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.