Yemen, 3: Lindsey, 1

Yemeni's love Obama! Whoo hoo! Mind you, when the results came in I was sitting by myself at 7am downstairs screaming and jumping up and down, but since this utter failure to get excited about the elections, random people keep telling me "Mubarak! (congratulations)"
I am currently wearing the world’s sexiest balto (think witch costume). However, baltos are not sexy, so this is an inherent contradiction that I think I am just going to have to work with…
Regardless, it’s rockin. These big black tents aren’t too bad when you convince the tailor that creating a waistline is possible and add pearls. The lack of a burqua is also a huge bonus.
This past weekend I had a Yemeni cooking lesson with my teacher’s wife. Now, unlike my teacher, she speaks about 5 words of English and my verbal Arabic is still limited to highly useful phrases like “the picture is next to the door, the pen is between the book and the notebook, I want to go to the store to buy a pomegranate, and the names and occupations of various family members. For some bizarre reason, “knead the dough and then create a round ball” hasn’t come up in class yet. However, despite a couple of hours of somewhat awkward non-conversation, broken my a fun look through a photo album of her wedding pictures and family, I can now make a layered, honey-covered pastry known as bint al sahan (literally “the daughter of the pan”) and a yummy yogurt-spice-bread number that I can’t remember the name of.
Now she is 18 and pregnant, and after spending the afternoon together hanging out in her house, I suddenly thought “wow, I understand why she wants a baby. In fact, if I was her, I’d want a couple of little squirmy things rolling about.” And we are all familiar with how I feel about children, now aren’t we? About the same way I feel about coming back with a Yemeni husband. In fact, that is one of the few phrases I can say fluently “I am not married, I do not want to be married, my Dad doesn’t want me to get married.” Why? While it is tempting to inform the legions of confused women in question that we just haven’t found someone willing to pay the right price for me, but that my father is surely in negotiations as we speak, I have generally tried to stick with badly worded explanation of being 23 and unmarried being normal and A-OK in America.
The concept of not wanting children at all is even more foreign and I haven’t tried it. As women bear the primary child-rearing responsibilities and rarely work outside the home after marriage, it is seen as one’s sacred duty. With the exception of family, men and women live in essentially parallel, but rarely overlapping spheres of existence. Women have their houses to maintain, children to raise, and family and friends to keep up with, while men work and chew qat and, well, chew some more qat…
I blame qat chewing for the failure of the Yemeni government to be anything like efficient. All those tests I took and the special paperwork I filled out before I came so as to obtain a special visa? Yeah—to no purpose. Due to a failure of their embassy to appropriately mark my visa or pass on the information, I got to retake the blood tests and convince them that no, really, I don’t want to overstay my visa and illegally live in Yemen for months on end. I just want to stay till December! And for the record, having one’s blood taken by a woman in a burqua is rather disturbing; all you can see is her eyes and you can’t really understand what she’s saying as the large folds of fabric impede talking and she has a large needle. Bad combination…