Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [32]
I BEGAN CLASS the next day by asking Adel to describe our reporting process at the Mövenpick. We talked about how we tracked people down and about how much more efficient it had been to take notes than to use a tape recorder. My students always wanted to record their interviews, which forced them to spend hours transcribing. I loathe tape recorders and believe they should be used only as a backup, when interviewing someone who might sue the paper. I told my class how one Egyptian woman had shied away when Adel produced his tape recorder. “It can intimidate people and keep them from talking to you.”
And then I showed them my notebooks. I had filled them front to back and then written on the back side of every page. “Reporters for daily papers go through one to three of these a day,” I told them. Their eyes widened. From what I could tell, they’d been using the same notebooks since I got there.
This led to a discussion of interviewing techniques. We talked about how I interviewed people at the conference and went over the interviewing handout I’d given them. Then came the fun part. I asked them to interview each other in pairs in front of the class. Zaid and Adel volunteered to go first. I asked the class to critique them. Which they enthusiastically did. Nothing got them more excited than criticizing each other.
I wanted to involve the women, who had been shyer about speaking up, so I asked Arwa and Zuhra to go next. Arwa was resistant but with a little encouragement agreed to interview Zuhra. She was a much better interviewer than the men—more focused and quicker with her questions. She also had the good fortune to be interviewing someone who answered every question with a torrent of words.
Faris rang me that afternoon as I was leaving my Arabic lesson and invited me out to dinner. At eight thirty P.M., he arrived promptly on my doorstep, beautifully dressed, in a dark pinstriped suit. Clouds of cologne wafted off of him. We climbed into his Mercedes and drove to Hadda, where we ate at an Americanesque Greek restaurant called Zorba’s. “It’s a five-star restaurant,” said Faris. “One of the best in Sana’a!”
This it most certainly wasn’t. The food was very basic: burgers and fries, salads, fish, spaghetti. But the place was packed with foreigners and the Yemeni elite and was one of the few places where women and men could be found in somewhat equal numbers. Faris knew the owner, who waved us to one of the front tables overlooking the street.
On the way, Faris had given me a flattering speech about how incredibly grateful he was to me for the work I had done. He asked if I would write up a few of my pithy pieces of advice for my students so he could frame my words and hang them around the newsroom to remind his reporters of what I had taught them.
“You mean, things like ‘This is a NEWSpaper, not an OLDSpaper; let’s put some news in it’?” I asked.
“Yes! I want that one. And as many others as you have.”
He also said he wanted me to see the countryside and promised to arrange a car to take me on a day trip to the villages of Kawkaban and Shibam on Friday. He would pay for me to eat at a restaurant there. Like so many of Faris’s promises, these turned out to be as insubstantial as the Sana’ani air.
Faris also said he wanted to have a dinner in my honor on one of my last nights and present me with some gifts. “Don’t buy any jewelry,” he said. “I have plenty for you.” The chances of me buying jewelry were slim to none, and slim just left town. I didn’t wear any jewelry, save Ginger’s wedding ring.
Then he offered me a job. “I will pay you one thousand dollars a month”—most journalists at the paper made $200 a month—“plane tickets back and forth to New York, and occasional three-day