Sana'a - Dubai - D.C.

Almost 360 degrees. I circled the globe, over Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Greenland, landed on yet another planet, and am now sitting in my beloved Washington, D.C. apartment with my cat, wearing a red tank top. If it wasn't so cold, I could wear the tank top outside, and I wouldn't get stares. Later, I plan to run through the streets, listening to my iPod. I plan to hold Heather's hand.

Ah, to be a woman, and to be free.

Of course, all freedoms are relative. As a woman, I could still become trapped inside my head, and feel limited by the shape of my body, my capacity for professional growth, an economic downturn. But, let's face it, here in D.C., we live in relative freedom.

As my plane rose up over Sana'a, I have to say, I breathed a sigh of relief. I let my scarf drop loosely over my neck, and removed my blazer. In my short sleeves, I readied myself for a few hours in Dubai before returning home.

And even in Dubai, just three hours by plane from Yemen, what I sensed was progress, modernity, and a relative antithesis. Dubai, like Abu Dhabi, the two most famous cities in the United Arab Emirates, pride themselves on progress. Their country has used its oil wealth to offer free education, through the university level, and free health care to all of its citizens. Because of its wealth, the cities are pristine high-rises jetting through the sky, and Dubai is an international metropolis filled with a modernity and capitalist mentality that even many places in the United States might try to emulate.

A couple of hours spent people watching at one of Dubai's famous shopping malls was filled with Arab princesses, their faced bedecked in make-up, three-inch long eye lashes, diamond-laden abeyas, and head scarves sitting high on their heads to cover towering buttresses of hair. These princesses walked beside European women with bare middrifts, and women wearing loose pastel outfits, with what looked like bonnets as head scarves. A few women sported the full face veil, as in Yemen, others wore the Indian Sari, the colorful Somali headscarf, and some looked like me. It was truly an amalgamation, in every sense of the word.

When leaving the mall, we were startled by a display of fireworks outside the Sheraton Hotel. Red, green and gold sparkles lighted the night sky. We asked our driver what the occasion was, assuming this could go on every night in Dubai -- a city of money, gold souks and shopping malls -- and it would make sense.

"It is the shopping festival," he said.

Ah, yes, of course. Every year, five days are designated for the "shopping festival," which brings in large crowds from all over the world to help boost an already boosted economy. While there, for $115, visitors can visit the tallest building in the world, spend the day at the beach, or go on a desert Safari -- all in a one day.

But it's not all a Disney Land in Dubai. The place still allows public executions and one is due in the next couple days, to prosecute a man who raped a little boy in a Mosque. He'll be gunned down by a firing squad. Because of the diverse population -- and various codes of dress -- the country has a "zero-tolerance policy" for sexual harassment.

The editorial page of Dubai's English language newspaper was filled with letters from its readership condemning France for trying to outlaw the face veil.


Burqa provides a sort of protection for women. It is not a punishment.
-Muzammil, Dubai


If France calls for the veil ban for Muslim women, the Arabs should implement compulsory 'full Islamic veil' for all other religions.
SAK Jeelani, Dubai


This is just exploiting the innocent people and religion! Truly an act of discrimination from a 'so-called' human rights leader!
Asghar Ali, Sharjah


It shows the dark face of the West.
Tariq Bangash, Al Ain

And, alas, I return to the face veil again. I didn't mean to do it, and I am not sure how I feel about a legal ban. All I know is that even sitting here 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., the face veil still tightens my chest, and compromises my heart.

Ladies Night Out in Old Sana'a

I am already smiling. It was the perfect way to spend my last night in Yemen. The night leaves me with a sweet taste and a memory I will surely cherish forever.

The six of us packed into the landrover and headed to the shopping district in Old City. We were a colorful group. Black with red dots, black with mauve flowers, bright, glittery blue and a garden of something more mild decorated the heads of my companions. They were the ladies from the YMA -- the Yemen Midwives Association, and on this Wednesday night, which is comparable to a Friday night back home, they were ready to show Salwa and I the city.

We walked as a pack, pushing through the black cloaks and the men pushing their fruits and breads in wheelbarrows around the Old Souk. As we watched cheeks fill with quat, I was, at many times, lost in their Arabic laughter. I noticed stares, sure. We were all bare faced and smiling, window shopping. I couldn't have felt more at home. They haggled with the young man selling cactus fruit, and Layla reached over and insisted I try some too. As I bought a few gifts for people back home, they moved their arms through the air, as if they were dancing, and bargained with the shopkeepers. I was lost in a rush of their beauty and their energy, their power.

After shopping, we packed back in to the car, on a truncated roadtrip to the Arabia hotel, a comfortable place where you can eat mezze, drink local tea or smoke shisha. As health professionals, of course, they discussed with me all the downfalls of Shisha and quat, and we steered clear of the Houkhas.

India, the UK, Abu Dhabi, Bulgaria -- these Yemeni women had all been educated outside of their home country, their soul, and returned to make something better of the place they love. The Yemen Midwives Association trains women to serve the communities they came from. Through a new program, they are also helping some women to set up private practices in the most rural communities. There are only 12 private midwives in the whole country of Yemen, but talking to these women, with their infectuous enthusiasm, it made me believe there will be many more.

It made me hopeful, optimistic. The six of us, together, were that powerful.

They asked me about Oprah, journalism, living in an apartment in Washington, D.C. And I asked them about their weekends. Layla, who appeared to be about my age, likes to rest on the weekends, surf the Internet, watch movies. An Oprah fan, she just discovered The Color Purple. Bless her. Sometimes, she goes to the park and hangs out with her veiled sisters, but sometimes she doesn't. She wants to avoid the chaos of downtown Sana'a, something she battles every morning to be at the office by 9 am, and every evening around 6:30 pm, when she leaves. Layla, unlike the other ladies, is not married, but she might be interested. She has criteria. He must not be Yemeni. He must let her have an equal say.

The way her eyes light up, and the way her upper body fluctuates into motion when she has something assertive to say, I know that she will wait for this person. Layla wouldn't settle for anything less.

As the city moved around us tonight, I felt protected, everything else -- the honking horns, the yelling, the small children in need of money -- became more peripheral. It was easier to survive. I think if I ever have to live in a place like Yemen, it is women, like these, that would keep me alive. I would latch on to them, and never leave.

Thank you, ladies.

One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back

It was my last full day of work in Yemen today, and I'm puzzled. I'm confused about what I am supposed to take away from Yemen. I came here half-filled with fear, mostly for my own safety, and I am leaving only with the fear of what the future holds for the local Yemenis, for people like Leena.

I learned a few new things about Islam -- so central to Yemen -- today. In Islam, apparently, if you kill someone you have to pay the family of the victim a sum. But -- if the person you kill is a woman, say many conservative religious leaders in Yemen, you only pay the family half the cost of a real, human life.

This interpretation of Islam is what is ruining Yemen, said a well-to-do Yemeni who works for a political think tank here, and has children in San Francisco and a niece who he has encouraged to study engineering in Canada. He insists that the extremists have only burgeoned since the end of the Gulf War when many were repatriated from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, carrying with them these extreme beliefs.

Reasonable people, he said, would never fall for such nonsense. Only extremism doesn't attract reasonable people, it baits uneducated and isolated people. People with an inability to think outside of a dangerous box.

Reasonable people would follow religious leaders like Sheik Yahia, who we also interviewed today. The Sheik pronounced the merits of family planning, which he says is inherit to Islam, a religion which helps its followers to plan for healthy lives. He even said vasectomy and tubal ligation -- permanent contraceptive methods -- are allowed as long they protect the health of the people. Sheik Yahia is working to make the age of marriage 18, and to outlaw female genital mutilation. But Sheik Yahia is reasonable, educated and he is of the minority. The people of Yemen can't rely on Sheik Yahia to be their savior.

More people need to be educated and more money needs to be allocated to social programs that make women's health and education a priority. But I don't see that happening anytime soon for Yemen. Dr. Jamila, a leader from the ministry of health, fights, every day, just to keep reproductive health as a national priority. She drives around Yemen with her face boasting its beauty, and I fear for her. A liberated feminist, dedicated to women's empowerment, Dr. Jamila has to use all her energy and will just to be able to sit at the same table with the conservative leaders who have an incredible sway over most of Yemen. She has to plead with them just to hear her, and not to leave the table.

Once she gets to the table, she then has to ensure that what she wants gets translated to each and every puzzle piece that comprises Yemen. Because in Yemen, each segment, or "governorate," is run by a different personality. Powerful national leaders like Dr. Jamila have little leverage over what is happening in each segmented part. Many parts are immersed in tribal warfare, most are running out of water, and some have become havens for planting seeds of hate, and training the next generation of Al Quaida warriors. There are only small glimmers of hope.

Dr. Zaeen, for instance, is the district ministry of health official, for Lahj. It is because Dr. Zaeen re-allocated the budget to put the health of mothers and babies at the top of his agenda, that the hospital in his district has become so welcoming to its women patients. It is a safe place women can come to deliver their babies, to breastfeed, to learn about kangaroo mother care and to immunize their newborns. Women hear from their neighbors about the friendly midwives who tell them how to space their pregnancies by using a contraceptive method of their choice, and they want to visit Lahj hospital too. That way, they can preserve just a small part of their youth, like their neighbors. They don't have to have newborns every year from the time they turn 16, and exchange dead babies for live ones as if that is a normal way of life. Maybe they can take some time to learn to read, if their husbands let them.

So there are the glimmers of hope in Yemen, and the educated few trying to change things a little a bit. Educated people know that by keeping half of the population down, they are keeping their country down too. They know how important it is to educate their people, so they don't fall prey to hatred. But they don't know exactly -- if they have the power to make a significant change.

Because according to mr. political think tank, things in Yemen aren't getting better, they are getting worse.

So I am unsure how far this glimmer of hope -- improvements in reproductive health and family planning at public health facilities -- will go.

One step forward, ten steps back.

Every educated woman I've met here, I have to add, has been against wearing the face veil. But they all do it at one time or another, when they are sick of being stared at, when a scar on their face became too much for the public to handle, when they feel they are defaming their fathers. So what will it take for these women to come out from under their veils and to see the detriment of hiding Yemen's most powerful commodity? If the educated women can't quite do it, when is the rest of the country going to follow? When are women in Yemen going to count for more than half a person?

And the face veil, of course, is only a start. But, in my very humble opinion, it's a healthy one.

Leena and Lahj

In some ways, I'm lucky to be a woman in Yemen, because I am getting a glimpse of the women, the beautiful Yemeni women, that most of you will never get to see.

"I am 54," joked Leena, a midwife from Lahj hospital, when I asked her how old she was.

Come on, I said, you are not!

I could tell by the very slight lines around her eyes that Leena might be 30, or maybe 31, just my age. She was joking.

Her dark eyebrows were laced with blond hairs that helped me to decipher her from the rest. Leena showed me around Lahj hospital as she introduced our team to the newborns and the mothers who had just given birth. I followed the abeya that was decorated with a gold trail of crystals pouring down one small side of her black dress, and knew that was Leena.

We got to the postpartum room. She showed me impressive statistics of the amount of women who are receiving Vitamin A, family planning counseling, and are learning about the merits of breast feeding. And naturally the conversation turned to families.

"Are you married?" asked Leena, holding up my finger affixed with the small Balinese ring, representing the union I have with Heather.

"No," I said, absorbing the culture, and acting half ashamed, "no I'm not."

"Are you?" I asked, already predicting the answer.

"No," said Leena, looking down.

We then raised our eyes to each other, and smiled. At least I think she smiled. Her eyes acquired another crease, and glimmered under the fluorescent lights and bright green walls of the hospital.

The other midwives joined us, and listened. They didn't know much English, but they knew our conversation.

"No married!" said one midwife after another. There were now five of us standing in the circle, 8 eyes that looked like the age of my own. Our smiles got bigger as we shared our commonality, until the pronouncement turned into half a shout, a 'cheers,' -- "no married!," we chanted.

Hallelujah.

Unlike these providers, the patients at Lajh's maternity ward are all married, and, despite their knowledge of family planning, have at least 6 children in their lifetime. One woman today, with the veil removed from her face, had just given birth to her ninth child, and her fifth that is still living. When asked her age, she said she was between 30 and 35, but, unlike Leena's eyes, she looked 54. She was haggard. Another woman had just lost her baby during childbirth, but laying on her bed, she seemed completely at peace. This death had worked out for her. I can use the breastmilk from this pregnancy for my one-year-old at home, she said in Arabic.

Life can be hard in Lahj. That is why Leena is here to help out. She studied medicine in Sana'a and dreams of going to London to study English, but she always wants to return to Lahj. She wants to continue to help out the only worthy hospital serving Lahj city and the rest of the sweeping district, which, according to my tour book, shouldn't have been visited at all. In fact, the book says Lahj is off limits to tourists.

But we were different. Our project and our video about these hospitals, and about improving health care for women, is about good public relations for Yemen, not tourism. Equipped with two men, one from the Ministry of Health and one from the Ministry of Information, as well as two well-armed military guards with guns almost the size of my body, we entered Lahj. We were a convoy of goodwill, venturing into the unknown. I imagined that it must be what working in Iraq feels like, driving through a dry, desolate landscape in a convoy of SUVs, knowing only the unknown.

We were getting stares, and I believe they were different from the stares we got in downtown Sana'a. I was imagining things I shouldn't have. I imagined what I could represent to the stares -- Amerika, not miles from where the USS Cole was bombed , and within what looked like the news report I saw the night before about the Al Quaida training camps in Marib. But I kept opening my mind toward the mission.

Leena. We are helping people like Leena to help themselves and all the other women that come to her for services.

Leena's heart-shaped face. I saw it briefly in the postpartum room when she uncomfortably lifted her face veil to get a breath of stale air. And then again in the director's office. She took it off, and I realized that to talk to Leena, I had been picturing her. I had someone with a long, thin face in mind, someone with straight black hair, and a gaunt figure. This was not Leena.

Leena has a heart-shaped face, and a glamorous smile.

I didn't want to get into it. The Western woman asking disapprovingly about the face veil, but I had to...

"So, Leena, have you always worn that?"

She smiled her glamorous smile.

"Well, no, I never used to cover my face."

She said she does it because if she doesn't, she is afraid she will sully the reputation of her family, her father's good name.

"The face of a woman is an embarrassment," said Leena.

No, Leena, your heart-shaped face is not an embarrassment, I wanted to cry, not at all. You aren't hidden anymore, my dear Leena, I have you photographed in my memory, my friend.

"If you were in London," I asked "would you cover up?"

"No," she said defiantly. She was that decisive. She might cover her hair, but never her face, never.

But Leena won't be getting to London anytime soon. All direct flights from Yemen to London have been cancelled, as an effort by the British government to ward off terrorist threats. She will work, as she now does every day, helping women have a little bit more of life: with contraceptives, with healthy babies and a respectable place to deliver them.

She may do this for the rest of her life, as her heart-shaped face ages under her veil.

Aden

"It seems more modern here," said one guy I am traveling with. "It's a beach town."

Yes, it certainly is, I thought. As we drove back from the airport in the dark, I noticed jagged silhouettes of rock overlooking the sea. I noticed a jump to the atmosphere. Skirted men hung out in open air tea shops, while other men roamed the streets in jeans, and fitted collar shirts. Well-lit strip malls separated old Aden from the airport. The humid air curled my hair and soothed my dry throat. A musty smell of heated fish and sea filled my nostrils.

But it gave me the antithesis of the feeling that beach towns usually do. There was no sense of freedom and escape to a place of sun and sand. There was no draping my bare arm out the window and letting the breeze crawl all the way up it -- to the top of my tank top and the crown of my head. There were no women of all shapes and sizes in sun dresses and bikinis going home sun-kissed after a long day in the sand. There were just the walking black enigmas floating by the surf.

Aden is creepy.

It wasn't always that way. It used to be a land of relative freedom, where women could enjoy the sand and the surf in tshirts and bathing suits. At least that's what I've read. Before Yemen was united as one country, the south served as the only Marxist state to ever exist on the Arabian Peninsula. As you know, Marxism and religion don't mesh. This meant that women walked around without their veils and without anonymity. I can't picture it now, but I tried.

I tried to picture a place where women didn't have to swim at a separate beach, like I did in Aden. Although our hotel was situated right on the Arabian Sea, with the sand just a step away, we had to leave the hotel and go behind a wall to find a beach just for women. I didn't mind. Who wants to be gawked at for showing their arms at legs? Who wants to be glared at for letting the salt saturate their hair?

At the women's beach, my colleague and I had the Arab Sea all to ourselves, swimming and soaking in an old crater. On one side, the rockface created a perfect circle where the sea moved in and out under a setting sun. The call to prayer bounced off of all sides of the crater as our feet moved clearly beneath us. I looked as far into the distance as I could, and imagined I was seeing the tip of Somalia, or maybe it was Djbouti.

A woman with full red lips, and a flattering white tshirt, and stone-washed jeans served us Adeni tea, thick with milk and flavored like weak coffee. Behind this wall, with these women on the beach, I almost escaped post-unified Aden.

Until another woman arrived. Black.

Covered, she brought me back to Yemen. She swept past us, and in the nicest light of the day, dropped into the gym, which posed next to the rockface, and through large windows, overlooked the Arab sea. I listened to my colleague talk office politics, and stole glances of the woman. Was she going to run and jump in her abeya?

Not at all.

She tore off her head scarf and then peeled away her black cloak. She took it off, one button at a time, and hung it in the corner. I couldn't stop glancing. She was exquisitely beautiful, with large features, and thick, wavy black hair that was pulled back into a pony tail. She had on form-fitting workout garb, with huge hoop earrings dangling from ears. She, very intentionally, wrapped a pink bandana around her head. She took her tall, lanky body from the corner to the scale and weighed herself. I wondered why. Who was she trying to please? Was she trying to please herself or the one man who was allowed to see what was below the veil? I hoped it was only herself, for health and for nothing else but the empowerment of her own body. She hopped on the treadmill and began running, just like I do.

I thought about how freeing that must feel to her, to tear off all that clothing, and to run. She moved around the small gym, pulling herself up and down, folding into sit ups and dropping to push ups. She had quite a work out.

She then grabbed her abeya and she slid back into it. She placed her headscarf back on, first veiling even her eyes and then pulling the material from only her eyes. She transformed into every other woman I had seen that day.

She suffocated my illusion of freedom.

The Eve of Prayer and Honey Perfume

I still smell like honey perfume. It is so lovely, so sweet that I indulgently bought myself a taste that could last me years. Whenever I wear it, it will bring me back to Yemen. It will take me back to a Thursday night in Sana'a, and that, my dear, is priceless.

The women came out in droves this evening. Just before the setting sun, cliques of them, all covered in black walked the streets, shopping for dresses, food and gold jewelry. They walked in groups of 2, 3 and 5. Some held hands. I watched their elaborate sandled feet, their closed-toed loafers, their delicate hands covered in gloves, black, gray and white moving through the old city, across the stone streets and under the crumbling fortresses. I smiled at them, not knowing if they were smiling back. Sometimes, I could have sworn that I could see their eyes crease just slightly under their burkhas. Sometimes, I might have been making it up.

Of course, when the sun faded, so did they.

Thursday evening, the night before the sacred day of prayer and the first day of the Yemeni weekend, is alive in Sana'a. Men of all ages sit around, running their wheelbarrows through the winding streets, filling their cheeks with quat. Some are on motorbikes, large and small, some are on foot and others drive small trucks filled with kids or bags of produce in the back. Some men stared at me, some gawked. Others paid little attention at all.

Kebabs, fresh bread, frankincense and chai wafted through the air.

One stout old man with a whitening beard invited us into his Mosque. I've never been inside a Mosque before, and I never imagined that I would be allowed in one, especially in Yemen, and especially without my head scarf on and my wrists showing. I let Bob enter first, then I hesitantly followed. I removed my shoes, and when the little old man seemed distressed by this, I moved toward the exit. Just as I thought. What am I doing wandering through a Mosque in Yemen?

No, my Arabic-speaking colleague said, don't leave, he is only worried that someone will take your shoes. Lucky for me, Tahir, our security detail, had that covered, ushering me back in through the stone arches.

An American woman walking barefoot and bare-headed through a Mosque in Yemen -- some misperceptions are meant to be broken. I didn't feel anything inside the Mosque, not that I thought I would. To me, it was like a church without the saints and the pews. It was slightly ornate, and a sweeping gold chandlier straddled the ceiling. "Allah," said the little old man, smiling from ear to ear, as he pointed to what looked like a large wardrobe at the front of the Mosque. Ok, I thought, as he moved from corner to corner, asking Bob to snap pictures of him.

As we moved away from the Mosque and through the city tonight, I saw some little boys, as well as little girls. They were out to earn some change. Some sold gum, others sold tissues, and most stood on bare feet with dust smeared across their faces. I enjoyed making eye contact with some of the little girls, wondering about them, and wondering what they were wondering about me. I loved them all. The little boys dressed like little men. One boy trying for a 1,000 rial, was wearing an oversized blazer with pants rolled up just slightly to showcase his spindly shins.

We had such a nice time in the city tonight that we wanted to see more, more of the city and more of Yemen. It would have been nice if the night, which ended with a large grilled fish and a taste of honey perfume, never had to come to an end.

"Gahyman -- can we go there to get some shots of a village?" asked Bob.

Tahir shook his head defiantly. Gayhman -- pronounced "gay man," only 13 kilometers outside of Sana'a, is too dangerous, he said. Gayhman is on the road to Marib, an area in conflict, like the majority of this poor country. Al Quaida operates on that road. Yikes, I thought, swallowing a baseball-sized nerve into my stomach. I then ran the images through my head:

The Landrover I saw yesterday with men in fatigues and white head wraps, and wild hair inside and on the roof, climbing one of the mountains inside Sana'a.

The car that was burning, totally engulfed in flames.

Although I am sure these images were nothing at all, just everyday life in Sana'a, they reminded me too much of what I see in the media, day in and day out.

And then the newspaper article in the Yemen Times today about how the young recruits have no discretion for who they kill, when, and how merciless they are. Although it seems hard to believe, wandering through the streets of Old City, Sana'a... I breathed in a gut rush of anxiety.

But I could still smell a touch of the lovely honey perfume. I used my next breath to inhale that instead.

"Thank You For Your Sensation"

I don't think it is very Arab to cry in public, or at least that's what I was told, after I did it. Something about the smell of the hospital, the mothers going into labor, moaning, one after the other, the black enigmas pouring into the waiting room , and staring at my bare collar bones from between the slits in their veils. My stomach twisted into a knot and wrung out tears from eyes. I didn't mean to do it, so conspicuously. I wasn't being loud. I was looking down, trying to hide it, but it didn't matter -- they saw me.

I can sit in my office thousands of miles away and conceptualize and intellectualize repression and analyze maternal mortality statistics, but when it comes down to reality, the position of women in some of these developing countries is harsh, and, please excuse my language, fucking unfair. It can be kinda hard to deal with it. As much as I don't want to admit it, I was probably going through some form of culture shock.

I sat down, breathed deeply, and tried to calm myself. I felt calm, until I saw the six of them -- nurse midwives shrouded in their Niqabs -- rushing from the delivery room to my seat in the hallway. They spoke frantically in Arabic, looking at me in a puzzled way, as a woman in labor moaned from behind the curtain. I heard one of them ask if I was married and then the others all seemed to see the light. "She is not married!" the one who knew a little English said. "You have baby?" she asked. I shook my head. "It's ok, you will get married and have lots of babies!"

Oh lord.

Yes, that must have been why I was crying, because I am a woman alone in this world, without a man, to accompany me. I must feel like nothing without a man, and proof of my fertility. Of course. That must be it. I am dust.

It did make me laugh. To think how ironic the situation was. I was sitting there crying about, in a sense, repression, and they thought I was upset over my mandatory state of independence.

My tears ceased for a little while -- until a nurse midwife came out and thanked me. I'm not sure what she prefaced in Arabic, but I clearly heard: "thank you for your sensation." Was it the sensation of tears, emotion, interaction, recognition? I'm not sure. Maybe she was thanking me for breaking up her day. Maybe some days she wants to cry, just like I did. Maybe by crying, I gave her something to take away from me, what I am always looking for when I travel, the hope that I can offer something valuable, not necessarily material, but valuable, to someone along the way. Because traveling, no matter how harsh the reality, always offers so much to me.

As I left the hospital, more of the staff approached me, asking me about my tears. Why was I crying? This puzzled them. It still puzzles me.

Am I In Heaven. Am I In Hell.

It was another classic day in Sana'a. The sun was rising brightly over the mountains, and the morning breeze was refreshing the small increment of skin that I let escape the covers. The morning prayer was coming to an end, and a hush was settling over the city. As the sun rose higher, the mountains all around me became more clear. When I went downstairs, I was greeted by Ibrahim, a young, tall, becoming Yemeni who works in the hotel lobby to cater to my every need.


We left the hotel and drove past the old city on our left, and the new on our right. The old is 700 years old. The new was built after Yemen's revolution, about 50 years ago when the all-powerful Imam was overthrown, and the theocracy with it. The two sections of the city are separated only by a small strip of a highway and an old and dried up riverbed that USAID has so kindly turned into an alternate and less-crowded road. I let the window down in the back, and put on my sunglasses. I sat, enamoured, by the glorious architecture, and the hum of the road. Ah, to be a foreigner in Yemen.



"We are foreigners," said my colleague. "Foreigners can do anything."

Ok, so maybe we can't do anything. But I was definitely enjoying that San Fransisco breeze blowing through my hair. Our movements are restricted, and I don't believe we can denounce Islam in the streets and get away with it, or speak about women's rights or gay rights...but you get the picture. I know what she means. We can be in public with our hair showing. We can let our ankles slide out from under our pants, and our shawls fall from over our long sleeves. We can eat at a restaurant and walk the streets, accompanied by men of course, at any hour that we please. Relatively speaking, when considering ourselves as women standing on Yemeni soil -- we are free. We are in this relative heaven.


Or are we in hell?

When I look around the streets, and see it caked in men, I am in hell. When I see women all covered up with only their sad, tired eyes as witness to the sunlight, I am in hell. And, yes, I am being judgemental. I am paying no attention to cultural sensitivities, of how they might be happy underneath it all, happier than me. I am judging in my Western way, sure I am. I can't help it. When I sense their hell, I am in it too.

As a foreign woman, I had the opportunity to explore Old Sana'a tonight -- on foot, accompanied by Tahir, Ivo and Bob. Three men. Ali then joined us, a 12-year-old young man, hell bent on being our friend and earning $5 USD for his services. We traced the seven-century old city, greeted by smiles, and glares. But much to my surprise, most people paid us no attention at all. Or if they did, they did it discretely, without us knowing, from behind the winding alleys and old stone towers. If a Yemeni woman did what I did -- I fear -- she would have all the attention of Old Sana'a for herself. She would be told to cover up, or go back inside. Go back and hide inside your shell, or else.

I don't know what goes on inside a Yemeni tower, or a Yemeni Niqab, so who am I to judge? As I walked, I realized I knew less and less. I saw so many shops selling elaborate dresses of every color, cut and shape. Many were sexy, too sexy even for Washington, D.C. Many were transparent. An array of different colored bras, some with glitter and some without, were displayed for the world to see. These Yemeni women -- they know more than their Niqabs. Maybe they know more than me. They are of life and color, only the world can never see. They live loudly under their costumes. But, in public, they are nothing. They are as anonymous and as quiet as a fragment of dust. I would love to spend a day and a night with a Yemeni woman inside her house, her safe space, just to know how it feels to hide all your color, and your life. I would like to hear her scream out loud.

They aren't all this way. My colleague and I talked with Dr. Jamila, the deputy minister of health. She -- yes, the deputy is a woman -- spoke confidently, with her whole face out there for the world to see. She wore fashionable boots and jeans under her Naqib. She studied in Russia. She is from a minority -- a well-to-do family. She speaks English fluently. She has a corner office. She likes holding coffee breaks, in public, for women only, women like my colleague and I. She wants Yemeni women to be able to choose when they want to have a baby, and she wants to give them every opportunity to have their babies the healthy way, with proper care --so that at public hospitals, like the one we are working in, women aren't dying every day in labor. But her hopes and aspirations are a long way from home. Because right now women do die every day, and for many women, they don't have a choice of when they want to get married or if they want to have a baby, or if one day they want to know what it is like to have their hair blowing in the breeze.

Because their colors are hidden, and they don't have a voice.

So, Am I in Heaven, or Am I in Hell?

On my way back from the Old City, my fellow group of men were reminscing about the beauty of the city, its glory. How it was so wonderful that the kids could run the streets and play safely. How the kids were taken care of by this community. "BOYS!" I wanted to scream, they were almost all boys, little men. Where were the little girls? They were inside hiding their colors. The boys are in heaven. The girls are in hell. Everywhere I looked, especially as the evening wore on, there were men. Short men, tall men, plump men, gaunt men, most men with bulging cheeks filled with quat. Many men were wearing skirts, and had shawls wrapped around their heads, or their necks or not at all. Some looked almost Western, and some looked like they could have stepped out of an ancient desert tribal war, with their daggers, and their sullen faces.

I remember them all. And I also remember the face of one woman, today. She was lying in the postpartum ward at Al Saba'een hospital. She heard our team was coming in and she quickly covered herself up with her blanket. But her face was bare. She must have felt naked. She stared blankly ahead. She might have been 17. She was remarkably sad, I think. Her color was gone. I hate to tell it like this. I wanted to bring you something more beautiful, more heavenly than the news about Yemen. I think maybe I've brought you something a little different. But, I can't bring you heaven. This is Yemen.

Sanaa's 16,000 Candles

I was told to bring with me feelings of -- Fear. Anxiety. Terror. Severity. Extremity. Dust.

Tonight, I left those emotions in my suitcase, and I watched 16,000 candles come to a crescendo with the sunset call to prayer. One fire after the next lighted up the city in front of my eyes. The smell of carbon-filled smoke permeated the mountain scape. Each flame, or flickering light became just a dot on the city, the remnants of falling stars, as the call to prayer became louder and then whispered with the movement of the flames in the wind. I closed my eyes. I wrapped my Pashmina scarf tighter around my shoulders, as the cool mountain air pushed the sun further to the ground. Soon the orange light of the sunset matched the 16,000 candles lighting up one of the oldest cities in the world.

--- From behind an iron gate --

Welcome to Sana'a, the capital city of Yemen, a history of frankincense and mirth, Absynnians and Sabeans, in a country where the fourth Caliph, Ali, was sent by Muhammed to spread Islam right after the Prophet conquered Mecca. You can feel the history seeping between the tower houses rising 6 -- 9 stories above downtown. It is a city of many men, of small women shrouded in black rushing in between the towers, hurrying out of public to somewhere hidden away. It is a city of just women's eyes and dirty little boys selling tissues, begging for change. It is another world.

I continued to rise throughout the night, listening to the scattered calls to prayer. I wondered if any of Yemen's Muslims ever slept. Did they set alarm clocks throughout the night to know when to get up and bow, or were their bodies, filled with quat, in a never-ending state of wake? Did Allah come to them last night, along with their neighbors, coaxing them into religious submission? Because I have never heard a place so unified in prayer at such early hours of the morning. Even the dogs prayed, barking and howling to the musical notes -- in this city of insomnia.

-- Behind the walls of my hotel --

-- Through the window of an old Mercedes --

I will only know Sana'a in this way -- from a distance. My colleague and I have been forbidden to take taxis, to walk the streets, so I will have to do my best to take in Sana'a without being in it. A government-hired security guard will escort us, because, sadly, in the world war of terror, it has become necessary. As our driver picked up falafel for us from a nearby shop and loaded the car with fresh bananas and mandarins, I watched the sleepy eyes of a quat-filled man graze my profile with his eyes.

Of course, I wonder what he thought of me. I wish I could have asked. I wish I could have been a candle in the night, knowing the hearts and minds of the men, all over Sana'a bowing to Allah. I wish I could have flown through the towers and listened to the women, maybe as they prayed or cleaned and cooked and cared for their many children. But I couldn't, and I can't. So, like we all do, I'll continue to make assumptions. I'll assume many of them do not like me. Haram. Forbidden. I am Haram. I am the United States of America -- an uncovered face -- with the lovely Sana'a air blowing my hair around in the mountain breeze.

Through Sana'a's main public hospital and maybe two others near the city of Aden, I'll try to tell you more of a story. I'll try to let you know more about the Yemen with such a sullied reputation in the international news media. I'll try to bring you something -- maybe not better -- but it couldn't possibly be worse. Because although Al Quaida has a strong hold here, I doubt hate runs through the true blood of Yemen. I doubt it very much. But I'll keep my guard up along the way. Because, unfortunately, the way of the world has me behind an iron gate.

A Short Walk Before Yemen

I felt my black wrap skirt swish against my knees and noticed the rhythmic bounce to my step as I walked through an unusually mild January night. The sky was pitch black and rims of delicately molded architecture met the night sky. New Hampshire Avenue was unusually bare.

I was going home, as I had so many times before. I lugged the weight of the day in my two bags, and I walked one step in front of the other, passing stragglers until I reached my door, turning one key and then another. My journey home tonight to a near-empty apartment made me wonder how to feel different. How many times had I walked to this bounce in my step, up and down New Hampshire Avenue? How many thoughts have run through my head -- feelings of independence, dependence, loneliness, claustrophobia, satisfaction, anger, guilt, frustration, bliss. Yet every walk up and down New Hampshire blends into another. I am giving my walk tonight a name, so that I will always remember it. I am memorializing it. It is called "a short walk before Yemen."

Because tomorrow I begin my journey across the world. Another one. The prospect has already rejuvenated my senses, something travel always does.

Tonight, I began my journey as I felt my skirt going back and forth, swish, swish, against my knees, and realized how foreign this feeling will become to me in the next two weeks. I will be covered from head to toe, so that nothing but my hands peak from the cloth hiding my body. I will try to fit in, although I never will. The women in Yemen -- I won't be with them -- because they will be swimming in large black cloaks. I won't be able to tell one from another, with only the slits of their eyes meeting mine. I won't be able to decipher one woman's swagger from an other's, or one's long arms from an other's short. They will be walking black enigmas, seldom seen.I will, no matter how hard I try, be their antithesis.

Or will I? If I cloaked myself, hid out underneath an oversized Niqab, could I understand more? I think I would just feel hot and irritated. But maybe I'd also feel repressed, imprisoned. Or maybe just the opposite. Maybe it would free me from the leering eyes of men who never see a woman's flesh, a woman's face, in public. Animals.

Whatever I wear, I will take from them this experience of putting myself somewhere totally foreign, and trying to identify, in some way, with what I see. I hope by being able to go to Yemen, I can bring back not stories of a failed state, harboring the world's most wanted "terrorists," but a story of women. I hope I can speak with some of these women -- through an interpreter, of course -- and begin to realize how it might feel to never have a skirt swish against my knees, to never freely walk by the ornate buildings on New Hampshire Avenue. Or much worse, to be married off at age 15, to have no access to contraceptives or a say in whether or not I want to have sex. I am picturing some of Yemen's most unfortunate.

But I digress. I will never understand this. As I much I see, as many people as I talk to, this is not something I will understand. But, inevitably, no matter how different we are, I'll understand something.

At least, I hope I can fit in just a little bit. It is only by melding that one can observe, and learn and grow. I am so lucky to have the chance to meld, to decipher one day from the next, by going somewhere else. Once again, I invite you to join me. Yemen.