In the Field Day 2

On the second day we got another early start. After breakfast at Sultan's house we headed back to al-Rujum to meet up with the local consultant again. The roads to the two villages we visited on this day were much better and shorter, so getting to the villages was not the adventure it had been the day before. Here are a few pictures from the first village, you can see in the first two the path that a major rock slide made falling down the mountain and crushing terraces in its way. It started at the top of the first picture and then made its way through the terraces in the second picture.



Here are a bunch of the terraces cultivated by the first village.



After finishing at the first village we headed to the second village. This one was a much bigger community with a population of over 1000, possible close to 2000, while most of the other places we visited had a population of around 300-600. This time we met in a computer room in the school built for this community and there was a large group of maybe 20 farmers and they all argued with each other a lot in answering the questions, it was actually pretty funny.

Here's a picture of some of the farmers from the second community. This community also really wanted us to come have lunch with them. Most of the places we visited invited us, but these guys were really persistent. Poor Sultan, I made it all his fault by telling them he had to decide and that I didn't know, because I didn't want to be rude. Sultan told me afterwards that we can't accept that kind of hospitality from the beneficiaries of the Social Fund, something I didn't know before, but is good to know now so I don't have to feel bad about refusing.


After finishing at the second village we had lunch at the same restaurant again, and again I was admonished to eat more food. Then we started the several hour drive to Bajil in the al-Hodayda governorate to stay the night. However, when we got to Bajil it turned out the only hotel in the town that was good enough to stay at was full, so we decided to drive another half hour or so to the city of al-Hodayda to stay the night. Al-Hodayda is on the Red Sea and the road we took there is a road that goes to Saudi Arabia, so it was interesting to see all of the big trucks hauling imported supplies into the country from Saudi, and then leaving empty again.

On the drive there was a pretty heavy wind whipping sand up into the air, along with the ever-present haze from the humidity. This is actually a picture of the sun, it pretty much just looked like the moon through all the dust a haze.

After getting to al-Hodayda we found a hotel and took some time to clean up and settle in before dinner. It was pretty funny actually because Sultan and Abdulla were really concerned about the quality of my room. The room that I was initially supposed to have had a problem with the TV so they hassled the employees of the hotel to no end making them fix it, then decided it wasn't good enough anyway, so took me to a second room and then spent a bunch of time making everything in that room worked. I started calling them my army "jaysh" in Arabic, because they were like my front line in everything. Abdulla was even scouring the room looking for mosquitoes.

Al-Hodayda, being on the Red Sea and up north close to the desert of Saudi is really really hot. It was super humid and cloying there. However, it is know for having really fresh, outstanding sea food, so for dinner that night we went out to have fish. Here's dinner.

... and here are my dining companions.

The fish was absolutely delicious.

Later that night in the hotel I watched a bit of TV. In flipping around I found some pretty funny things, including SpongeBob SquarePants in Arabic... awesome!