Well, I haven't written anything in a few days because nothing has really been happening lately. I have just been cooling me heals at work, reading and refining my questionnaire for the field, but I'm unable to really make a lot of progress with work until I actually get out and starting doing these interviews. If all goes well I will be leaving for my first big field visit on Monday insha' allah. I'll be gone for three days if all goes according to schedule, but for now, just waiting.
My colleague from UC Berkeley, Daniel, arrived day before yesterday. He's also a PhD student but he's in the Economics department. He's been here a couple of times before so he has some friends here. One of the people who knows him and knew he was coming had gotten us on the invitation list for a big event at the house of the French ambassador. The event was last night, so we went with a group of people, mostly Italian, but a couple of French and Yemeni people as well. Daniel's friend Fawsy told him that the party would be casual, but of course he was dead wrong, so here was our group showing up with almost all the guys where jeans to this party where people were absolutely dressed to the nines. They almost didn't let us in because we were such a scruffy lot. The event was for the French national holiday. There were hundreds of people there. It was fun to try and guess which countries everyone was from because there were diplomats from all over the place. The decorations were quite excessive, including ice sculptures! In Yemen! Ice sculptures! I had to take a picture of one.
The food was actually not particularly good. I kind of expected better. They had some good stuff, but then they had a bunch of these pre-frozen friend snacky foods including what looks suspiciously like pigs-in-a-blanket.
Anyway, it was quite a surreal experience walking around with all these high mucky-mucks. I wanted to take pictures of everyone, but that would have been quite rude, so I didn't. But I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a couple of photos to capture the feeling.
We only stayed for a short while because Daniel had some friends he was meeting up with later that evening and offered to let me come along. We left the ambassador's house and walked to his friends' house which was only a couple of blocks away. They were really interesting people. The woman's name is Roberta and her husband's name is Tim. She's Italian and he's American. She works with an organization here that's working on the problem of child labor and child trafficking and he's an engineer that works on water projects all over the country. It was actually quite serendipitous meeting him, because he worked with an organization called CARE that did a pilot project on terrace rehabilitation several years ago. I had heard about this project, but hadn't found any documentation on it. He has agreed to email me a bunch of information about it, which is great for my work. Also, the fact that he's involved in water projects is really interesting to me. That's one of my main areas of interest in general, so I'm hoping to be able to talk to him more about it. Unfortunately he and his family are leaving in a week or so until the end of August, so any further contact will have to happen soon.
Speaking of his family, they seem really interesting! They have two sons, one of whom is 14. He apparently speaks perfect street Yemeni and roams around the city taking the little mini-van-like-buses called Dababs everywhere. He writes articles for the Yemen Times, which is a small English language publication here that apparently anyone who speaks English can write an article for. He wrote one article on a random event that took place here in Sana'a where there was apparently a spontaneous "Drifting" event where hundreds of people came out to watch street car races! He went a took pictures and wrote all about it, crazy!
But, one of the other main things this kid is interested in is animals and for that reason he volunteers at the zoo here in Sana'a. Apparently someone came to the zoo with these kittens that they thought were panthers or something and was trying to sell them to the zoo. It turned out they weren't panthers, but rather Caracal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracal). The zoo already had a bunch of Caracal and didn't want to hand-raise the kittens, so the kid brought them home and the family has raised them. They are in the process of trying to donate them to a zoo in Greece, but the paperwork for transporting protected wild species across national borders is quite extensive and is taking a long time, so the cats are living on their roof! They took us up and let us check them out. They're really incredibly beautiful, and despite how it looks in the pictures, not psycho cyborg cats. The female, which is the one I got photos of, is a bit standoffish, but the male was snuggling and playing with Roberta and was quite friendly. They are absolutely gorgeous! I wish I could have gotten better pictures. They are about the size of a large bobcat. Really sleek and beautiful. With these cool pointy tufted ears.
Anyway, it was a really random evening full of odd experiences and serendipity. I'm hoping that the connection made with Tim will be an interesting one for me.
Hope everyone is well back home! More soon.
it's so surreal, it's almost like watching a movie at this point...except that the pictures don't move and I have to read a lot...but it wouldn't really get the point across if I said your life was like a book would it?
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