Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [63]
Outside each room stand two armed men in green camouflage and red berets. Despite the threat of violence, I don’t see any reason to feel uneasy. Things seem to be moving more or less smoothly and thankfully the guns remain unused.
Back at the office, I write up my notes. Zuhra and Jabr bring me their stories from other polling centers, and I tuck them into my reporting. Farouq runs around between the SCER and polling centers all day, so I don’t see him. Al-Asaadi is allegedly doing something similar.
Election results won’t come in until the next morning, so I am able to leave work by eight thirty P.M. The next day will be long; I had better escape while I can.
The results trickle in all the next day, with Saleh unsurprisingly winning 77.2 percent of the vote. It’s a disappointing anticlimax after the frenzy of the last few days. No serious election violence is reported, no riots, no major problems at the polls. And privately we had all hoped bin Shamlan would do a bit better.
On the upside, it’s a bizarrely calm day. I sketch out the issue on my dry-erase board and get al-Asaadi’s approval. He hasn’t eaten breakfast so I offer him some of my oat cookies. He takes four. “My food is your food,” I say.
“My office is your office,” he says, his mouth full of oats.
I am pleased that he’s so cheerful, and even more pleased that he gets his pages to me on time. So does everyone else. It’s not a perfect issue, but some of my ambitions for the paper will have to wait. When al-Asaadi leaves early to let me finish the issue on my own, I am downright astonished. Without his last-minute headline changes and layout shifting, we finish all the pages by midnight and I am out of the office by one A.M. Some nights, it feels good to be boss.
TEN
homemaking in the holy month
After a month in my little suite at Sabri’s, I still haven’t unpacked my suitcases. My two rooms are certainly adequate, but they do not feel like home. I have made no attempt to decorate the walls, put up photos, or stock my kitchen. It seems a waste of effort when I know I am leaving. Living in a dormitory with Sabri’s young Arabic students has its perks, but I want a place of my own. Once I have a house, I can get myself sorted. I can unpack, decorate, invite people over for tea. Then I can truly begin my Yemeni life.
So far I have had no time to look. Faris found a house he thought I might like, but it was far away from everything—far from the Old City, shops, and my office. I want to be able to continue walking to work. Karim gives me the number of a Yemeni man he knows, Sami, who can find me a house in Old Sana’a. I tuck it in my purse and plan to call. Just as soon as I have a free minute.
Work is beginning to follow something of a schedule when Ramadan arrives abruptly. I am dining at Zorba’s with Shaima, my worldly World Bank friend, when she gets a text message from a friend telling her that Ramadan will begin the next morning. She immediately texts others to spread the news. I wonder how this was all done before cell phones.
No one is entirely sure when Ramadan will start until the evening before, as it depends on the first sighting of the crescent of the new moon. The Islamic calendar is lunar and shorter than our solar calendar. Islamic months thus rotate through the seasons, with Ramadan falling about eleven days earlier each year. Yemen turns upside down during this holy month. One of the Five Pillars of Islam is that Muslims must fast from sunup until sundown during Ramadan to burn away their sins. But in Yemen, after breaking their fast at sunset, everyone stays up until four A.M. binge eating and then sleeps half the day away. It seems a bit like cheating to me, to sleep until three P.M. when only three hours of fasting are left before sundown and iftar, the fast-breaking meal. But who am I to judge?
At the Yemen Observer, we don’t go completely