge caverns in the mountains outside the city. I asked the driver about it and he said the military is constantly dynamiting these caverns, filling them with weapons, then resealing them in prepration for an invasion or coop. He said to try and not get any of the mountains in photos because if a military person suspects you have photographed one, he will confiscate the film.
Yemen at this time has not been exposed to Westerners as much as many of the other countries in the Middle East. We were required to attend a training session on cultural awareness. A couple of items mentioned are noteworthy:
The hand gesture we use for OK is equivalent to showing a middle finger in Houston traffic. I thought this would be no problem since I couldn’t recall ever using an OK gester. But since I’ve been in Sana’a and trying to communicate when out in public with a population by large that doesn’t understand English, I have found myself using much more body language than ever before. Including, to my horror, an OK gesture to agree with a non-English speaker. Fortunately, no one has bludgeoned me to death for an offensive gesture!
Toilet paper and soap are virtually unknown in the majority of the country. As a result, the left hand is used in cleanup after one does their business in an effort to keep the right hand as clean as possible for more sanitary operations, such as eating. Therefore it is assumed that everyone’s left hand is a petri dish of vile residue. If someone offers you something using their left hand, they are testing your local savvy. You should act mildly offended and not accept whatever they offer. The usual response by the Yemeni will be feigned shock at their oversight and apologies. If a merchant hands you something to view left handed and you accept it, the price just shot up by 400%.
The old sook (Arabic for giant flea market), Babel Yemen, is something to behold. There is no way to describe the sights, sounds, and smells, you simply have to experience it. Gigantic wooden gates that open to the original fortified city of Sana’a are the entrance to Babel Yemen. In not-so-long-ago times, thieves caught stealing in the sook had their hand cut off and it was nailed to the gate as a warning to potential thieves. There were no hands on the gate at this time, but there were the remains of hundreds of nails that held the hands at one time. Thinking out on a limb, maybe they stored those hands with all the arms in the mountains?
The sook is especially crowded on Thursday evenings since Friday is their holy day and most Yemeni are off work. I was wondering about the sook one crowded evening and kept getting bumped by the crowd. I could feel guns strapped on under coats during this contact. At one point I stood aside and surveyed the crowd. I would estimate nearly every male in attendance was packing heat. I may have been the lone exception! Regardless of the moderately hidden guns, every Yemeni male wore a long white robe (dish-dash) with a western style sport jacket and a belt with a foot long curved knife (jambia) in a sheath. The women were usually covered head to foot with black robes reminding me of Cousin It from the Addams Family. Occasionally a Yemeni woman would be so brazen as to not have a top veil that left her only her eyes uncovered. That would probably be the equivalent of a female back home in Walmart wearing only a string bikini. The women always walked together behind the men. The men would walk together and hold hands with fingers intertwined. While this alone confused me, I really have no idea why the guy on left side would let the guy on the right side hold his right hand with their left hand. Maybe that is the Yemeni equivalent of the guy on the right wearing an “I’m with Stupid” shirt pointing to the left?
I have learned from a Bedouin driver how to properly tie a meshada head wrap with the traditional red and white or black and white scarves. Colors and patterns of the scarves can indicate Bedouin tribe association. I now realize that so many Arabs do not know this skill! The rich ones use black bands to hold the traditional scarf on the head. The true Bedouins that live in the desert in harsh conditions know how to tie the wrap to protect the neck from the sun and to provide a dust cover as well when needed. They have never owned a black band to hold their scarf in place. To the Bedouins, these rich Arab dudes with the black bands are viewed similarly how a true cowboy views a goat roper. Or a city politician making the rounds in a rural area wearing a hat and boots and not knowing the difference between a cow or a horse. And neither seems to know you take the dang hat/scarf off indoors! (Although this lack of knowledge of when not to wear a hat has become a widespread plague in the USA!)
Qat. I will try to explain qat, but no way I can do it justice. Qat is a small tree with leaves that remind me of a cottonwood. In Sudan and Yemen, the qat leaves are a mild narcotic when chewed. In the evening in the Sook, merchants on the street will sell qat, but it is often sold out in short order. Yemeni men will stuff the leaves into their cheeks until the look like the old trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, only with one cheek swollen out from their face. And nearly every Yemeni male does this. Including Yemeni operating motor vehicles. Did you catch the part about qat being a narcotic? It can be unnerving to get into a vehicle and see the driver’s cheek absurdly large with qat. A buzz of qat costs about the same as the average day wage (~$2) and Yemeni blow all their day’s wages on chew! I read that at one time, Yemen had a fairly robust grape and wine industry, even though wine could not be sold locally, but most vines were destroyed for the much more profitable qat.
Lots of work during the day and almost all of my free nights involve strolling the sook once I found how to navigate the unmarked streets the 1-2 miles to the entrance from our hotel, the Taj Sheba. As crazy as this place is, their customs require being accommodating to visitors and I always feel safe walking about. On guard, always alert to surroundings, not doing stupid, but ultimately safe. After the initial shock of the airport, I think this viewing of the world will need to expand!
Matzalama,
Shiek Keith