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By Root 555 0

First World quarters, where I could catch my breath and let all of the new sights and smells settle. We were setting the table when Theo arrived. Theo, my high school sweetheart and the reason I landed in Yemen, had already been living in Sana’a for nearly two years, doing research for a book and occasional work for the Yemen Observer. Frustrated with the chaos and lack of standards at the newspaper, he had summoned me to come instill a few basics in the heads of its reporters. He had no journalism training himself. I still wasn’t sure why he had chosen me. Surely he knew other journalists. I couldn’t help wondering if it could be, at least partly, a faint hope of rekindling our long-expired romance. It had been probably seventeen years since we’d been together, but I still felt naked in his presence—the kind of vulnerability only a first love can inflict. We still mattered a little too much to each other to be at ease. But I hadn’t come here for romance. I came for the adventure of spreading the journalistic gospel in an utterly alien culture.

We had a massive amount of food. Sabri even broke out one of his best bottles of white wine, which we drank warm. Wine was a precious resource in this dry country, where it was illegal to sell alcohol or to drink it in public. Non-Muslims caught drinking in public could be sentenced to up to six months in prison, while Muslims faced a year behind bars, plus (in theory) eighty lashes with a whip. So I was fortunate to be staying with one of the very few Yemenis with a wine cellar. Theo was impressed with Sabri’s largesse and told me that I was being spoiled. “Don’t get used to this,” he said with a hint of warning.

We ate everything with our fingers from communal platters, ripping off pieces of chewy flatbread, using it to pull chunks off the blackened fish, and then dipping the bundles in the zahawek. It tasted of garlic and cumin. I loved it. The fish was sweet and tender, falling off the bones. All of the new foods preoccupied me, while Theo and Sabri talked about Faris, the mysterious founder and publisher of the Yemen Observer, whom I was to meet the next day.

I had examined several issues of the Observer online before my arrival and now listened carefully as Sabri and Theo enumerated the myriad faults of the paper. The biggest problem was management, said Theo. There wasn’t any. Nothing seemed to come in on any real deadlines, and there were no procedures for getting story ideas approved. When I wrote for newspapers, things generally worked like this: Reporters ran around town talking to sources and coming up with ideas for stories. They pitched these ideas to their editor. The editor either approved, refined, or killed the ideas. The reporters then reported, wrote, and sent their stories to their editor. That editor checked the reporting and basic structure and sent it along to a copy editor, who checked solely for grammar and style. And then it was published. The Yemen Observer did none of this. According to Theo, people wrote what they wanted to write, and it went into the paper as is. Quality checks on either the reporting or the prose were nonexistent.

This bit didn’t bother me too much. It wasn’t my problem. After all, I was there for only three weeks, to help the journalists hone their skills. I certainly wasn’t going to muck about in management and I didn’t have time for a revolution.

“And no one has any training,” Theo said. “The whole staff is made up of English majors who have no background in journalism. They have no idea how to structure a story. Or how to report it. Oh—and you will have to convince them that it is wrong to plagiarize from the Internet.”

I paused, a handful of fish midway to my mouth. “They plagiarize?”

“All the time.”

“What about copyright law?”

“There is no copyright law in Yemen. Intellectual property rights don’t really exist.” He took a sip of wine.

“Oh.”

“And they also write about advertisers all the time. Faris has them write about his friends and such.”

“But that’s unethical!” I protested. “You can’t write stories about advertisers.