Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [83]
Yet sometimes, my visitors delight me. I am busy editing one afternoon when a tall, blue-eyed cowboy walks into my office. A real cowboy. From Arizona. This is Marvin. He steps hesitantly across my threshold, looking as though he’s just been peeled off a Marlboro billboard. His gray hair is cropped short, and he sports a big mustache, jeans, and bowlegs.
I’d heard of Marvin. He is running a livestock program on Soqotra and splits his time between the island and Sana’a. Thinking that I could get an interesting story, I invite him to sit.
Goats run loose across the pristine island of Soqotra, he tells me, and they are slowly destroying its unique and delicate ecosystem. Marvin’s plan, yet to be put into action, would help the local people learn how to keep their animals healthy, manage foraging, open a sanitary halal slaughterhouse, and sell meat to the mainland.
We commiserate about the difficulty of getting anything done here, the malingering of our workers, and the disorder of the country. Marvin tells me that one of his workers refused to come in one day because he’d skipped breakfast and his stomach hurt, while another didn’t show up because his left pinkie finger had a paper cut.
“You know the Spanish word ‘mañana’?” says Marvin.
“Of course,” I say. “Tomorrow.”
“It doesn’t really mean ‘tomorrow,’” he says. “It means ‘definitely not today.’”
I could see where this was going.
“And here, it’s the same thing with ‘insha’allah’.”
“I know! It’s the universal excuse for everything. If my reporters don’t get a story done on time, well, it just wasn’t meant to be done on time.” This absence of personal responsibility bothers me. The general attitude of my male reporters seems to be “Why should I worry about it, when I can just leave it to God?” While my women will work themselves to exhaustion, refusing even to eat until a story is done, my men spend the bulk of their time justifying their minimal efforts. This is the result of privileging one half of society over another, I think. The men feel the world owes them a living and work only to get more money for qat, whereas the women work three times as hard in an effort to prove that they can do what everyone tells them they cannot.
Yet the men treat the women with condescension. One afternoon, al-Matari, who is Noor’s cousin, comes into my office to tell me that Noor has gone home crying. “It is Farouq,” says al-Matari. “He yelled at her.”
This is not the first time this has happened. Zuhra recently ran into my office trembling. “Can I talk to you?” she said, closing the door and throwing back her veil. She was in floods of tears. Farouq had been taunting her, she said, accusing her of spending too much time talking with westerners, as if this were a betrayal of her people. By “westerners,” he meant Western men, which meant Luke and Manel. Zuhra sees Luke as a brother and is nearly as comfortable talking with him as she is with me. Because Luke is Western, she knows he won’t mistake her friendliness as a sign of loose morals. Over time, she has come to feel the same way about lovable Manel. It’s agonizing to have these relationships misconstrued.
Today, it’s been Noor’s turn to play punching bag to Farouq. As she is already gone, I send her an e-mail saying that I am sorry Farouq has upset her and that she shouldn’t hesitate to come talk to me if he bothers her at work.
The next afternoon, I pull Farouq into my office. He claims that Noor yelled at him first (which I doubt). “Farouq. You are an adult. No matter what Noor said to you, I need you to try to be kind to her in the office. If you have a problem with her, come talk to me about it, and I will deal with her. But this isn’t the first time you’ve upset someone in the office, and I don’t want my reporters leaving here in tears.”
“I will have nothing to do with the women!” he says angrily. “I will never speak to them!”
“Well, you may have to, for work. So I need you to please try to be nice. And professional.