Food and Housing

Wednesday 4 October 1972

Last evening one or two things were explained to me about the food.  The gist of the letter I was given by the Ministry of Education was that the governor personally will pay me out of the provincial funds which he controls, rather than by the local education office.  He is also to arrange a house.  While he is not here, I am to receive 300 riyals worth of food from the palace kitchen and 100 riyals of pocket money, or I can have some or all of the 300 riyals and buy my own food at a restaurant or cook it myself.  I've told themn I would like to cook my own breakfast and dinner and have the palace lunch, which is what the German-trained doctor does.

As for housing, the room in the palace is a temporary arrangement.  However, there are housing problems in Hajjah, and it is envisaged that I shall stay here some time, although they are aware that a house would be preferable.  The other teachers are being lodged at the education office (which is actually another formerly royal building) until their house or houses are ready. 

The German-trained doctor is really helpful and helps by translating between German and Arabic for me when thinkgs get a bit too complicated.  Tomorrow he will take me to the market to show me the best shops for buying food from.  The other teachers are helpful, but they are as new here as I am and don't really know their way around.  The director of education, Abdullah Ali Anash, is very helpful too.

the fruit market in Hajjah

Last thing last night was that when I went back to my room the paraffin pressure lamp which the palace man had lit for me had gone out.  I made  bit of a hash of trying to re-light it and ended up breaking the mantle.  The lamp is called an "itreek" which is from "electric" (though it isn't).  A primus stove is called a "baramoos", which is the closest they can get.

This morning I went to the education office and had a look at the English teaching books they are using.  They are pretty dire - they are from Iraq, and the very first lesson of the first book has words like "knife", which I hope I don't have to teach as "kanife".  Then we went to have tea at the local restaurant which is called the "boofiya". 

The boofiya is in the middle of this picture.

Some more first impressions, etc

Tuesday 3rd October, 1972

Ismail came round at quarter to nine yesterday and asked why I wasn't at the school, but it turned out that school is definitely starting on Saturday.  I spent the morning at the education office sorting out paperwork.  Most of the other teachers who are here so far were there too - mostly about my age, and very friendly and helpful.

I was told that a truck loaded with arms to take to Qa'tabah on the border with the south fell off the road from Hajjah yesterday, and the driver was badly injured.

After the Education Office I went over to the hospital to get the water treatment pills that the German-trained doctor had offered.  His name is Ahmed Abbas.  On the way back towards the palace he pointed out the main water reservoir of the town, which apparently is the principal source of bilharzia in the town.  There was a project to pump the water out of it into some sort of filter plant, but nothing has come of that yet.

Hajjah seems ready for modern development.  When the new road to Hodeidah is finished, and electricity and water plants have been built, it will be quite an important community.  In Sanaa - and as far as I know, in Hodeidah - there is no municipal piped water system, and people pump up water from wells.

This afternoon the man who looks after the palace, Ahmed Shawsh, suggested that I go down to the palace's large majlis downstairs.  When I got there, he said that someone wanted me to visit them in their house, but I wasn't very clear who.  He took me to a very rough house on the edge of the suq, where I was left in a small room with an ancient woman who was smoking a hubbly-bubbly and whom I could only half understand (well, perhaps less than that).  It turned out that she was the mother of the palace Ahmed, and he shortly came back with some children who belonged to the baker who owns the house.  We stayed there for about 20 minutes and then went back to the palace majlis.

When we sitting there an old man about 70 came in - I think his name is Hajj Hamud.  He turned out to have a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the countries of Europe - including knowing that Scotland was part of Britain - though the countries he described were the ones on old maps.  He had been a bandsman in the Ottoman Turkish army and could hum - in an oriental sort of way - some Scottish tunes, and the British and German national anthems.  He came out with a continuous stream of jokes, using enormous hand and face gestures, leaving everyone in stitches.

 Hajj Hamud, who was in the Ottoman army, is on the left

Later on I went with one of the teachers to see the place where the lorry had fallen off the road - at the first bend in the road as it left Hajjah, it turned out.  It had rolled over and landed upside down a couple of terraces below the road.  Someone told me that was lucky - another vehicle had gone off the road at the same point some time before and rolled several hundred feet to the bottom of the valley and all the people in it were killed.

And now I have sorted it out - Hajjah was a Republican stronghold in the middle of a Royalist area.

Some first impressions

2 October 1972

In Hajjah people still talk of the Imams, and some still have their watches set to "Islamic" time - the day starts for Muslims at sunset (ie about 6pm) when they set their watches at 12, so they are six hours different from what you would expect.  However, the Republic abolished Muslim time and imposed infidel time.

Hajjah is actually very pleasant - fairly well spaced out, with a hospital, a preparatory  school and two new schools (secondary level) under construction, one for the boys and the other, placed just by the main mosque in the Hawrah area, for the girls.  But although the town seems to be quite well organised - almost developed - there is no piped water, and no sewage system, but the long-drop toilets in the houses are probably a lot more hygeinic than flush toilets that don't work (as in the hotel in Hodeidah).  I hope that self-sterilising filter candles are OK - I lost all my water purifying tablets in my luggage. The German trained doctor has told me I can get some water tablets from the hospital tomorrow, in case the filter doesn't sterilise enough.

Men in Yemen mostly wear a footah (a sort of skirt) or a thowb which is full length, plus a jambiyah - a ceremonial curved dagger and, except in Sanaa and Hodeidah, a rifle or sub-machine gun, most of which are Russian.  The Governor also carries a pistol.  On their heads they wear a sort of fez, but made of straw or something like that, around which is wrapped cloth to make a nice headcovering.

Hajjah is hotter than Sanaa when the sun is out, but when the sun goes in we are actually in the cloud, so it is rather cold and damp.  This afternoon has been cold and cloudy, and it is thundery weather now - maybe it will rain.

My food and tea comes from a kitchen which is outside, on the ground floor, so everything is only half warm when it reaches me five floors up.  However, I have invested in a primus stove (called a "baramoos" here) to make tea for myself.  I'm looking forward to that.

Ramadan begins next Monday (a week today) - no food to be consumed between about 6am and 7.30 pm.  Then, about 6 or 7 November, is the 'Id al-Fitr, which means break-fast feast, and lasts for 5 days (officially - unofficially, most of two weeks). 

The start of the school term has been delayed for a week so that the new teachers can see round Hajjah and get settled in - nearly all of the Yemeni ones are here now.  There are some others expected from Egypt or Syria in about two weeks.

I understand that the Governor may be delayed for some time because of the war with south Yemen - he is a brigadier or something in the army.  If the country gets plunged into chaos I shall probably have to leave, but with all the weaponry available and the fact that there are Russians and Chinese on both sides of the border, I doubt if the fighting can spread significantly.

Hajjah - finding my way around

1 October 1972 (still)

Later on the day I arrived I was taken to the palace where I met the director of education and one of two doctors in Hajjah - he was trained in West Germany for two years, until relations were broken, and then in East Germany.  Later I was taken to my room at the top of the palace - it's a small room with a separate toilet room off a small hallway, and a walled veranda sort of thing round three sides.  Later on the electricity in the palace was turned on - especially for me, so they said - and during the evening I played chess with the doctor (he won).  Earlier on I met a teacher called Azzadin who I had met in Sanaa and the British Council director, Richard Jarvis, had told to look after me. We went out and had dinner at a local restaurant (of sorts).

In the evening the electricity failed twice about 10pm and then went off altogether having borrowed a torch from the German-trained doctor.  That was last night.

This morning one of the servants at the palace brought me some breakfast at about 7am.  I have no idea who is paying for this food, but I dare say I shall find out in the next week or so.  Then I went downstairs to a sort of general meeting room in the palace.  Hamud was there, and then a number of us went to see the governor's representative in another part of the palace.  There I met a man who had spent a year in Small Heath in Birmingham.  Then I met someone else about my age, called Ismail, who took me to see the school which is rather rough and ready, and then the Education Office which is in an old building on another hill in the town.  Then we went to see the hospital again, where the German-speaking doctor explained that they were rebuilding the hospital because it had all been destroyed in the civil war.

It seems that Hajjah was in the thick of the fighting for most of the time the war was going on but I haven't worked out yet whether it was a republican stronghold surrounded by royalists or the other way round.  They have only really started rebuilding in the last year, although the war ended 2 or 3 years ago.  Then Ismail and a friend of his and I went to see coffee trees in one of the wadis below Hajjah.  Most of the agriculture in Hajjah is millet or qat - less coffee now because qat pays better.  Then we went to Ismail's uncle's house where we had coffee, smoked a hubbly bubbly (called a madaah here) and ate toasted millet and some sort of beans.

When we got back to the palace I found that my trunk hadn't made its way from Hamud's house yet, so Ismail went off to see what had happened to it.  Shortly afterwards several people arrived pushing and shoving it up the stairs, so I was able to unpack some of the things I had bought in Sanaa.

A bit later, about 1.30, Azzidin came to say hello again.  He is rather hard work and his English is not too hot, although he has been studying it in Sanaa and is supposed to be able to teach it. Unfortunately he doesn't understand the local Arabic dialect well either, as he is from the south somewhere where the dialect is quite different.  In the afternoon Ismail came to take me to his house on the back side of the hill facing the town called Naaman.There we chewed qat with a whole group of friends, smoked a hubble bubble and (ahem) drank some whisky afterwards. 

Naaman hill facing Hajjah town. The Education Department is the large building on the right hand side.

When I got back to the palace at about 8pm there was a kerosene lamp for my room which hadn't been there the night before, when the electricity went off, so I had supper and sat down to write this letter, then probably I shall go to sleep.

Hajjah - getting there part 2

1 October 1972 - later

The second part of the journey here.

On Friday (29th) I didn't do much in the morning, and Hamud asked if I would like to see some of the town.  I thought that might be nice, and so he told the guard who was with us to give me a quick tour on foot.  The guard set off at enormous speed so that I was mainly rushing to keep up rather than sightseeing.


We were supposed to continue our journey to Hajjah at 4pm, but the car - another Toyota Landcruiser - didn't show up till nearly 5.  We stopped by at someone who I think is the governor's representative in Hodeida and gave him my baggage tickets in case my luggage turns up, so that he can send it on to me in Hajjah.

We set off northwards from Hodeida along a pretty good tarmacked road, making me wonder if the road system in Yemen was quite as undeveloped as Professor S had suggested.  But after a short distance we came to a roadblock on the road.  Straight ahead, along the nicely surfaced roadway, was  the port, I was told.  We weren't going that way.  Our route meant leaving the nice smooth way and turning on to a sort of track in the scrubby desert beside the road which, the guard said, was the way to Hajjah.  The first part of the journey was interesting - the villages on the coastal plain (called the Tihamah) are all grass huts, and the people are very black.  We stopped at one grass hut village for tea, and later, at another, for supper.

The journey was eventful - we were travelling now in a convoy with a GMC pick-up truck loaded with people and goods and at one point our Toyota seesawed as it was going over an agricultural embankment and got caught on its transmission shaft.  This is because the road isn't very distinct, and is about half a mile wide in some places and we were following the tracks of a lorry which obviously had been able to get over this packed earth embankment.  We all got out and some of the people scraped away the earth from under the car until the wheels were able to grip again - encountering a scorpions' nest in the process, whcih slowed things down for a short while.  Further along, the road got wetter and wetter and we had to manoeuvre around enormous muddy puddles.  At this pint we were ahead and we noticed that the GMC had come to a halt.  We drove back to discover it bogged up to its back axles in one of the puddles.

People worked away to free it for about half an hour (joined by travellers in other cars coming along the road to and from Hodeida) until someone decided I must be getting tired (I was) and took me to a nearby village about three quarters of a mile away and ordered tea and a bed for me.  The tea shops in the grass villages had a kind of beds made of wood and cord where people can sit or sleep in the open.  After another half an hour the cars turned up along with the GMC and after a short rest we set off on our way.

At the tea stop earlier I had borrowed someone's radio, and had tuned in to the BBC.  They had said that fighting had broken out between northern Yemen and southern Yemen, and I reported this in my Arabic, which isn't very good yet, to the others in our party.  They assumed that I had misheard or mistranslated, and told me that wasn't the case.  But at the supper stop they listened to one of the Arabic channels and heard the same news and admitted that I had been right.

From here the road was really rough, and I was half asleep, but constantly woken up by jolts and bumps.  At some stage we drove along a rocky river bed for a short distance with water running alongside us.  Then at 2 or 3am we started to climb into the mountains.  We finally arrived here at about 6am.  Thankfully I was set down, with the trunk, at Hamud's house and I fell into a deep sleep until early afternoon when I awoke and was brought something to eat - Yemeni lunch.  Tasty!

Before I set off for Lebanon and Yemen my brother, Dugald, gave me a set of Arab League booklets which he had got from somewhere.  I have the one of Yemen with meand there's a picture in it of Hajjah where I now am, and it shows the former Imam's palace which is apparently where I am going to be put up until they find somewhere else for me to stay!

Hajjah! - Part 1, getting there.

Hajjah, Sunday 1st October 1972

Part 1 - getting there: down to Hodeida

Well, I got here at last!  Khalid, the Minister of Education's son came round at 1.30 on 27th and told me that the Minister wanted to see me now! so I went along to his house (near where I was staing with the Boyds, near Zubairi Street which turns into the Hodeida road.  After a cup of coffee with the Minister Khalid hailed a taxi and we went by the Boyds' house to pick up my brightly painted metal trunk and took it round to the governor of Hajjah's house, also not far away.  I'd got some blankets and other essentials, like a teapot, to equip myself for the western highlands.  The governor is called Mujahid Abu Shawarib - the Abu Shawarib bit means "father of whiskers", but it is a family name.

The governor and I and a couple of soldiers and one or two others left Sanaa at about 3 pm in a Toyota equivalent of a Range Rover.  The soldiers sat in the back with my trunk between them - it was rather larger and harder than they were expecting, and I think they found it pretty uncomfortable.  We swept off on the road to Hodeida.  The temperature rose and rose as we descended to Hodeida.  I think I had already forgotten how hot it had been when I arrived earlier in the month.

We arrived in Hodeida after dark, about 7.30pm and went to a rather basic hotel, the Red Sea Hotel I think, which was apparently the best in town.  Rather oddly we had a shared room - the governor, me and an official from Hajjah called Hamud Siraj, with lots of gold teeth.

On Thursday (28th) we had an early start and set off after breakfast in our convoy in the direction of the airport.  I hadn't a clue what was going on at first - there were enormous crowds there, and wild confusion.  A military officer was telling his men to stand on one side of the road to the runway and then on the other and pushing the crowds this way and that.  Finally a plane landed and the crowd-pulling event turned out to be the arrival of the President of Yemen!  He came out of the plane and shook hands with everybody in the first 30 yards of the crowd lining the road to the airport building, including me.  The governor kindly took a moment to ask the airport customs about my missing luggage, but to no avail.

After that we raced out of Hodeida in the middle of a convoy headed by an armed truck with an anti-aircraft gun for about an hour, again with me having no idea what was in store until it turned out that we were going to a place called Bajil about 20 miles back along the road towards Sanaa, where the Prime Minister was going to open a cement factory built by the Russians.  We sat in the guests stand and listened to a number of speeches before being given a short tour round the factory.  After that, the governor and I went with our retinue to a rest house built by the Germans where we had lunch and a rest for a couple of hours.

Next we went to the Republican Palace in Hodeida, which is actually very nice.  Then, later in the afternoon, the governor told me that he had to go back to Sanaa for two days, but that I would go on to Hajjah with the rest of the party. Somewhat surprisingly, since I had been told I might not be paid promptly (and possibly not at all) the governor gave me 100 riyals (about £8.50) for anything I might need - that's a third of a month's salary up front!

In the evening a person called Dirham who works at the hotel and had studied for the GCE in Aden invited me to go along to see an Indian film.  The film was pretty tedious with Arabic and disastrous English subtitles but an interesting experience.

Once again we were a threesome in the room at the hotel, the governor's place being taken by a guard.

Revolution Day in Sanaa, 1972

Wednesday 27 September, 1972

I was told the Sunday before last that I would be heading off to Hajjah last weekend with the Governor, so I bought some supplies - some blankets (Chinese cotton-waste blankets - cheap and very warm), a towel, a thermos, a water filter (which I made out of a self sterilising filter candle in a plastic bucket - much cheaper than a commercial filter), sheets, a flag, tea, milk (dried), some basic dishes etc etc.  Also bought a shirt since the one I was wearing kept on getting dirty too quickly.
I took a bit of time to see what stamps were available, as my Dad collects them.  I found that they print much larger numbers than needed, but don't withdraw the old ones, so that it was possible to find stamps commemorating the first and ninth anniversaries of the Revolution, even though we were just about to have the tenth (yesterday).

A week ago, Richard Jarvis took me round to the Ministry of Education to find out if I would be going up to Hajjah that day, and to ask about my residence permit.  No news of either the Governor or the residence permit.  Later that same day I went to see Qadi Ismail the director of Monuments and Libraries.  Prof Serjeant had given me a letter of introduction to him.  The person who took me to see him was Mohammed al-Shami, the director of the university, who I bumped into.  On the same mission I also met up with  Dr Costa, a charming Italian who runs the museum.  Actually I had already given him his letter of introduction from the Prof when we went to the museum a few days previously.  Mohammed al-Shami also took me to see if the Governor of Hajjah had arrived in Sanaa, but he hadn't.

I also visited a missionary called Peter Dahlen of the Red Sea Mission - he is arranging for some nurses to be sent to Hajjah to open a clinic there, though he will not be living there himself.

In my last letter I mentioned that news of the Munich attack was just filtering through.  It wasn't mentioned in the official press until 23 September, and didn't even mention Germany.  Yemen has to be very careful about what it says, particularly as it is receiving aid simultaneously from the US, Red China, East and West Germany, Britain, and others besides.  Apparently Yemen is rated by the UN as the 2nd least developed nation in the world - mainly on the basis of its administration, which isn't in control of more than half the country, and has no machinery for collecting taxes from resistant areas.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Revolution.

We had some power cuts in the run up to the Revolution anniversary - mainly, I think, because the illuminations for the 26th take up so much electricity that there is not enough to go round. I got up early and went out at about 7.45 to see the parades.  It was a bit of a struggle to make my way through the crowds to Tahrir Square ("Liberation Square") but I eventually found a good place to look from, helped by the fact that I am quite a bit taller than Yemenis and could see over their heads.  People around me were muttering "tawil, tawil" (tall, tall) and "tashuf tayyib" (you can see well), etc.  I was able to see the parade of soldiers (quite smart, in fact) followed by lorries and tanks etc.  A biplane flew over and dropped sweets on to the crowds.

For some reason I had not received an invitation for the celebrity stand where the diplomats etc were sitting, as were the foreign volunteers, so I went over and joined them after the crowds had started to disperse.  It was rather fun watching from inside the crowd, though, particularly as I didn't have any trouble seeing what was going on.

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On housekeeping matters, Cooks sent me a telegram telling me I could collect £50 refund for the missing travellers cheques in my luggage from the Yemen Bank for Reconstruction and Development but the bank said they knew nothing about it and wouldn't pay up.  However, a couple of days later the authorisation came through and I was finally able to collect my money.

While I was trying to track down my luggage (still) I tried to phone Aeroflot in Hodeidah a couple of Fridays ago to see if I could get the paperwork I would need for my insurance claim - only to find that there are no phone lines to Hodeidah open on Fridays.

I have to finish in haste as I have just learned that we are setting off for Hajjah today - more in my next one.  And I'll try to add a picture or two of the Revolution Day parade when I can.