The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (15 page)

IT IS A HUGE RELIEF
finally to begin working. The anticipation and anxiety that have been building up since I accepted this job were harder to bear than the work itself. I don’t do well with leisure time or stillness. I had arrived in Sana’a just a day and a half before my first day of work, and that was more than enough downtime. I’m not type A, I’m type A-plus.

On my second day of work, I arrive hours before my staff. (I have a staff! Okay, I am a little excited.) Only Qasim is there, so I give him one of the Jacques Torres chocolate bars I brought as gifts (it is impossible to find good chocolate in Yemen) and three Hershey bars for his three kids (who aren’t yet picky about chocolate). When Radia and Zuhra arrive, I give them embroidered silk Chinese purses, stuffed with soap and chocolate and hand-woven change purses. Accessories are important in Yemen, where the basic outfit doesn’t alter much from day to day. Radia is shyly pleased, while Zuhra announces her gift to everyone in sight.

I hold my first staff meeting that morning. Everyone tells me which stories they are writing and when they will get them to me. It is difficult to pin down exact deadlines, because when I ask, for example, if Bashir can get me a story by one
P.M
., the answer is
“Insha’allah.” If God is willing
. Never, in my entire year, would I be able to get a reporter to say to me, “Yes, I will finish the story by one
P.M
.” In Yemen, nothing happens unless Allah wills it. And as it turns out, Allah is no great respecter of newspaper deadlines.

“Insha’allah”
is also murmured reflexively after almost anything stated in the future tense. It makes Yemenis nervous when you leave it out. If I were to say to a Yemeni man, for example, “I am traveling to France next week but will return to Yemen Thursday,” he would automatically add
“insha’allah.”

Ibrahim, who writes front-page stories for each issue from his home office, joins us, expressing great joy over my arrival. He invites me to a
qat
chew, which surprises me because I didn’t know that women could go to
qat
chews with men. But apparently Western women are treated as a third sex in Yemen and thus can wander back and forth from male to female worlds. Western men, on the other hand, do not have this advantage.

This explains why my male staff members offer me immediate deference. To them I am not really a woman; I am a giraffe. Something alien and thus unclassifiable in the familiar male/female cubbyholes. Were a Yemeni woman to take over the paper, most of the men would quit in protest. They do not treat their female colleagues with anything like the respect with which they treat me, and they’d rather die on the spot than ask a Yemeni woman for help or advice on a story. But oddly, they rarely mind deferring to me.

Al-Asaadi is the exception. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out that he
does
mind deferring to me, though he makes an initial effort to disguise his resentment. He is always smiling and polite, but he never shows up at the office on time in the mornings, when all of the other reporters arrive. He often ignores my deadlines, filing his stories when he feels like filing them. These things tell me that I may be filling his shoes, but he is still his own boss. Thankfully, though, he does show up to the editorial meeting on my second day and is helpful in suggesting which reporters should work on which articles.

After I send everyone off to pursue their stories, I spend the bulk of the morning editing a health story Najma has written about the psychological impact of eating various foods. There isn’t a single source in the entire piece. When I go to the newsroom to ask her to come talk with me about the story, her eyes widen in terror.

“This won’t be painful!” I say, trying not to laugh. “I am just going to help you.”

Zuhra rushes over to reassure her. “Do not be afraid,” she says as I lead Najma toward the conference room. “There is no one more supportive.”

I explain to the trembling Najma that we need to know where the information in her story comes from, so that our readers can judge its legitimacy. If we are to contend that Brazil nuts can elevate a person’s mood, then we need to be able to quote a specific study from a university or a hospital that proves such a thing.

This is all new to her. It seems she had thought that the mere fact that the words would appear in newsprint would give them authority. This was a common mind-set. One of the greatest challenges I would have working with Yemeni journalists is that they are too trusting, too willing to believe whatever they are told. In a deeply religious society such as this one, children are raised to take everything on faith, unquestioningly. The flip side is that they often do not feel they have to prove their contentions. I have to undo years of conditioning.

I spend the rest of the day editing other health stories and election briefs, and fretting about the dearth of stories we have for the front page. Farouq is still out, and he’s our main political reporter. There is no one to replace him. The new guys have none of his political contacts and no idea whom to call for story ideas or quotes, and the women are busy with culture and health.

Only late that evening, after running out through a rainstorm to cover a batik exhibit at the nearby German House, do I finally find Faris for the first time. I am happy, as I have a long list of requests for him, including reimbursement for my plane fare. I give him the dental floss he had requested from the States, and he is happy too. He gives me a warm little speech about how he now considers me family and that if I need anything at all, money or anything else, I am to come to him. He has VIP passes for me to cover election events, as well as hotel rooms, he says, which I hope means I will be traveling to cover the polls. (None of which comes to pass.) He also has a phone for me, but it is still charging, and no one is sure of the number, so I will get it from the office tomorrow.
Insha’allah
.

I GO BACK TO WORK
after this meeting to edit an unreadable story of Hassan’s. Despite the fact that Hassan was in my original class, every single paragraph of his story begins with an attribution. I call him on Luke’s phone to tell him that this is no longer acceptable. “Before you hand in anything else, please make sure you are not starting all of your sentences with ‘according to’ or ‘he said.’” Hassan, being the sweet and deferential man he is, thanks me enormously and says he hopes we can talk more about this problem of his.

My day began at eight
A.M
., and I don’t leave the office until nearly eleven
P.M
. that night. Salem drives me home, where I finish editing a few more stories in my small suite in Sabri’s dormitory over some carrots and hummus, the first real meal I’ve had all day. I’ve stumbled upon a foolproof diet plan: Take over a newspaper in a poor, semiliterate Islamic country, and watch the pounds just fall away.

THE NEXT DAY,
my third day at work, we close my first issue. It takes nineteen hours. Yet I am not unhappy, even with the overwhelming amount of work to do. The thing about being at the top of the masthead is there is never any question of leaving early or leaving anything undone. I find something very comforting about succumbing to this total commitment; it eliminates all other choices. I’m going to make this a better paper or die trying. I have nothing else to distract me. I am free of an intimate relationship, having just ended a turbulent on-again, off-again romance in New York; I haven’t time to socialize outside of work; and I have no other deadlines. I can give the paper everything. I will have to.

I wake at six
A.M
. and walk to work. Men stare at me as I pass—it’s unusual to see a woman walking alone, particularly one with blue eyes and uncovered hair—but their comments are mostly benign. Everywhere I go, I am showered with “Welcome to Yemen!”s and “I love you!”s. I stopped covering my hair after I realized it made no difference in the amount of attention I attracted and because Yemenis kept asking me, “Why do you cover your hair? You’re a westerner!” The morning is deliriously cool and crisp. Sana’anis are not early risers, so the streets don’t get busy until close to eleven
A.M
.

When the women get in, I consult with Zuhra, who is fast becoming my right-hand woman, and send Najma and Noor to cover a Japanese flower-arranging demonstration. Hardly real news, but it’s a nice easy way to break them in and get them used to reporting outside of the office. I have to send them together, so that neither has to travel alone in a car with a man. It can damage a woman’s reputation to be seen alone in a taxi with a male driver. There is no
Yemen Observer
driver available, so I have to wheedle the taxi fare out of the Doctor, who vigorously resists all attempts to draw down his allotment of
riyals
.

The Doctor. Everyone lives in terror of this tall, bespectacled man, who is not actually a doctor but the person in charge of administration and finance. He doles out salaries, takes attendance each morning, and serves as Faris’s iron fist of enforcement. The Doctor never speaks; he shouts. He shouts at Enass the secretary, he shouts at my reporters, and, inevitably, he shouts at me. Shouting in the newsroom does not always suggest displeasure, however. Many of the men shout as a matter of course. Often I run out of my office thinking I am overhearing a fierce argument, when really the men are saying to each other: “FANTASTIC NEW CAR YOU HAVE! WHERE DID YOU GET IT? HEY, DO YOU WANT SOME OF THIS
QAT?
IT’S DELICIOUS.” But when the Doctor shouts, it generally means trouble.

So far he is trying to be nice to me, so I get the taxi money for the women. I have to talk to Faris about providing transportation for our reporters; they do not have enough money to pay for these things themselves. I am amazed that Faris fails to provide his staff with so many essentials. My reporters are not given business cards, telephones, or press IDs and are even required to buy their own notebooks and pens. But they cannot afford these things on their salaries of $100 to $200 per month. No wonder they make a notebook last for weeks. I buy a stack of notebooks for them. I would buy them phones too, but my salary does not stretch that far.

I spend the morning editing the Panorama page, a collection of editorials from other Yemeni papers, and Najma’s article about a course that trains women to manage money. It’s an interesting story, but she hasn’t talked with any of the women at the workshop, other than the instructor. “You should have talked with a minimum of fifteen women who participated in the workshop,” I say. “Their personal stories are what would really make this interesting.” Too late for this issue. (I have to let a
lot
of things slide in this first issue.) But Najma seems to understand. So. It’s a start.

I write and edit all day, with no break, save for the twenty minutes I spend walking to the Jordanian sandwich shop with Zuhra. “You need to take a breath,” she says. Back at the office, Zuhra helps me figure out which pages are missing stories. Farouq still hasn’t turned up, so we have nothing for the front or local pages. I try not to panic. I ring Ibrahim at his home office to ask him about the election page, and he sends over two stories, promising a third by noon. Al-Asaadi promises at least one front-page story. Clearly we need more staff.

Luke swings around my doorjamb toward lunch, flushed with excitement. “Did you hear?” he says. “The crocodile hunter died.”

“No! Steve Irwin?”

“Yes.”

“What killed him, a crocodile?”

“Stingray. Right through the heart.”

“Jesus.”

“So—front page?”

“Perfect. We have nothing else.”

“It’s definitely of global significance.”

Luke pops into my office often, to chat or to trade stories. A half hour later, he walks in holding an enormous jar of amber liquid. “I just accidentally bought thirty dollars’ worth of honey,” he says.

“Accidentally?”

“Well, I was with al-Asaadi, and there was this guy he usually gets honey from, so I ordered some too, but I didn’t realize it would be this big! Or that it would cost thirty dollars.” He looks forlornly at the enormous jar in his hand. “I have enough honey to last me a year.”