Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [43]
“Why, I would love to!” I say. “But not tonight. I have things I need to get from home. Books and things. Presents to take to the office tomorrow.”
She nods. But when she gets out she asks again. “But you will come, another time?”
“I will.”
Salem teaches me several new Arabic words on the way home. I am famished by the time I arrive, close to ten P.M., and polish off a yogurt and a peanut butter and raisin sandwich. Did I mention I don’t cook? I read a few issues of the Observer, try not to despair, and slip into sleep.
IT IS A HUGE RELIEF finally to begin working. The anticipation and anxiety that have been building up since I accepted this job were harder to bear than the work itself. I don’t do well with leisure time or stillness. I had arrived in Sana’a just a day and a half before my first day of work, and that was more than enough downtime. I’m not type A, I’m type A-plus.
On my second day of work, I arrive hours before my staff. (I have a staff! Okay, I am a little excited.) Only Qasim is there, so I give him one of the Jacques Torres chocolate bars I brought as gifts (it is impossible to find good chocolate in Yemen) and three Hershey bars for his three kids (who aren’t yet picky about chocolate). When Radia and Zuhra arrive, I give them embroidered silk Chinese purses, stuffed with soap and chocolate and hand-woven change purses. Accessories are important in Yemen, where the basic outfit doesn’t alter much from day to day. Radia is shyly pleased, while Zuhra announces her gift to everyone in sight.
I hold my first staff meeting that morning. Everyone tells me which stories they are writing and when they will get them to me. It is difficult to pin down exact deadlines, because when I ask, for example, if Bashir can get me a story by one P.M., the answer is “Insha’allah.” If God is willing. Never, in my entire year, would I be able to get a reporter to say to me, “Yes, I will finish the story by one P.M.” In Yemen, nothing happens unless Allah wills it. And as it turns out, Allah is no great respecter of newspaper deadlines.
“Insha’allah” is also murmured reflexively after almost anything stated in the future tense. It makes Yemenis nervous when you leave it out. If I were to say to a Yemeni man, for example, “I am traveling to France next week but will return to Yemen Thursday,” he would automatically add “insha’allah.”
Ibrahim, who writes front-page stories for each issue from his home office, joins us, expressing great joy over my arrival. He invites me to a qat chew, which surprises me because I didn’t know that women could go to qat chews with men. But apparently Western women are treated as a third sex in Yemen and thus can wander back and forth from male to female worlds. Western men, on the other hand, do not have this advantage.
This explains why my male staff members offer me immediate deference. To them I am not really a woman; I am a giraffe. Something alien and thus unclassifiable in the familiar male/female cubbyholes. Were a Yemeni woman to take over the paper, most of the men would quit in protest. They do not treat their female colleagues with anything like the respect with which they treat me, and they’d rather die on the spot than ask a Yemeni woman for help or advice on a story. But oddly, they rarely mind deferring to me.
Al-Asaadi is the exception. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out that he does mind deferring to me, though he makes an initial effort to disguise his resentment. He is always smiling and polite, but he never shows up at the office on time in the mornings, when all of the other reporters arrive. He often ignores my deadlines, filing his stories when he feels like filing them. These things tell me that I may be filling his shoes, but he is still his own boss. Thankfully, though, he does show up to the editorial meeting on my second day and is helpful in suggesting which reporters should work on which articles.
After I send