And the Beat Goes On....

My third week of lessons are halas (finished). Time seemed to be moving slow the first two weeks of my stay, but now that my schedule has become set, and I am getting into a routine, time is starting to move quicker. The only thing currently slowing time down is my mounting anxiety over when I will start to hear from the graduate programs I applied to. Danny, my friend from Maryland, is also expecting to hear from three medical schools (Duke, Columbia and Penn – smart dude) in the next three weeks, so we are helping each other cope with the anticipation. Hopefully though, we will both be celebrating around the end of March (inshaallah=god willing).

As for what to report from my third week, there is not too much exciting news. As I have mentioned before, my classes are going well, but at times I am a bit overwhelmed by the immense workload. It is paying off though, so it is worth it. Plus, my study skills have already begun to improve as a result of my studies, which is good because I will need to be a more diligent and proactive student in graduate school.

Major news outside my studies is that I have run four times in the past five days. Each morning, around 7:45am I get out of bed and head over to Al-Ahli where we play football (soccer) on the weekends. Al Ahli is like a small sports complex with a volleyball court, basketball court (both used for football), a large football field (the one we played our game on two weeks ago) and another small asphalt soccer court. The centerpiece is the large, fenced in football field, so this past week, I get there early and do about 5mi or 22 laps to be precise. I guesstimate that each lap is probably 375-85 meters. The past week of running went pretty well, so I am planning to try to continue to get in about 4-5 runs a week there. I tried to run there today (weekend) and at 8:15am it was packed with people playing football, which is annoying because people are in my way, plus the fact that everyone stares at me like I have three heads because, 1) I’m a foreigner, and 2) I’m plain old running (not dribbling a ball). Therefore, I will probably get my 4-5 runs in during the school week and then keep playing football once each weekend.

Oh, I also began reading the Quran this week. It was funny because I told one of my teachers, Ameen, and he asked me who gave me the Quran. I told him my Mother and he got all excited. Then he began telling me that maybe my Mom was finding her faith and strength in Islam after coping with the difficulties of her accident (I had told him about my Mom b/c she is planning on visiting in April). I did not have the heart to tell him that he was far off and that while she was interested in the culture and religion of the region, she just gave it to me as a Christmas gift and nothing more. You should have have seen his eyes light up though when I said my Mom had given me my Quran. As for the book itself, it is dry (to be expected) and quite redundant. The main theme I have found in the first hundred pages is that Allah is the knower of all, the most merciful and most beneficent, and that as non-believers we will face the fire when the Day of Judgment arrives. Now this may seem like a gross over-simplification, but honestly, a form of what I just said is written on almost every single page. The most interesting part of reading the Quran for me is the extensive footnotes my version has linking the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Onto more exciting topics, I chewed qat again today with Danny, and Crazy Mohammad. This time I insisted on chewing outside, so Danny, Mohammad and I sat in the back of a pick up truck on our street and chewed for about three hours. While this might seem like a quite mundane activity, it actually provides Danny and me with a great opportunity to practice our Arabic. Being outside chewing, absolutely everyone comes up to you and asks you questions because you are a foreigner chewing Yemen’s legal numero uno drug of choice. Thus, Danny and I constantly used our Arabic to talk with the interested native city dwellers. Moreover, Mohammad (despite his title) is incredibly helpful. He has a lot of patience with us and teaches us new words and phrases. Overall, I pretty much practiced speaking Arabic for over three hours. This is why I am planning to make my Thursday qat chew a weekly event because it breaks up the monotony of studying and allows me to use everything I have learned during the week in class. As for the “high”, I got the same buzz as last time. The only crappy thing is it is 1:15am right now and I am still wired from chewing qat five hours ago, but the once a week insomnia is a sacrifice I will accept if I get to practice speaking my Arabic for a few hours on Thursdays.

Then today (Friday) we played pick-up football once again. Our team is definitely improving each time we play. I'd say we won the majority of our small sided games today, capping it off in the last game with a 3-0, in which I scored the first two goals (Yes, I am bragging). And you guys don't actually know that we are playing a bunch of 10 year olds! (just kidding, but I figured someone would make some sly comment to that effect after they read this). The most exciting part of our three hours of football though occured off the pitch. We had a Yemeni guy playing goalie for us, but then our goalie from last week showed up, so they started arguing over who should play. All the Yemeni's sided with the guy who had just arrived, so the guy who had been playing with us (and other teams when we were off) started getting quite pissed off. It didn't help that he had about ten guys in his face yelling at him and giving him a hard time, completely exacerbating the situation. I guess the goalie then started to throw small rocks at people, so these older men (people said they were police) came up and started beating him over the head with sticks. Fortunately, Gillam, from our team ran over and grabbed the guy and took him away before he was seriously injured. Pretty crazy stuff. Everything was alright though because he came back about an hour later and there did not seem to be any hard feelings.

God Fearing Society (Theme of the week)

This week’s Yemeni cultural theme of the week pertains to the Sananians devout belief in Islam and the Quran. For a city where only 50% of the men are employed (the women’s work is in the house), and most family’s spend 30-40% of their income on qat (a drug), it is amazing how low the crime rate is in the capital. Personally, I attribute this mainly to the fact that most Sananians follow the teachings of the Prophet to a tee. Almost everyone in the city prays five times a day and they truly take the words of the Prophet Muhammad, written down almost 1500 years before as law. Thus, crime is quite low around the capital. In the market for instance, vendors just put tarps over their stands at the end of the day and no one touches them or steals anything. Can you imagine a vendor in Philadelphia just leaving out his clothes or fruits and vegetables just sitting out only covered by a tarp? So far, during my experience, Sananians have been extremely fair to me considering I am a foreigner with no experience in the Middle East. The only time I’ve seen them truly commit harram (sin) is when they charge us what we like to call the “foreigner tax”, but even this is usually only on more “expensive” products like qat or jambiyyas. Another deterrent is the consequences they would face if they were arrested for a crime like robbery, but I do not know enough about that to comment. I do know though that most Sananians I have met are devout, God-fearing folk, who closely adhere to the literal words of the Quran. On the other hand, following an ancient text so closely is also a reason for many problems in Sana’a and throughout the Islamic world, but now is not the time to open that can of beans!

I also have a funny joke for everyone that I was told the other day. Warning: You may not find it funny (I apologize in advance), but for someone living in the region it is hilarious and I have to share it. If you don’t get it no worries, I’d like to get some comments about the joke and what you think of it (or if you even get it or not).

Q: Why are the streets of Sana’a so safe?

A: Because %50 of the population are NINJAS!

On a more serious note, I will leave you with a quote I recently read in a novel about the history of philosophy. It fits a major problem in Sana’a to a tee.

“A state that does not educate or train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.” - Socrates

Take Care All! Enjoy your weekend, I’ll be thinking of everyone while I’m sitting in class.

- Rich