Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [168]
For years, I tried in vain to get the staff to call me Jennifer or Jenny instead of madam. They would smile in agreement, say “like family?,” and then keep calling me madam. Not until Theadora and I were evacuated, and Emebet began sending parcels of our favorite foods to me in Jordan (where we stayed until the end of Tim’s posting), did she write on the note taped to a box of muffins that they were for “Jeny and Teodora.”
Having a staff was only the beginning of how surreal my life became. Suddenly I was hosting dinner parties several times a week for Yemeni politicians, business people, hostage negotiators, other ambassadors, development workers, or visiting British ministers. Every official I met—and I met many!—treated me with respect and kindness and as though I were Tim’s wife. Divorce is common in Yemen and Yemenis (many of whom have more than one wife) were warm and understanding about our relationship.
There was hardly a night when we didn’t have official cocktails or dinner at the house or a National Day to attend elsewhere. Mostly, I loved this. I am a social person, and it was great fun to meet and talk with such a wide range of people—and to practice my Arabic. But I did occasionally worry I would get myself in trouble by talking too much or too freely. I once got into a debate with the foreign minister about the freedom of the Yemeni press. He had claimed, over the soup course, that the Yemeni media was unfettered. Having run a Yemeni newspaper, I knew differently and said so. No, the Yemeni press is free! He insisted. What was it that I couldn’t write about?
Well, for starters we couldn’t criticize the president by name, I said. And we couldn’t write that there was an argument against capital punishment. And we couldn’t write freely about religion. I went on.
Yes, yes, said the minister. But there are good reasons for those things!
I guess I just have a different definition of “free,” I said.
We both laughed.
THE MOST ASTONISHING THING happened at a holiday party during my last year in Yemen. Faris, my former boss whose approval I had fruitlessly sought for the length of my tenure at the Observer, told Tim that the newspaper had never been better than it was under my leadership. Which was bittersweet news, as it made me wish I were still at the paper at the same time that it filled me with a warm sense of closure. It wasn’t long after this that Faris approached me at a party to ask if I would come by the office to talk with the new American woman running it. “If you could just give her some advice,” he said. “Just tell her what you did with the paper to get it the way it was.”
But the attack on Tim brought all of this to a premature end. We had to leave. After a family vacation in the United States, Theadora and I moved to Amman, to be as close to Yemen as possible. I rang the only person I knew in Jordan, my friend Saleh whom I’d met when he worked in Yemen. A week later, he had found me both a comfortable apartment and a babysitter. Tim visited us whenever he could, but he was extremely busy in the final few months of his posting. It was a hard, hot summer alone with a baby in an unfamiliar city.
Amman was a world apart from Sana’a. At the gym near my house, most women didn’t wear hijabs, and they all showed up in full makeup, carrying designer bags. Teens socialized at massive shopping malls. Alcohol was available everywhere. I found the conspicuous consumption overwhelming. I pined for Yemen.
Eventually, I settled into a social life with a few Jordanian friends and with other parents I met at the British Club and an American playgroup. By the time I discovered people with whom I really enjoyed spending time, it was time to move again. We left Jordan in October 2010, again taking a quick trip to the United States to see family before landing in the