Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [36]
Several women took out their bags of qat and began to place the little green leaves in their mouths. Leila placed a handful of her qat on my lap. The blond woman on my right added a sprig. We began to chew. The goal is to keep the leaves in the left cheek, between the gums and the cheek, while gnawing on them to release the juices. They were bitter, as if I were chewing something slightly poisonous.
My initial impression was that qat was a very mild drug—less of an immediate jolt to the body than coffee. I had been chewing for nearly an hour before I felt anything at all other than nausea. Then the curtains of my mind began to slide open. The fog of exhaustion dissipated, and I felt lucid and sharp. My thoughts rang like crystal. I suddenly felt like running a marathon, writing a novel, or swimming the English Channel. If American journalists were to ever get ahold of qat, I am sure they would promptly deplete the supply.
But this is just the first phase of the drug. During this phase, chewers customarily banter with each other, trading barbs. In the second phase, the conversation becomes more focused, zeroing in on a topic. After that is Solomon’s Hour, named for the Prophet Solomon, rumored to be fond of meditation. During this time, everyone slips into thoughtful trances and cannot be bothered to talk.
I didn’t stay long enough at this chew to get to that stage.
By the time Dr. al-Haj called to check on me, I was ready to go. I couldn’t sit still any longer. What I found most mysterious about qat chews is how people were able to sit for so long while ingesting a stimulant.
Dr. al-Haj walked me home, where I was hugely relieved to be alone again. It wasn’t until I was standing in my room that I realized the monumental effort it had cost me to be someone other than myself for the hours of lunch and the chew. It was obviously easy to make Yemeni friends, but for how long could I pretend to be a virtuous married woman who had never had a lover? It seemed impossible that I could ever manage this feat on a daily basis for as long as a year. Concealing so much of myself made me lonely. It also felt dishonest. This is what made spending time with Yemeni people so exhausting—all the parts of me I had to hold back. Restraint has never been my strong suit.
Not that I was thinking about staying. Was I?
BACK AT WORK, I finished my piece on Arab democracy for Arabia Felix, which I titled “Cultivating the Desert.” (Faris subsequently lifted this title for a coffee-table book on the elections he published later that year.) My students claimed the rest of my time as I crammed as much as I could into my final lessons. For a class on Internet research, I herded my reporters to the computers. We began by examining a site that collects tax forms of international nonprofits; a site that gives profiles of every domain; and snopes.com, an urban legend—debunking site, which everyone loved. They wanted to look up all kinds of urban legends. I found it intriguing that the men wanted to look up urban legends about marriage, whereas the women wanted to look up stories about Hurricane Katrina and war. So much for gender stereotypes. I bet if Yemen had a Cosmo-like magazine, the men would devour it at least as enthusiastically as the women.
The point of this exercise was to show my students how to figure out which sites were reliable sources of information and which were sources of unfounded rumor. They had a remarkable inability to tell the two