Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [131]
“When you leave here, you really ought to think about joining the circus,” he says. “You have all the skills to be a ringmaster.”
My stomach tightens. When I leave here? The phrase fills me with panic.
It is a frenetic day, but we do indeed close early. Farouq turns in a decent story about two brand-new X-ray machines that were intended to screen containers entering Yemen’s ports but that failed embarrassingly in a public demonstration. When the officials put a machine gun through one of the machines, it failed to detect it.
Ibrahim files a story about three officials in Dhamar who were fired on corruption allegations. Zuhra writes another story about Anisa al-Shuaibi, whose rape case goes to trial this week. Luke and I joke that Zuhra is on the sodomy beat after she turns in a series of stories on abused prisoners, raped women, and sodomized men. Every story she reports seems to involve some kind of bodily violation. My little human rights crusader.
Najma gives us a story about how an overabundance of fluoride in the water of some villages is turning children’s teeth brown, and Noor writes a piece about a march through Sana’a to demand funding for children’s programs.
All of our pages are done by two P.M., though I stick around a bit to prod my staff along, proof pages, and make sure all of the captions are written and grammatical. “Do you need me?” I ask Hadi before making my escape.
“No,” he says without hesitation. “Go home.”
“Yes,” says Luke, turning to me. “Please go home.”
EVEN WHEN DAYS don’t go this smoothly, I now find my reporters’ mistakes more entertaining than exasperating. Take Bashir’s translation of Farouq’s story about the Huthis: “The minister of endowment and giddiness Hamoud al-Hitar said, ‘We will try to convince the rebels to surrender and lay down arms and stop the war against the camps of the State.’ He adds, ‘Last Saturday, the scholarship committee arrived to Sa’ada to transfer massage from the scholarship to the rebels about the war there.’”
I am sure that a massage by the minister of endowment and giddiness could play a productive part in conflict resolution. But it seems unlikely to happen.
Jabr turns in another of my favorite leads, for a story about a fundraiser for a charity that helps children with cleft palates. “One thousand and seven hundreds dollars for work of Yemeni smile that provide operations for children who have genital problems and who can not smile, said Nerys Loveridge, the Principle of the school. The money delivered to the ambassador of British during the open day that held in Sana’a British School on Wednesday.”
It’s common for Arabic speakers to mix up the P and B sounds. There is no P in Arabic. Thus I often get sentences like this: “There are some teams of masked soldiers called IRF (Instant Response Force). ‘They enter the cell and beat the crab out of the prisoners,’ he said.”
Zuhra pulls her weight in the malapropism department too. When she is assigned to write a story on the celebration of Passover by fifty Yemeni Jews who live in the North and are under government protection in Sana’a after threats were made against them, she describes their food restrictions as such: “Jews are not allowed to eat inflated bread during this time.” In a story about a group of people protesting shoddy medical treatment, she refers to them as “people who have had kidney plantations.”
But perhaps my favorite is this paragraph from a health story she wrote on fertility treatments, which—alarmingly, given the country’s already astronomical birth rate—are increasing. “Women must take medicines that stimulates the ovaries to produce eggs, and the men must stimulate their male liquid. Then, the mother will be in stupefaction in order to take out the eggs. Laser peels the chosen egg from the surrounding cells to guarantee that it will be fertilized appropriately.”
I relish having