Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [20]
“Yes!” she said to the last one. “More women are doing it.”
“Good,” I said. “So that is the information we lead with.”
I kept referring to it as a health club, and she kept correcting me. “Not health! Sports!”
Adel went off to report on the recent Guantánamo suicide, Radia to write about street children, and little Zuhra to write about the new respect hairstylists were getting in Yemen.
After class, a tall, chubby man with greenish eyes and a shiny round face lingered in the classroom with visible anxiety. He had arrived halfway through class, just before my staged fight with Theo. “I am so sorry for being late,” he said. “I had to take my wife to the hospital. She had surgery on her eye, and now there is something wrong with her—” He glanced at Theo, who was standing with us.
“Cornea,” Theo supplied.
“Yes. Cornea. And she will need another surgery.”
This was Zaid. I expressed my sympathy and sat down with him to go over everything he had missed. I liked him immediately. He was obviously bright, joked with me, and told me he had just won a scholarship to study next year in Britain. He was frothing with excitement.
I was beginning to sag with the relief that the first class had finished without catastrophe when Theo reminded me that I still had a hurdle ahead (other than the 1,001 new challenges I had just uncovered): I had to impress the Boss. He gave me a minute to take a breath and collect my papers, and led me upstairs to meet Faris.
FARIS AL-SANABANI was tall, dark, and handsome, with just about the worst case of attention deficit disorder I’ve ever seen. He did nothing in real time. He moved in fast-forward, spoke in fast-forward, and demanded an equally speedy response. A conference with Faris was an aerobic workout.
Faris was educated in the United States at Eastern Michigan University. Michigan is home to the largest population of expatriate Yemenis. Because Faris was elected the university’s homecoming king—the first minority ever to win that honor—he was invited to many events held by campus organizations. One of these was a talk at a black fraternity on the theme of giving back to the ghetto. The speaker, Faris told me, said something like this: “You are at a good university. You have good lives, good educations. I want you to reach out to where you came from. I want you to let them see you. Not just as a basketball player or a singer. But as a successful educated person in another field.”
And Faris sat there, thinking. He had been planning to accept a lucrative job in the United States as soon as he finished school. He had no intention of returning to Yemen. He was married to an American woman.
“But I realized that Yemen is my ghetto,” he told me. “If everybody leaves the ghetto, dresses nice, and marries a nice white lady, then they in the ghetto will have nothing. They will have no hope. So I said, ‘I am going back to Yemen. I have to go to my people.’”
He gave up the job offer and moved back to Yemen, where he took work as a translator, development worker, and government employee before deciding to launch the Yemen Observer.
Until then, there was just one English-language newspaper, the Yemen Times. But Faris felt that this paper was too relentlessly critical of his country. How was Yemen ever going to attract tourists if all they ever read about the country was negative? He decided that starting his own newspaper would be the best way to contribute to Yemen’s development. An English-language paper would be most effective, he thought, because he wanted foreigners—especially Americans, because he had lived there—to be able to read about Yemen.
His American wife helped him write and edit the paper on their one computer. One thousand copies were printed of his first issue, which he delivered himself on foot, by bicycle, and through friends. That was more than a decade ago, in 1996. Faris had since divorced his American wife, who hadn’t taken to life in Yemen, and married a Yemeni woman.
By the time Theo summoned me, the paper was printing about five thousand