A trip to Sanaa

 Monday 30 October 1972

We left Hajjah shortly after 11am.  From the town it was a long, slow grind down to the bottom off the mountains at little more than walking pace for 2 or 3 hours, until we reached Suq al-Aman where we bought petrol (sold in jerry-cans).  From there to Qanawis which had the sophistication of a real petrol pump in the middle of a grass-hut village.  We continued on to Bajil, on the main road between Hodeidah and Sanaa.  The lowlands are now much cooler than a month ago.  There has been a lot of rain and some of the desert tracks have been washed away in the week since the Mission team came up to Hajjah.

1 November

We arrived in Sanaa at 2.15 in the morning of 31 October and I kipped down at Peter Dahlen's house.  The next day I was able to meet up with some VSO volunteers and the co-ordinator, Paddy Coulter, who gave me a run-down on who was in town - Richard Jarvis is away at the moment, and John Baldry has one of the VSO volunteers staying with him while his housing is being sorted out, but Paddy has offered to put me up for a day or two.

I was planning to go to the Cold Store to buy some goodies to take back to the hills, but first of all tried to get hold of some cash that my parents had sent out via the Midland Bank and the Yemen Bank for Reconstruction, rather than the United Bank.  Then I couldn't do my shopping because the Cold Store was shut, so I went by the International School, where I had a bite to eat.  I left the food at the Boyds and then went back to Paddy's via the Yemen Bank (shut) and a shop where I bought some shoelaces.  

Paddy's house is out of water, so no chance of a decent shower there - I shall have to ask if I can stay at the Boyds again as Paddy and his wife Angela are off to Taizz.

Hajjah is about the same size as Ferrette in Alsace, I guess, but there are several villages all very close.  Sanaa can't be bigger than 500,000 or so,but there are no accurate figures.  I shall try to get a lift to the hills above Sanaa so I can take a picture or two to give an idea of the size.  

Now we are into November it gets very cold at night in Sanaa - bitter, in fact.

I'm still trying to track down the £80 I was sent, and worrying that the pound is about to be devalued to $2.25.  After visiting the bank I went by the Ministry of Education to see Richard Jarvis (now back), and will be able to stay at his house for a couple of nights.

2 November

Visited the Higher College and met John Baldry and another British Council teacher.

Postcard to my brother, dated 2 November

3 November

Richard Jarvis offered to take a small group of us - John B, Mervyn (a volunteer) and Daniel (staying at John's) on an outing to a valley some distance from Sanaa called Wadi Dahr.  It was some miles away, along a rough track, but with spectacular views from the rim.

I've now tracked down the money from home, and now have about £180 in the bank here.  However, I'm wondering whether I should send some of it back - there are anti-governments rumblings here and rumours of a period of disturbance, if not of civil war.  The "Voice of the Free South" - a radio station in Saudi - is trying to get Royalist tribes west of  Sanaa to overthrow the government for agreeing to unite with the South.

Sunday 22 October

Tuesday 24 October, 1972

It's almost a week since the first of my cases turned up - just as well, as the weather is turning cold and windy.  If the other one doesn't turn up by next Wednesday I'll make a revised list for the insurance.  How the first one got here is a complete mystery - someone mentioned that after it had been found in London it had been sent London-Cairo-Taizz so how it was intercepted and retrieved by the Governor's man in Hodeidah, goodness knows.

Last Friday six Egyptian teachers arrived in Hajjah.  Apparently all the Yemeni teachers will be sent elsewhere, except for Munabbih, since there isn't a trained Arabic teacher among the Egyptians.  There is an English teacher in the Egyptian group, but the director of education said he wanted to keep his English English teacher.  The Egyptian English teacher wasn't complaining anyway, as he will go back to Sanaa.  It is quite amazing how alarmed the Egyptians get at the prospect of bilharzia and no electricity. 

What with the loss of my luggage, and the disappearance of most of the postcards I sent from Cairo, I'm not altogether impressed with Egypt and Egyptians at the moment. 

Last night the Yemeni teachers went to the education director with an ultimatum - either they stay in Hajjah or they return to Sanaa.  They refused to be sent out to some of the village schools in the governorate.  The director has therefore decided to let them stay to teach in the primary school, while the Egyptians, Munabbih and myself will teach in the prep school.

Thursday 26 October

Today I was supposed to be moving to the teachers' house.  However, no-one showed up to move my things.  Peter Dahlen of the Red Sea Mission arrived with the long-promised nurses.  He is going back to Sanaa on Monday, so if I can I shall go back with him and see if I can pop in to Aeroflot in Hodeidah and ask about the case.

Saturday 28 October

Yesterday I helped the nurses to move stuff into their new house, in the upper part of the town called Dhahrain.  There were one or two problems due to the fact that, although the Mission had been paying rent on the house for four months there are some women living in the house whose husbands are in different parts of the country and they have had to be "moved".

This afternoon it rained a lot in the afternoon.  I have taken a set of rainy and misty pictures .  I helped the nurses again with their move - I have been offered a free lift to Sanaa, so it is worth it!)

There was no electricity in the palace last night or tonight.  I went over to the post office radio office (where the generator is) to find out what has happened.  Apparently the post office has run out of petrol until the end of the month. One of the radio operators has offered to teach me the Morse code in Arabic.

Sunday 29 October

The nurses' housing sage continues - Peter Dahlen went to find the house owner to pay the rent, but he was nowhere to be found, so Peter decided to leave the money with the village governor.  But when he met him, it transpired that the governor had had the house owner thrown into prison for being obstructive about evicting the local women (though the medical team had not complained).  Eventually the owner was released and matters cooled down.  It seems that in this area anyone who won't co-operate in any way is thrown into priison.  I was told that when the men hired to carry the luggage from the Red Sea Mission's car to the house (about a quarter of a mile) refused to work on a Friday a warrant for their arrest was issued.  In no time at all they were friendly and co-operative.

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!