Yemen 1995
Sana’a, Yemen
June-July 1995
October 2025 Note: I returned to Sana’a Yemen in summer 1995. Communication challenges of 1993 still persisted with limited contact back home. I was scheduled this time to be gone a total of six weeks. I missed a family reunion about a week before my departure due to everything I needed to get done before my extended absence. My wife sent paper and pencil with my Mom to the reunion and asked my relatives to write me a note that I would read while in Yemen. She then organized these in envelopes with additional notes or cards (Father’s Day!) from her and our 11 year old daughter with the date they were to be opened and snuck two large manilla envelopes holding the daily envelopes into my luggage without my knowledge. So every day of my trip, I had a message from home to read. You can’t imagine in today’s instant communication the impact of that action. That was probably one of the most special things ever done for me! (Can I get a collective “awwwwwe” from the readers?) Every day was a welcome surprise from home!
Sana’a Yemen
June-July 1995
Kayfalic again from Sana’a Yemen!
I have returned to Yemen, this time it is for six weeks and only two of us sharing an apartment in a guarded and gated Ex-Pat complex the company uses with other international firms. I am excited to return. The only drawback of the new location is that it no longer walking distance to the Sook. We have to rely on company drivers to get around. Two company Yemeni drivers share responsibility for us: Achmed and Khalid. These are really great guys and we quickly bond with them. Although we have an apartment, it is a hassle to buy food to prepare so we rely on a man-camp where rotational employees come through Sana’a stay while they are in the process of rotating to the field or back to home. One of the drivers recommends a local breakfast called foule (pronounced “fool”) this allows us to get to the office a little earlier to prepare for the day and they go and get it for us. Foule is a three bean mixture that kinda reminds me of refried beans. They would bring in a huge metal platter loaded with foule that they would later return to the shop. The foule was accompanied with a plastic bag full of pita type bread and hot peppers. There are no utensils used in traditional Yemeni meals; you take the bread, tear off a corner dip in in the bean mixture, then eat with with a nibble off the pepper. This tastes like a little piece of heaven after missing Mexican food for a couple of weeks! We invited the drivers to eat with us each morning - there was more foule, bread, and peppers for the equivalent of a US dollar than we would eat all day. This impressed them greatly since the Ex-Pats usually ate separately and definitely didn’t share a single dish.
As our time with Kahlid and Achmed was coming to a close, they wanted to take us out for a traditional Yemeni meal at a local place. We agreed. Restaurants in Yemen aren’t regulated by the local health department. The place they took us was 4 plastic tables with 16 plastic chairs set up on a wide space in the sidewalk between the courtyard fence of a home and next to a busy street. From my seat, if I leaned back more than six inches, I would have been clipped by the mirror of one of the speeding cars. At one end of the tables were two large propane burners with two huge pots cooking on top. The four of us sit down and a 10 year old boy comes over and passes out battered plastic bowls, so old they were probably brought to Sana’a by Shem, son of Noah, (you really need to read the first Yemen trip before this one!) filled with a soup. Again, no utensils. Kahlid and Achmed explain you sip the boiling hot soup directly from the bowl. The soup is pretty good, probably a corn base. But while I’m sipping mine, I observe two Yemeni get up from the table next to us and leave at the same time two new Yemini sit down at another table. I see the boy get the soup bowls off the now vacant table, dump any remains in the street, then go to the pot where they are refilled and he serves them to the new guests. You may have noticed he didn’t send the bowls to the non-existent kitchen to be scrubbed clean. Or even wiped. The last time these bowls were cleaned was probably by Shem. Later the main course was served communal and eaten similar to foule by using bread for the eating utensil. The meal was actually pretty good, but I just kept thinking about my communion of germs with half the population of Sana’a!
One Friday, the local holy day and our only day of the week off, we decided to hike a few miles to a little community called Hadda from our apartment. A couple of derranged Ex-Pats said it would be safe and gave us directions. Very few roads are marked with identifications, especially in the countryside, and we promptly got lost. As we wound up a mountainside, we could see Sana’a spread out below us, so we weren’t overly concerned about finding our way back. Until we rounded a corner and saw a hole blasted out of a mountain with parked bulldozers. If this had been any other day than a Friday, it would have probably had workers and military oversight. Remember my first trip when I observed the holes in the mountains high up around Sana’a and a Yemeni told me the military is constantly blasting caves and filling them with arms? And if they saw you taking a photo of one, they would take your film and possibly your camera? Well what do they do if you walk right up to one of these in progress?! We immediately decide we should not only leave quickly, but determined the best route was straight down the mountain across some fields we could see below. I pushed this option because I did not want to risk running into someone on the road coming up that might want to detain, torture, or kill us for stumbling on one of the military’s future stash of weapons. The descent wasn’t that steep and the terrain was mostly rock with little brush. We finally came to a cultivated orchard, and as we started through, I kept looking at the leaves…they looked familiar…HOLY CRAP!! I REALIZED WE WERE IN A QAT ORCHARD!!!! As I explained previously, most of the Yemen males are hooked on a narcotic that they daily spend the equivalent of an average day’s wage on called qat. They get a buzz off chewing the leaves. A qat orchard is more valuable than 10 camels, six wives, and twelve sons to a Yemeni. Even more valuable than a cave full of munitions to the military! We had just literally stumbled down from the frying pan and straight into the fire! Again the only apparent luck in our factor was that it was Friday and the owner and any guards were either at the mosque or buzzed unconscious by the qat. Somehow, we managed to make it back to our apartment alive and unscathed. Except for those 10 years off my life.
The only other noteworthy event during my trip was the US Embassy invited all USA Ex-Pats in Sana’a to a Fourth of July celebration. That was pretty special after weeks in Yemen to watch Old Glory being presented by the Marine Color Guard, the Marine bugler playing the Star Spangled Banner, and hear a patriotic speech by the Ambassador! Plus they served a variety of real American and Mexican food afterwards! By adults on clean disposable plates with utensils! HOOORAA!
Oh, and I tagged along out of curiousity to a gun sook in the Marib dessert one Friday with several questionable Ex-Pats. But probably best to not document that experience in writing. But if you need AK47s, hand grenades, mortar launchers, or land mines, I know where they can be had.
Shalom!
Sheik Keith