Baywatch Aden (title from Chad)

There was a point when I was running in slow motion across the beach, but luckily for me, I wasn’t worried about my swimsuit riding up my crack…mostly because I wasn’t wearing one. My ridiculously sexy and inappropriate swimwear consisted of Matt’s baseball shorts which I will probably never give back to him and Nusaiba’s t-shirt which she already gave to me knowing that I was never going to give it back. I was running in slow motion because I was tired and trying to get back fast enough to help but without using the rest of my energy left over from swimming into the rip, pulling the little girl out of the rocks, and swimming back out of the rip. So here’s the story (for those who asked and those who don’t care but for some reason are reading my blog):

I went to the beach with Jonathan (boss’s boss) and Miriam (boss’s boss’s boss) because Miriam wanted to swim while she was in Aden and Jonathan wanted to try out windsurfing with Nigel and me. After the ordeal of putting the windsurf together (the main reason why I like regular surfing better), we made our way out into the water, surrounded by crowds of little boys as usual. We really should stop going to this beach on the weekend. Too many people see me in my Baywatch clothes. A couple groups of black-clad women sit on the beach watching everybody else have fun while small groups of men in robes chew qat and probably don’t notice much else. My plan is always to get in the water as fast as I can and stay there. Of course, that’s almost always my plan whenever I go to the beach, but here the reason is to obscure my scantily clad body whereas everywhere else, it’s just because I love the water.

So the sea was kind of rough, and the waves made it hard to get the sail up. I played around for a while and then let Jonathan have a “go.” (British people suck you into their lingo.) While Jonathan was figuring things out, I was body-surfing the baby waves in towards the shore, but carefully, because there were a bunch of rocks between us and the beach, and I didn’t want to crash. I noticed a couple of little girls playing on the rocks. I thought they were playing, but it turns out that the younger girl (maybe about 7 although it’s hard to tell because Yemen has a malnutrition rate worse than many African nations) was screaming at her older sister on the shore that she was stuck on the rocks. I swam over, but it was hard to get there fast because the girl was stuck in a rip.

As soon as I got to the girl, she grabbed on to me, and we both went under. I finally propped us up on the rocks, but the waves were breaking over us, and I couldn’t swim with her clinging to me like a baby koala bear. I told her to move to my back and then I rolled us out of the rocks. Just then, her dad got to us. I passed her off, but then I noticed that he wasn’t swimming well. I tried to tell him to swim parallel to the beach to get out of the rip, but he didn’t get it. So I swam out of the rip (it took some serious effort and prayer), trying to think about what to do. I looked down the beach and saw a couple of girls playing with a large yellow floatie in the shape of a duck. I ran to them and asked if I could borrow their duck, but they were not OK with that idea. When I asked about their mom, they pointed me towards a group of veiled women, lounging around on a nearby truck, in a style very different from what might be seen on a Ford advertising poster. Also, the truck was a Hyundai or something weird starting with an H… So I explained the situation, and to their credit, no one took the opportunity to lecture me on my outfit. Instead, the mother came with me to convince the girl to give me the floatie. After I swore on a stack of Qurans to bring it back, she relinquished the duck into my care. And that’s when the slow motion run came in.

From out in the water, Jonathan and Miriam were smiling and waving at me running down the beach with the duck, thinking I was just hanging out with some cute kids. I swam back out to the father and daughter who were clinging to the rocks and trying without much success to stay above water. The dad helped me throw the little girl over the back of the floatie, and then he grabbed the other side. I started the long slow swim out of the rip (again). Jonathan showed up then and I handed him the little girl to bring into shore. He was out of the rip and able to walk in to shore. He didn’t realize what had happened, he just thought the girl was tired of playing. He left her on the shore and went back to windsurfing. I stayed out and pulled the dad in. Even as a Yemeni man who refuses to touch a woman not related to him, when I yelled at him to grab my hand, he did. I dragged him and Duckie into the shore. When he got to a place where he could stand up, I swam in to his daughter, who was in hysterics on the beach.

I tried to calm the girl down, taking a water bottle from a nearby qat-chewing man who had watched the whole incident. She drank a little water and calmed down enough to tell me that something had hurt her leg. I thought at first she had just scraped the rocks like me. My hands and legs were all ripped up, and I was bleeding all over the place, probably attracting sharks. But the little girl wasn’t scraped up. She had somehow come in contact with a sea anemone, which left about 50 black bumps in her little leg, some of them with spines still sticking out of them. I wrapped her in a towel and stuck her in the car with her sister and ran back to the father to make sure he was ok. He had almost made his way back to the car, but he was obviously exhausted and in shock. I told him he needed to take his daughter to the hospital right away because of the sea anemone, but I don’t think it registered in his mind. He immediately started trying to pull out the spines until I stopped him and reminded him to go to the hospital. He turned back to me and gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, not in a creepy you’re-a-Baywatch-Yemen-star way, just really grateful. It was weird. Then he promised he was going to the hospital right now. I watched them drive off, and then I ran back to give a very anxious little girl her duck floatie. And all was right with the world.

Sadly, I’m afraid that an experience like that will keep both of those little girls out of the sea for life. They are among the few rare girls of any age that I have ever seen swimming. If they had known basic swimming skills and which places to avoid playing, they would have been fine. I really wish that more people here could safely enjoy the beautiful water they are blessed to live beside. I would love to teach swimming and basic safety knowledge to girls here. I want them to be a part of the fun…even if they have to pay money to swim at the private women’s beach. At least then fewer accidents like the one today would happen. Plus, I think it’s a tragedy to live next to the beach and not enjoy it. I already told Cait she is a failure as an Australian because of her hatred of beaches and any type of enjoyable physical activity. She should be from somewhere like Wyoming…there’s nothing out there, right?

Yemeni Men

It is time. I must analyze the average Yemeni male for the benefit of my readers. In spite of the general segregation between the sexes here in Yemen and the fact that I either live with two girls or ten, I have spent a lot of time with men the few weeks while I was stuck in Aden. My favorite of these men is not actually Yemeni. He may not even be human. Possibly he is a story-book character come to life. Later I will have to dedicate an entire entry to Captain Roy and his awesomeness. He is worthy of it. It is so difficult for me to tear myself away from showering Capt. Roy with accolades, but I will return to the subject at hand, Yemeni men.

Fortunately for me and other women here, Yemeni men are much less likely to approach a woman on the street. They will rarely make rude comments and after 2 months here, no one has tried to touch me at all. I really appreciate this on public transport when I would never be expected to sit next to a man. I usually stand haughtily outside the door and wait for the men inside to rearrange themselves so that I can sit far away from them. When riding in ADRA cars with coworkers, I sit alone in the wide front seat made for two passengers while 5 men cram into the back seat. But I do not feel sorry for them. The benefits of being a man here far outweigh the minor inconveniences of being squished in the car. They don’t wear long black dresses that cause lots of tripping, and they swim in the beautiful sea with impunity. I only get to do that after a long run/hike with Capt. Roy and Matt through the remote rocky mountains on the edge of the city where no one might accidentally see me in my long shorts (borrowed from Matt, thanks man!). And I’ve come back to Capt. Roy already…how does that happen?

Last week I had several men-only experiences. First I went to a restaurant. Yemeni women rarely go to restaurants, or if they do, they eat in the “family section.” Most of them wear the niqab (face veil) and they would never be caught taking that off to eat in front of strange men. But being the scandalous loose woman that I am, I went with my coworkers (all men) to a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with Yemeni men who could not stop staring at me. We went upstairs and kicked off our shoes to join the rest of the patrons on the floor while busy waiters ran back and forth bringing rice and meat to everyone (there was a very limited menu…I think that was our only option). I mentioned to my friends that I, at least, was not worried about someone accidentally on purpose running off with my shoes. In spite of the joy that I got from that experience, then I declined the next invitation to eat with the boys. It felt creepy accidentally looking up into the shocked eyes of fellow floor-diners.

Here men and women who are not related rarely interact. Still, foreign women are sometimes considered the exception to this rule. I can sometimes use this to my advantage. In my neighborhood grocery store, there is always a shortage of my favorite whole-wheat pita bread. The man in charge of the bakery has become my friend as I often ask him for the bread. We have multiple exchanges in which he tells me to come back after sunset when the bread will be there. I do, but inevitably it is not. Then he tells me to come back in an hour. Still nothing. Finally, he is feeling very embarrassed so he ends up going to the bakery himself to retrieve the desired bread. I am almost positive that he never does this for any other girl. Once when I hadn’t visited the store in a while, I walked in and he came right over to me, asking if I had been ok because he hadn’t seen me in a week. He had been worried that something might have happened to me. He is not the only guy in the store who “looks out” for me. One time this random guy came up to me, telling me that he was my neighbor and asking why I don’t keep better control of my noisy kids who keep banging on his door and running away. I am pretty sure he is one of the Egyptian guys who live across the hall from me, and we DO have noisy kids in our building, but I really like them so I don’t care. I told him that they are not my kids, but they live above us. “What about your kids?” he asked me. “I don’t have kids,” I told him. “Oh,” sudden interest, “You don’t have kids? You aren’t married?” “Nope. See you later.” I decided this would be the moment to find somewhere else to be. But a minute later one of the security guards came up to me and asked if the other guy was bothering me. “No,” I said, “I think he’s my neighbor.” “Well, men are not supposed to talk to girls they are not related to. That does not happen here in this store. It’s forbidden.” I guess he forgot that he is also not related to me, but even though he was little too excited about playing my knight in shining armor, I’m glad to know that at least people are watching what guys in the store are stalking me.