Mijn adres

Vandaag

heb ik mijn huisnummer verwijderd

en de naam van mijn straat aan beide uiteinden

ik heb alle wegwijzers weggedaan

Als u mij ondanks alles toch wilt vinden

moet u aan de deur bellen

van ieder huis van iedere straat, stad of land

Het is een gesel of een weldaad

want als u een bevrijde ziel tegenkomt

beschouw die dan als de mijne

Amrita Pritam

Uit: Daan Bronkhorst (samenst.) 'Liefde kon maar beter naamloos zijn – 150 dichteressen voor Amnesty International.' Breda, De Geus, 2000.

    "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."

    "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

    "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real, you don't mind being hurt."

    "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

    "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real, you can't be ugly, except to the people who don't understand."

From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, via Brené Brown's Daring Greatly.

Roadtrippin' in Yemen...

 N.B. This post is mainly an excuse to show you lots of pictures, many of which will probably end up in the 'visuals' section of this website.

When I came to Sana'a, I didn't know if I would feel safe enough to even leave the building of the language institute where I stayed and took classes. Enter Mélodie, the sweetest PhD student ever to have walked the earth, who has been living in Yemen for 4 years now and happened to be staying at the institute as well. On my first day, she walked me around the Old City of Sana'a in her own, incredibly calm but reassuring way. On day two, she went with me to Dar al Hajjar, and on my last weekend, she and her partner joined me on a road trip to Ibb. And we lived to tell the tale…  

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Dar al Hajjar, or 'house of the rock'. (Click for bigger.) 

Our driver was a short, skinny old man whose family was originally from Ibb and who used to take tourists all over the country in Yemen's better days.  He clearly wanted to make this trip as much as we did, to the point where he slipped the Tourist Police a couple of thousand riyals so they wouldn't ask too many safety-related questions when getting the permission required to leave Sana'a. They didn't, they just made us sign a paper that we were traveling 'on our own responsibility' and off we went, with copies of the permit for every checkpoint we passed.

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A village just outside of Sana'a. (Click for bigger.) 

Since the road to Ibb is basically the main highway to the south of the country, there are many big trucks and traveling both up- and downhill, making it something of a racing game for our driver to take over just before a turn in the road with no view of who or what was coming. Even more than in the Old City of Sana'a we were stared at by other people on the road, but we figured – if upon seeing us they don't pick up the phone to call ahead and tell potential kidnappers we're coming, we don't need to worry.

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On the road. (Click for bigger.) 

I was told that Ibb was beautiful and green, but I wasn't prepared for exactly how beautiful and green it was. The road, initially brown and dusty, went across a mountain range with views over the most impressive valleys, the slopes of the mountains terraced and often covered in qat, coffee and corn.  

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This wadi  took my breath away. (Click for bigger. Do it!)

Ibb itself is situated in a valley and is a cute enough town, but the real attraction – judging by the number of Yemeni visitors – is the waterfall in the mountain just above it. Smart locals have attached long hoses higher up at the waterfall, so you can have your car washed while hiking up along the ridge. Many kids ran around under the waterfall, hair shampooed by their mothers. Others took the opportunity to wash their vegetables, or just drove through the cold, cold water on their motorcycle.  

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Waterfall near Ibb. (Click for bigger.) 

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Wash your motorcycle, your carrots, yourself... (Click for bigger.)

When we went into the old center of Ibb, we immediately became its biggest attraction. Just as in Sana'a, the kids wanted to know where we were from, and have their picture taken. The adults wanted to know more: what did we think of the USA? Were we Muslim? If not, why not? Since we didn't have a sufficient answer to that last question, they insisted we embrace god and become Muslims. "It's good for you," one man assured me.  

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"Take a picture of me!" she said, so I did. (Click for bigger.)

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Little boys wearing their Friday's 'best'.  (Click for bigger.)

Another stop on another mountain showed us Jibla, a town with a heavily graffitied presence of Real Madrid and Barcelona fans, but also a mosque of more than a thousand years old (according to our guide who popped out of nowhere and insisted on taking us into the mosque right at the time of the Friday-prayer, which we politely declined) and the castle of queen Arwa which supposedly had 365 rooms, one for every day of the year, but now lays in ruins.

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An minaret in Jibla (not the old, old one). (Click for bigger.)

Lunch was served at the house of a friend of our driver, a man with either 13 children and 30 or so grandchildren (which seems to make logical sense) or the other way around (which is what he claimed). When I said I didn't have children, he said he hoped I would have 40 of them. Not sure if that was a wish or a curse…

We ate with the women next to the kitchen on the top floor, while the men ate together one floor down. As they retreated to chew qat after lunch, we had tea, chocolate and chewing gum while trying to figure out who was related by blood, who by marriage, which kid belonged to which mother, and whether the 14 year old son of one of the women would be a good match for the cute, blushing cousin of the same age.

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Our driver is buying a boiled egg.  (Click for bigger.)

The rest of the day we spent doing just what all other people from Ibb and surroundings seemed to be doing: finding the top of a mountain (or a close enough ridge on the side of it) and staring out over a beautiful valley, while chewing qat or drinking tea and eating cotton candy. While I was sitting there contemplating life, I got company from two young women who had come to Ibb from Taiz and who told me all about dating in Yemen. Apparently, finding a good man in Yemen is not that easy, although facebook and whatsapp have quickly become essential in establishing contact between the otherwise quite rigidly separated sexes.

(They confirmed the explanation of a Yemeni friend who told me that although the men can't see the faces of women, there are other ways to determine whether it will be worth to try to get in touch with a specific girl. As he said: "You can look at her shape, which is still visible despite all the layers of black tissue – especially if she wants it to be visible; you can check if she takes good care of her hands and feet; and you can see her eyes. Other than that, we Yemenis are just very optimistic about what's behind the veil!)*

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The other beautiful valley...  (Click for bigger.)

Together with the girls and their mothers we watched the sun set behind the mountains, and decided that Yemen is definitely a beautiful country.

*Another friend told me that Yemeni women are the most beautiful on earth. I asked him how he knew. Oh, he said, what do you think us boys are doing when we are still young enough to be put with the women and children… we soak up the beauty of the women and we never, ever forget!

The rhythm of Old Sana'a

Every city has its own rhythm. The Old City of Sana'a has silence at 2am and 6am, and a lot of noise the rest of the time. But even in chaos there is order, and it didn't take me long to be able to tell the time by the sounds of a typical day in Old Sana'a.

Starting at 4am (or sometimes a little earlier), there are the mosques calling for prayer. (Big cultural shock: in Lebanon, the mosques sing – generally a pleasant sound to wake up to. Here in the old city, they squeal like animals being slaughtered.) There are a lot of mosques, and some of them will also broadcast the sound of the men praying together, so the murmur of hundreds or thousands of men fills the air for a good amount of time. Before and after that, I will hear the men chatting on their way to and from the mosque, sometimes on motorcycles honking to warn people walking in the narrow streets.

The Old City of Sana'a at 6am. 

When the first shops open, it is usually just before 7am. This is also when the wild cats start screeching at each other and the first children will quietly walk to school. In the hours that follow, the kids will start calling each other from across the alleyway, the motorcycles will add music to their honking (most of them have a radio installed between the seat and the handlebars), and the dogs will bark happily along. The guy who picks up and sells bottles of gas for the stoves passes by, banging his wrench on the bottles in the wheelbarrow to let people know he's here. For lack of doorbells (and/or electricity), people rely on doorknockers to announce their visit to the neighbors – and if those on the third or fourth floor don't hear them, screaming someone's name multiple times will usually do the trick.

(Have I mentioned the screaming? I am seriously impressed by the volume the average Yemeni guy can muster – a professional opera singer would be jealous. And they are not stingy when it comes to using the ability to scream louder than the muezzin, the barking dogs and two honking motorcycles combined.)

Most little shops close again at the next prayer time, but the sound-level remains more or less constant until around 1 or 2pm, when the schools go out and the streets are filled with kids running home: lunchtime. This is also the prelude to qat-time: the hours in the day when life slows down because almost all men are lying sideways on pillows and mattresses inside their shops or, better yet, at the top floor of the building with a beautiful view, chewing the green leaves until their cheeks seem to pop out of their faces. Those who don't chew and work at the same time often leave their children in charge of the (market) stalls, but others close their stores completely.

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The market is empty at qat-time. (Click for bigger.) 

It is not until just before sunset (6pm) that most men come back to their shops. Slowly the streets will get emptier again though, because the darker it gets, the less women there are out and about, leaving only the men and the boys and girls on the streets. Although empty is not the right word in a city with houses so close to each other and streets so interconnected that there is always a kid playing football or a little shop selling cookies and washing powder just around the corner. The evening, then, especially in summer (so I've been told), is for weddings, and weddings means fireworks and gunshots – my favorite part of the day.

After that, it's screaming kids, chatting men and honking motorcycles, then silence… until it all starts again.