Ali Abdullah Saleh

Have you ever heard of Ali Abdullah Saleh? If not, I imagine you will within the next few months. Mr. Saleh has the bad misfortune to be the President of Yemen and I would bet even money that he will be the target of an assassination attempt before the summer sun hits Sana’a. Mr. Saleh finds himself stuck between the wishes of the United States and the ire of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He has some company in his cramped little space—Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has been in there for a while now.

Ali Abdullah Saleh was also the President of Yemen back in 1987, when I first got there as a Peace Corps volunteer fresh out of college. At the time, Yemen was divided into North Yemen and South Yemen, which was a client state of the Soviet Union. Since then, President Saleh has negotiated the reunification of the two Yemens and held onto power in spite of a secessionist movement in the south and tribal unrest (propped up by Saudi Arabia) in the north. He has proven himself to be an able politician.

Yet I say again, I have strong doubts Ali Abdullah Saleh will be alive come August.

I bring this up not to get my prognostication out in public, but rather in service of a larger point. When I lived in Yemen from 1987 to 1989, almost every person I met there, from the taxi drivers in the capital to the store clerk in Hodeidah to the dirt-poor farmer in the mountaintop villages, was able to identify George Herbert Walker Bush as President of the United States. Yet, none of my close friends or family members back in the United States had any idea where Yemen even was, let alone who their President might be.

The imbalance of power struck me powerfully, even then as a 21-year old who knew next-to-nothing about the world. The uneducated 35-year old farmer who had never left his mountain HAD to know who George Bush was because decisions made by George Bush affected that farmer directly. My mom did not have to know who Ali Abdullah Saleh was because decisions made in Sana’a by President Saleh did not seem to have any effect on her.

Yet, it turns out some of his decisions DID have an effect on my mom--as well as on every other American. And now we do what it seems we have to do each time there is a crisis in a new hot spot—we as a nation have to scramble to make sense of a seemingly-impenetrable situation in a place we know next-to-nothing about. When will we learn?

Southern Cross

I woke up at three in the morning, hurting and headachy and HUNGRY. The sand was
uncomfortably hot, but my body and my mind were so tired, I must have fallen asleep anyway…at least for a few hours. Now, my stomach was moaning and my muscles were demanding repayment for the energy I had wrung from them all day long. I remembered that I had some heavy Turkish soldiers’ bread (kudam) in the hood of my backpack. Kudam is, by far, the densest bread I have ever eaten. It is said to have nourished the Ottoman Turkish army in their massive conquests hundreds of years ago, and I can see why.


In the starlight of a Red Sea beach somewhere south of al Hudaydah I reached into my bag and let my hand root around like a famished rodent. My fingers quickly found the brick of bread they were feeling for and ripped off a chunk to direct mouthward.

In the dark, I crammed the wad of bread in and started chewing. As I did, it felt like shards of glass were stabbing my tongue and the inside of my lips. I had no idea what was going on, but my self-preservation instinct took over and I spit the bread out faster than I had shoved it in.

My mouth felt like it was on fire and I could not make the feeling go away. I reached around in my backpack and found a small flashlight, which I turned on and aimed at the bolus of bread on the ground. When I looked closely I could see ants in the wet wad of bread. I am not a myrmecologist, so I do not know specifically what kind of ants were chewing on the insides of my mouth, but I can tell you they packed one heckuva bite. My mouth REALLY hurt.

I took the bread out of my backpack and saw that it was indeed crawling with red ants. I threw the bread into the dark of the dunes and cursed.

My friends Nick and Tim and I had decided to take a three-day hike along the Red Sea from near a town called Bayt-al-Faqi north to my “hometown” al Hudaydah. This stretch of Yemen is in what is called the Tihama—the flat coastal plain that often hits 115 degrees in the summer. We had not carried enough water that first day and I had come close to suffering from heat stroke. We were dreadfully unprepared for how tough it was and that first night when I bit into the bread and then the ants bit into me, I wanted to just cry and be back home in my bed. (Not my “home” in al Hudaydah, but my real home back in Delaware with the Wonder Bread down in the bread drawer and the air conditioner set at a comfortable 72.)

Delaware was not an option there on the beach at three a.m. and crying wasn’t making anything better, so eventually I decided to lie back down and try to get back to sleep. The inside of my mouth had swelled up painfully wherever the ants had bitten, but my fears of anaphylaxis proved unfounded. Once I got used to the pain, it actually felt kind of cool in the same way your tongue exploring the soft pulpy gap where a tooth has just fallen out can feel kind of cool.

As I lay flat on my back in the still-too-hot sand, feeling the pain in my mouth slowly subside to an acceptable ache and listening to the small waves on the windless night as they made half-hearted attempts to reach us far up the incline of the beach, I noticed the stars for the first time. We were far from any source of light pollution and the stars were thicker and brighter than any I had ever seen. As I scanned the skies I noticed what could only be the Southern Cross.

And in an odd way, I place my coming of age as an adult at that exact moment. Twenty-two years old, eight thousand miles from home, on a beach in Yemen at three in the morning with some fresh ant bites in my mouth. The full ridiculousness of the situation dawned in me there in the starlight and I had to laugh out loud. My friend Tim asked with a groggy voice what I was laughing at and I just said, “Nothing…go back to sleep.” And that is just what both of us did.

Head in the Clouds

I went for a run yesterday morning. Tropical Storm Hanna was forecast to hit later in the day and I needed to get a run in before the weather came. It was humid. Steamy. Tropical, even. When I got to the top of East Rock the wind became slightly more insistent. The air seemed even thicker. And there were wisps of clouds below me. East Rock is only 365 feet above sea level, but it somehow seemed higher with a solid ceiling of grey above and smaller scraps of clouds blowing by below, between me and the rooftops of my neighborhood.
It reminded me of a time In Yemen when I hitched up out of the desert to a mountaintop village and then sat on the edge of the world looking back down 6000 feet at the sand of the Arabian Tihama. Huge birds of prey were riding the updrafts and I was absolutely convinced they were simply having fun in the wind, maybe having a contest to see who could rise the farthest without flapping her wings, (I still am convinced, in fact.)
I saw a tiny speck-of-a-cloud just above the desert sands far off in the Tihama. As I watched, this flimsiest wisp of water vapor blew inland and started to ride the wind up the face of the mountain I was perched atop. As it rose, it expanded and became more substantial.
It probably took about thirty minutes, but by the time it got to me at the mountaintop that tiny cloud had become a storm. I had seen it coming from miles away, yet still I just sat there and allowed the grey to engulf me. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in a minute, the wind picked up, and a fine mist soaked me to the skin. It is one of my favorite memories of my time in Yemen.


Hanna didn’t really live up to her advance publicity, but I do want to thank her for the memory.

Old Friend

I am not good at multi-tasking. I find it hard to juggle the details of several tasks in a way that allows me to complete any of the tasks well. So, I tend to complete things serially. I will make a list, tackle the first item on the list until it is done, then move on to the next entry. In this way I get things done and generally I get them done well. But, if ever I find myself in a spot where I must complete several complicated tasks simultaneously, I get stressed out, steps get forgotten or mixed-up, and none of the tasks comes out as well as it could have if it was the only thing I had to do.
I watch Erica prepare appetizers, main courses, and dessert whenever we have people over for dinner and I am amazed. Her brain sorts, evaluates, plans, and acts in an efficient way that allows her to get everything done and done well, at just the right moment. If she asks me to help out by making a sauce for the veggies and grilling the meat at the same time, I freak out.
I can’t prove it, but I think whatever deficit of mine it is that leaves me unable to focus on more than one thing at a time is also responsible for my inability to keep in touch in any meaningful way with old friends. I can focus on just one or two relationships in my life at any given time. This makes those one or two relationships rich and meaningful, but it also puts a LOT of pressure on them. At the same time other relationships are starved of the one ingredient needed to keep them strong and vibrant—attention.
This whole dynamic is something I am just coming to terms with in myself, even though I have been aware of it for years. A few months ago I decided I needed to take some of the pressure off of my relationship with my wife and daughter by reconnecting with an old friend or two. Right away I thought of my closest friend from my Peace Corps days in Yemen twenty years ago. Her name is Amy and she and I have been in touch only sporadically since we returned to life in America in 1989. My loss of closeness with Amy has always been a big regret for me.
Well, this week Amy and her husband and daughter were on the East Coast to visit family and we had the chance to spend the day together at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, CT. It was the first time we had seen each other in ten years. I was excited and nervous before we got to the aquarium but quickly realized that I didn’t need to be.


Many changes have happened to Amy and to me since we met on the rooftop of a courtyard house in the Al’G’aa section of Sana’a and spent six hours talking. We have each gotten married, had a child, gotten a graduate degree and a teaching certificate, moved several times, and hit forty.
It was a relief to feel right away that none of the changes that have happened in either of us have changed the nature of our deep connection to each other. We picked up our friendship right where it left off when we used to see each other all the time. The ease and comfort of a good conversation with an old friend is a gift that I almost forgot the value of. Getting back in touch with Amy and then seeing her again feel like a gift I have given myself simply by picking up the phone and, (as Michelle Shocked once put it), walking across that burning bridge.
Amy now lives in California and I live in Connecticut, but you can bet I will not let ten more years go by before we get together again.

How Peter Matthiessen Saved My Life

I went to a charity auction a few weeks ago and while there, my wife bid on and won a signed copy of Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard. Erica knew that I really liked Peter Matthiessen, but I don't know if she was aware of just why I liked him so much.  Here is the story of why:

“Hey, Patricia. Do you think the Taj Mahal has a bathroom?” I asked dubiously.

I was traveling with my friend Patricia through India on our way to Nepal. We had a month off from our teaching jobs in Hodeidah, Yemen Arab Republic, and we were celebrating Ramadan by getting out of Yemen and going to a place that had two big things going for it. The first was easy and legal access to alcohol. The second was the Himalayas.

We had landed in what was then called Bombay and got on a train and headed to Agra. Along the way I bought and consumed food and drinks from street vendors, which was maybe not such a smart thing to do. Hence my sudden, dire need of a bathroom at the Taj Mahal.


I will spare you the details. The end result was a rapid loss of fifteen pounds, severe dehydration, auditory hallucinations, and a terribly weakened state of being. A doctor in Agra prescribed Limodal, which stops ALL intestinal activity for a set period of time. I took the medicine and then took the 24-hour train and bus trip to Kathmandu. We found a guest house, the medicine wore off, and I re-descended into dysentery hell.

Kathmandu was supposed to be a quick stop on our way to a trek up in the mountains, but I was in no shape to leave our room, let alone the city. I told Patricia that she should at least enjoy the mountains, so she did. While she was hiking in the Himalayas, I was slowly recuperating from a severe bout of amoebic dysentery. I got a map and found my way to the United States Embassy, where the doctor agreed to see me because I was a Peace Corps Volunteer.
While waiting for the results of a few tests I was told to feel free to hang out in the Peace Corps Library on the grounds of the Embassy complex. So I did. Its collection of books was impressive in both number and variety. And it turns out those books would be more important to me than I could have predicted.
Being a volunteer at the time, I didn’t really get a salary. The money I had saved for the trip was budgeted pretty tightly and that budget hinged on me spending most of my time in Nepal OUT of the capital and instead up in the mountains where a person could eat for pennies a day and sleep in a tent for free. Kathmandu was not an expensive city, but I was living close to the bone and I certainly had not budgeted for three weeks in a guesthouse.

After one week it became clear to me that my money was not going to last unless I took drastic measures. I went to the Peace Corps Office in town and some volunteers told me I could use their small apartment while they were away, free of charge. I moved to a diet of yogurt and fruit supplemented by an occasional grilled cheese sandwich with garlic. And still the money just got tighter. I had one week and $3.00 left. It did not look good for me.

I decided to take a long walk, see parts of Kathmandu I had not yet seen, and think about my situation. As I walked I noticed something that had been bubbling just below the surface of my awareness: Kathmandu is full of used bookstores. Travelers come to Kathmandu with books, read them, and then realize they do not want the extra weight in their backpacks as they head out on a trek at 10,000+ feet. So they sell them to used bookstores. Then, when their treks are done, they come back to the capital and they need a book or two while waiting for their planes, so they go to the used bookstores.
Each store had some version of this sign in its window:

















I let the idea percolate in my brain for one hungry day and then I acted. It is not something I am proud of—(or maybe it is. Why else would I be writing about it twenty years later?) The details are not pretty. I emptied a backpack, walked to the Peace Corps library, made sure I was alone, scanned the shelves for books with multiple copies, and then started loading the backpack. I only took books if there were three or more copies—and this somehow made it okay to me. I noticed when I got to the “M” section of the non-fiction books that there were more than a dozen copies of a book called The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. I had never read the book, but I sure was happy so many other people had.

I quickly looked around, grabbed nine copies, stuffed them in my bag, and walked straight to a used bookstore, where I got enough money to feed myself for a few more days. I held on to one of those copies of Matthiessen’s book and I read it in a park in central Kathmandu with the snow-topped peaks of the Himalayas looming in the distance over the top of a beautiful Buddhist temple. The book was incredible.


So, maybe it is an exaggeration to say that Peter Matthiessen saved my life, but he did give me food for several days when I otherwise would have gone hungry. And he came to represent for me my own ability to survive in any situation. I don’t often tell the story of stealing books in order to feed myself, but I do think about that time once in a while when I am facing a tough situation. I gained a lot of confidence in my ability to adapt to changes, to stay calm, and to do what needs to be done.

I need to find a good place to display that signed copy of The Snow Leopard.

Armpit Fungus

I once had an orange fungus of some sort growing on my armpit hair. Gross, I know, but true nonetheless. I had spent a week hitching around Yemen, riding in the backs of Hilux pickup trucks across the flat coastal desert plain called the Tihama. Sometimes my truckmates were bipeds, sometimes quadripeds, sometimes an assorted mixture. They were always mammalian and always quite aromatic, as was I. The temperature in the Tihama broke 115 fairly regularly and I had only the one set clothes on my back for the entire week.

On day eight of my jaunt I woke up on the living room floor of a smalltime sheik in a market town called Bait al Faqui. To this day I am not sure exactly what made me take off my shirt and look at my underarm. But I did. And I promptly did a full-on Hollywood double-take. If I had been drinking milk I would have spit it all over the room. There, lining each shaft of my armpit hair, was a fuzzy orange growth that was simultaneously alarming and really cool.

The unbearably hot and humid weather in New Haven this week made me remember that trip and that fungus. I guess it’s true—every cloud does indeed have a silver lining.

My Trip To Yemen

My trip to Yemen took twenty-one years, ten months, and fifteen days. The final two days of the trip were by airplane from Miami, (via Charlotte, New York, Frankfurt, and Amman). For most of the trip I didn’t really know that Yemen was the destination. (And, as it turns out, Yemen wasn’t really the destination anyway. It was just another stop on the way to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maine, Delaware, Montana, Ithaca, and Connecticut.)
The conscious portion of my trip to Yemen started one July night in a bar in Lewisburg, PA in 1986. I was with a few friends enjoying a post-softball pitcher or three on a warm night between junior and senior years of college. Most of my friends were Management majors who knew where they were headed. My roommate Mike asked us all, “Where do you think you will be one year from tonight?” As people in the circle took turns answering with a fair amount of certainty, I scrambled to find anything even remotely plausible.
I had started college as a Biochemistry major but changed to a double in English Literature and Political Science. I had devoted hundreds of hours to both the cafeteria and the school newspaper—The Bucknellian. But still, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. It came to be my turn before I was able to think of anything, and I was shocked to find myself stating rather calmly and quite certainly, “I am going to join the Peace Corps.”
When I woke up at the crack of noon the following day, I found my words from the night before echoing in my brain. They still felt right and true, in spite of the fact that I had never once before that moment in the bar the night before thought about joining the Peace Corps. I tracked down the phone number and gave the Peace Corps a call. And, to make a long, grueling process short, in September of the following year I was on my way to Yemen.
What got me thinking about this today was a request my daughter made in the car this morning. We had a thirty-minute drive and ten minutes into the trip it became clear to Isabel that I was lost in the radio show called Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. Whenever this happens, she will think hard for a moment and then ask a very specific question designed to get me to tell a story. Today she said, “Daddy, turn off the radio and tell me about a time when you were experiencing something VERY exciting and even while it was happening you KNEW it was special.”
After a quick TiVo scan of my life, I settled on the moment on September 26, 1987 when I arrived at the airport in Sana’a, Yemen Arab Republic. At that point in my life, I had not seen much of the world—and I had not slept for forty hours. I got off the plane, crossed the tarmac, and lined up at Customs with my United States Passport in hand. As the “line” moved at Third World speed and I eventually made my way to the front, it struck me hard that I was as far out of my element as I had ever been in my life. My heart started to pound, my breathing grew shallow and fast, and I began to quickly consider the implications of turning around.
I knew even in the moment that I was starting something hugely difficult and hugely exciting and I really didn’t know if I could do it.

When I finished telling Isabel about that moment, our drive was finished and she said as we got out of the car, “I want to join the Peace Corps when I get older.”

Chalk Dust (Revised)

I found myself sitting in a bare-bones classroom in an old house in a suburb of Sana’a, eight thousand miles from home, twenty-one years old, and suddenly thinking of the Talking Heads lyric, “This is not my beautiful life.” I was there with twelve American Peace Corps Volunteers and Fritz Pipenburg. Fritz was a German follower of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and also an expert on Arabic grammar.
The sun was falling inevitably toward the gap in the mountains that ring the high-plateau city at 7,800 feet and its light slanted through the traditional stained-glass half-moon shaped windows high in the wall. My head was aswirl with the deluge of new experiences I had subjected it to in the preceding six weeks. New friends, new food, new country, new language, new life.
Fritz was telling us that when we got to the “willages” people would speak ungrammatically, but that we should learn proper Arabic anyway. On the board he had written out a conjugation for the verb “to know”—a’aref. I had been listening to Fritz for four hours and my brain was simply unable to absorb one more speck of knowledge.
Rather than focus on Fritz, my eyes fixed on a shaft of red light that was angling through the space between us. He erased his sloppy Arabic—I know, you know, he knows, she knows, we know, you know, they know—and the red shaft was brought to life with a swarm of swirling ex-words dancing a modern pink composition in mid-air, all twirls and sudden mass movements one way or another, like a school of fish or a flock of birds all responding to the same stimulus.
For just a moment I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open and I was seeing chalk dust swirl through sunlight or if I had nodded off and was somehow able to see into my own brain. It was a moment of such perfect one-to-one correspondence between exterior and interior states that I felt as if the membrane between me and not-me had dried up and flaked away to join the gyrating words before me in their dance.
Fritz must have seen the look on my face and so he called on me to conjugate the verb “to know” in the present tense. Without thinking, I gave him the correct answer. I pulled it out of thin air.

Depends On How You Look At It...

Many years ago I was walking along a Red Sea beach with a good friend, scanning the sand for interesting and beautiful finds. I spent much of my childhood on the beaches of Delaware and Long Island, so I was only half-committed to the process, at best. My friend, on the other hand, spent her first 23 years in Missouri and Illinois. The beach, shells, and sea glass were all still new to her.
That particular day we were the only humans on a three mile stretch of beach known to the locals as Ra’s Kathib. We called it “The Spit” because it was a long spit of sand angling out into the Red Sea from just north of Hodeidah, in what was then North Yemen. The fact that we were the only ones on the beach may have had something to do with the air temperature of 115 degrees and the relative humidity of well over 80%. Anyone with any sense at all was parked in a shady spot, directly under a ceiling fan.
We were near the end of our two-year stint as teachers of English at the National Institute of Public Administration. Don’t let the name fool you; NIPA-Hodeidah was a slightly ramshackle school that offered Accounting, Small Business Management, and English classes to anyone capable of paying the $40.00 registration fee. As a result of the less-than-demanding admissions criteria, my friend and I lucked into one of the most open and diverse groupings of people in all of Yemen.
There were ten year-old boys, seventeen year-old daughters of Hodeidah’s upper crust, forty year-old cab drivers, and thirty-five year-old housewives. These people would never have met, let alone acknowledged each other’s existence in their real lives in Yemen’s gender- and income-segregated streets. They would not have been allowed. But there in my classroom they were free to converse.
Of course, most of their conversations came straight out of Longman’s Beginner English Workbook, (Level One), and contained the phrase “Excuse me, do you know the way to Camden Market?” But at least they could say something to each other.
Anyway, on this particular day I am remembering, my friend and I were stopped dead in our tracks by the most incredibly luminescent blue shell either of us had ever seen. It was spectacular. We both saw it in the same moment and we both froze. My friend bent down to snag the treasure before I could and then she promptly dropped it to the sand as quickly as she had snatched it up. As she dropped it, she let out a disgusted “Unnnhhh.”
Thinking she had gone crazy, I immediately reached out to grab the shell. If my friend didn’t want the treasure, that was her problem. As soon as I lifted it I could tell something was wrong. It didn’t feel right—it was far too light and too slick to be a shell. One look up close and I could see that it wasn’t a shell at all. It was a shell-shaped piece of plastic. I reacted just as my friend had—I opened my hand and let it fall right there where I stood.
Now here it is twenty years later and I find myself thinking of that moment on the beach quite often. It taught me something that I have had cause to learn over and over since. What it taught me is the importance of perspective. That concave clam-shell-shaped piece of plastic didn’t change one whit during our entire “interaction.” It was just itself the whole time. And yet, in a span of thirty seconds it went from being incredibly beautiful to both of us, to being beautiful to one and repulsive to the other, and then finally it ended up as an ugly piece of litter to both of us. All without any change in its actual state of being.

Chalk Dust in the Sun

I was in a 200 year old tower house in a small town outside of Sana'a in the Yemen Arab Republic back when it was North Yemen. A German Moonie named Fritz Pipenburg was teaching me and 11 other Americans some of the finer points of Classical Arabic grammar. I had been in the country for only three weeks and I still had not managed to fully wrap my mind around the fact that I was in this strange place and probably would be for two years.

I was having fun learning Arabic during the day and then occassionally skipping a lesson and catching a taxi into Sana'a with Patricia to go practice by getting lost in the Old City and having to find our way back to arRowdha.

My mind was drifting away from Fritz and toward the low-angled light streaming in through the stained glass gamaria windows common in Yemeni houses. Fritz had just erased the verb "a'aref", (to know), and the dust from the once-words was swirling through the sunlight in a dance far more graceful to the eyes than the sound of the word ever could be to the ears.

Even then, in the moment--in real time, I knew that that image would be a powerful metaphor someday. Well, here it is 20 years later and the image still knocks me for a loop whenever I picture it.

Funny thing, though. I still can't make it stand for anything more than what it already is.