Behind the Veils of Yemen

by Audra Grace Shelby

  I sat on the thin mattress that served as both mufraj and bed. Firdoos and Nabila fastened curious eyes on me as we drank hot, sweet tea served black with pink sugar wafers. I wondered if Firdoos could afford milk.

  I initiated conversation, attempting to understand their lives. “Do you have relatives in Hudaydah?” They did not.

  “Do you see your family often?” They went home once a year for eid al kabeer [the big festival a month after Ramadhan]. Firdoos went to Taiz, Nabila to her village in the south.

  Firdoos was a new bride of eighteen, yet to become pregnant. She had moved to Hudaydah from Taiz, where she had not finished high school. She was slightly plump and looked like she was smiling even when she was not. She wore a thin gold necklace, which she fingered proudly, and a thick black ponytail she displayed uncovered inside her home. She stayed alone while her husband spent long hours each day working or chewing qat with his friends.

  Firdoos had a small black and white television that played one channel. The thin maroon curtains in her one open window had been sewn by hand. I could see the uneven line of orange stitches. Firdoos wanted to learn how to sew dresses. She dreamed of being a seamstress.

  Her one tiny bathroom had a hole in the cement floor and a bucket of water next to the hole. There was no running water and no kitchen. Her water came from a faucet outside her back door. Her two-burner hot plate was perched on a concrete block next to the faucet.

  Nabila lived in an open shack in the yard of the villa across the street. I had seen the shack from my window. I had thought the rough lean-to was an animal pen. I had seen an oil lantern on a peg at night, but it had been beyond me to imagine the lean-to as someone’s home. My heart lurched when I learned that Nabila shared it with her husband, a tire repairman, and their three-year-old son, Mohammed. It lurched even more when I learned that the undersized, barrel-chested little boy sitting next to Nabila was her third child. Her first two had died from malaria and unknown causes.

  Nabila was thin but full-bosomed with a face too old for her nineteen years. She had not gone to school. In her village only boys were educated. Her brown eyes looked dismal even when she laughed. She sighed when she mentioned her dead children. She did not seem mournful; she seemed resigned.

  “Kan al qadar [It was their fate],” she said, moving her shoulders in a tired shrug.

  I looked at the tiny boy beside her. Mohammed’s brown curls crowned large brown eyes that drank everything in, including me. He stared intently at me. My attempts to make him laugh failed. I wondered if he ever laughed. His chest was puffed out like a strutting rooster. At first I thought it was intentional, that the undersized child was trying to look bigger. But I soon realized he was not. I wondered if his mother knew the signs of malnutrition and parasites.

  His mother’s head scarf slipped from her head to her shoulder as we talked, exposing her greased brown hair. She did not seem to notice, but Mohammed seemed almost alarmed. He quickly moved the scarf back in place and smoothed it gently back over her hair. He tenderly patted her covered head.

  “Shukran, habibi [Thank you, my love].” Nabila kissed him.

  Our visit ended after an hour and a half. Firdoos’s husband roared up on his motorcycle, and I knew it was time to leave. I invited Firdoos and Nabila to visit me. They nodded with pleased smiles, but their wary eyes told me they would not come. They urged me to return the next day with my children.

  “B’ahowel [I will try],” I replied as I went out the door.

  Nabila walked to her lean-to as I walked across the dusty alley to my home, a house that was more like a villa than a hut. I had been proud of our new house and its comforts. We had been led to it by local businessmen who insisted it was the house we should have. But now I was not sure.

  I thought about Firdoos and Nabila, barely out of their girlhood. I thought about the challenges common to their everyday lives. They seemed resigned to things I would not tolerate. I was beginning to understand their curiosity. They were less curious about me than they were about why I wanted to know them. Those who lived in villas never spoke to those who lived in huts. Villa-dwellers pretended that no one else was there.

  I unlocked my gate, muttering to myself. “How easy it is to let lives go unnoticed. Lord, keep me from letting any life slip by.” I went into my house and shut the door behind me.

  We pulled off the asphalt highway and bounced along a narrow dirt road. “Ouch! Can you imagine this in monsoon season? Look at the potholes!” I rubbed my head where it had hit the car window and braced the small bulge in my abdomen.

  “Sorry.” Kevin looked over his shoulder at me on the backseat. “I didn’t see that one. You okay?” he steered sideways to avoid another hole in the road.

  The guide in the front passenger seat grabbed his armrest. Kevin grinned at Omar. “Praise God for four-wheel drives!”

  “You doing okay, Annie?” I looked at the young nurse beside me. “A little different from Virginia, huh?”

  Annie laughed, reaching for the camera that had bounced off the seat. “Yeah, but I’m glad you let me come along. This will be the highlight of my trip.”

  “Glad you could come. I needed a partner. I don’t know any Christians who have been to this village yet. It’s pretty remote. You’ll have lots to tell your church.”

  “That’s a fact!” Annie grinned.

  I grinned back, but my smile slowly faded as I recalled my retort to Omar. Omar’s arrogance about his pure connection to Abraham and his disparaging remarks about the Bible and Jesus had spurred me to hot anger. It was my Lord he was making a common prophet and my Bible he was deriding as corrupt.

  I chewed my lip. I had nailed him with the differences between Jesus’ life and Mohammed’s, and I had won the debate. Omar would not venture another remark about Jesus or the Bible to me. But winning the argument had cost me an opportunity to demonstrate the loving relationship God offered to all people through the only way they could have it—through Jesus, His Messiah.

  I peered out of the window, letting my head bump hard against the glass. Oh, Lord, I cried inwardly. How can You use me when my mouth keeps getting in the way?

  I looked far beyond the dusty, difficult road to the endless expanse of clear, blue sky. Lord, I need to focus on You, to worship You in all I do, in front of everyone I meet. If I am doing that, then everything else will fall into place.

  The dirt road sliced the middle of a field edged by acacia bushes and a few banana trees. Dried grass waved gently on both sides as the road cut deeper through the field. A lone donkey grazed near the roadside, and a skinny brown cow grazed just beyond. They were undisturbed by our SUV, but a long-legged crane flapped its white wings and flew away as we passed.

  This was our first invitation into one of hundreds of Tihama villages. We had received invitations almost overnight. Doors that had not even been cracked now appeared wide open. We thanked God for the faithful prayers of His people and prayed for more workers as we struggled to be in several places at the same time.

  We pulled up on a sandy knoll under a large shade tree, and Kevin turned off the car engine. “We’re here!”

  “Al hamdulilah.” Omar stretched as he got out of the car.

  I looked at the village. A six-foot, mud-plastered wall surrounded a collection of ten or eleven huts. I could see only their round thatched roofs. A slight breeze rustled as a dove cooed in the thatch. A goat bleated in the distance.

  “Ahlen wa sahlen! [Hello and welcome!]” The young sheikh walked out of an opening in the wall. Two men accompanied him with wide smiles and curious eyes. They greeted Kevin, and he walked side by side into the village with them. Annie and I followed behind.

  Inside the wall, surprisingly large brown mud huts were scattered about sandy soil. Each had two square openings that served as windows and a single door propped open at the center. They were made of mud bricks plastered and painted with different shades of brown. Their roofs were thatched with bamboo reeds, branches and woven bar
k from palm trees.

  A woman appeared in the door of one of the larger huts. She hurried to greet me, introducing herself as the sheikh’s sister, and hugged me enthusiastically as I kissed her cheeks and greeted her. I introduced Annie, and we walked hand-in-hand with her toward her hut.

  A baby was crying nearby. I looked around, trying to locate the sound. Lying in the dirt three feet away was a naked baby girl not more than six or seven months old. She flayed her arms and legs and wailed pitifully as she wriggled on the ground. I flinched, moving involuntarily toward her.

  The sheikh’s sister stopped me. “Ahdee, ahdee [It’s okay, it’s okay].” She nudged me toward the hut.

  “But the baby? Why is she in the dirt?” I paused.

  “Ahdee, ahdee,” she repeated. “The baby soiled her clothes. It is nothing.”

  She introduced me to the other five women in the hut and motioned us to the center cot, one of four circling the inside wall. “Glissee, glissee [Sit, sit].”

  The cots were wooden with rope rungs and thin foam pads strewn with flowered cushions. Our hostess grabbed three or four and plumped them against the wall. She waved us to make ourselves comfortable.

  “Why is that baby in the dirt?” Annie whispered as we sat on the cot. “Doesn’t she know how dangerous that is?”

  “They don’t even know how dangerous unboiled water is,” I whispered back. “That’s why we need nurses like you for health education!”

  “Somebody needs to get that baby.” Annie was angry.

  “She said the baby soiled her clothes, but it’s more than that. I’ve never seen a baby treated that way. Look, someone got her.”

  We watched a woman pass by with the baby. She was scolding the crying infant, holding her under her arm like a sack of potatoes.

  I shook my head. “Something’s up with that. They don’t usually treat babies that way.”

  The women seated themselves on the cots around us and stared curiously. A few young girls sat between them, smiling shyly as they leaned on each other’s arms. A teenage girl had been reciting something from a torn piece of paper to an older woman. She stared at us along with the rest of the group.

  Several flies buzzed in through the open door. I cleared my throat and commented on the beauty of the village and the sweet quiet far from the highway. I told them how refreshing it was to hear the breeze in the grass instead of car horns and motorcycles.

  They smiled their pleasure and began to relax. They asked about my children, wondering why I had not brought them. I explained that they were doing their schoolwork at home with my friend. I did not mention my hesitation to take them to a remote village without exploring it first.

  The teenager began reciting lines again from her torn piece of paper. The older woman, who looked about sixty, repeated each line after the girl. I listened to the somber recitation. The girl was helping the woman memorize a surah [chapter] from the Quran. The older woman, who turned out to be 45, did not know how to read.

  “She goes to school,” my hostess said proudly, pointing to the teenager. “She is the daughter of my sister from the town.”

  I smiled at the girl, who sat straighter and read more carefully from her scrap of paper. “Is there a school in your village?” I asked the other women.

  “For boys only. In the town there is a school where girls can study.”

  “What are they saying?” Annie whispered. I quickly translated the women’s words.

  Annie looked shocked. “There’s no school for the girls? How do they learn to read and write?”

  “They don’t. Tihama villages have an illiteracy rate of 98 percent among women. What they know, they learn from memorization or by word of mouth. They can’t read it for themselves, not even their religion. They know it only by what they are told it is.”

  Tears glistened in Annie’s eyes. “Somebody needs to tell them God’s Word,” she whispered.

  “I know.” I held her eyes. “They need to hear it for themselves.”

  One of the women rummaged underneath her cot and pulled out a small stereo cassette player. She checked the batteries and put in a cassette. She motioned a woman to join her as Arabic music crooned from the player.

  “Do you dance?” the woman asked me.

  “Akeed [Of course].” I grinned. “Yemeni dances are beautiful.”

  Pleased, the woman wrapped a scarf around her hips and began to sashay with a partner. “Get ready,” I whispered to Annie. “Our turn will come.”

  “I can’t dance like that,” Annie protested.

  “Just shake everything that’s shakable. No one will care if you mess up.”

  Annie looked skeptical but stepped obligingly at her turn. We danced until the batteries slowed the music to a deviant drone. Then we sat on our cots and passed around bottles of lukewarm water.

  The women began to ask about our families in America and how we liked living in Yemen. Our answers were interrupted by our hostess.

  “You have a camera!” she exclaimed, eyeing my camera bag. “Would you make pictures of my children?”

  The other women agreed eagerly. “Aywa, aywa [Yes, yes]!” All eyes were on me.

  “Akeed [Of course].” I loaded more film as the women scurried for their children, who were playing with goats in the animal pen.

  After twenty minutes, one woman hurried breathlessly back with her daughter. The little girl was dressed in a purple satin dress with tulle flounces around the hem. Her hair was slicked into a tight bun, and her cheeks were damp and shiny. Other women joined us soon after with their children dressed in their best clothes. I was surprised to see the baby girl we had seen in the dirt. She was cleaned and dressed in a pink ruffled dress made of satin.

  “That’s the baby,” I whispered to Annie.

  I looked at our hostess. “Whose daughter is this?” I asked.

  The women looked uncertainly at each other. My hostess, Arwa, laughed nervously. “Her mother is not here,” she said and looked at me warily.

  “The pictures will be better outside,” I said.

  Each of the mothers took turns arranging their children. They cajoled the children for each shot, moving themselves a safe distance from my camera lens. The children were too intent on me to listen to their mothers. They stared at my protruding lens as if it were a weapon. At their mothers’ coaxing, a few smiled nervously, but a few seemed ready to cry. I snapped pictures quickly, distributing candy from my pockets as I finished each shot.

  When they were finished, the children scampered off to play, and the women went inside the hut. I packed away my camera, explaining to Annie that conservative Muslim mothers would not allow pictures in their homes because they considered them to be forbidden graven images.

  “But many make exceptions for their children’s pictures,” I said. “Even if they won’t let themselves be photographed.”

  “Are they afraid of the camera? Like it will steal their soul or something?”

  I laughed. “No. They are afraid their picture might be viewed by men in the film development process.”

  I suddenly became aware of a man watching us. He was tall and looked a little like the sheikh. I started to nod a greeting to him, but I realized he was not looking at us. He seemed to be looking through us. His eyes were far off, staring blankly as he muttered something and walked around in circles. His hand passed methodically over his face as he walked.

  “That must be the sheikh’s brother,” I whispered. “We were told he had a mentally disabled brother.”

  “Ta’allee [Come],” Arwa called to us from the doorway. She clicked her tongue when she saw the man walking in circles. “Muskeen [Pitiful],” she said softly. She waved him gently toward another hut.

  “Does he live in that house?” I asked.

  “Aywa. He lives with my mother. His wife is . . . she is not here.”

  “He is married?” I tried to keep the surprise from my voice.

  “Akeed. He is the brother of a sheikh. But he is taban
[tired, sick].”

  “What did she say?” Annie urged me to translate.

  “She was telling me about that man. He is married to a woman who is not here. The way she said it makes me think something must have happened. The wife must have run off.”

  “Do you think she was forced to marry him?” Annie grimaced. “I can’t say I’d blame her for running off.”

  “Maybe. A sheikh would have a lot of influence. Hey!” I looked at her. “I wonder if she was the mother of that baby girl.”

  “Is that why that baby is treated so badly? Because the mother ran off?”

  “Maybe. Or the mother was raped and unmarried.” I looked thoughtfully at her, then glanced at Arwa who was scowling at us. We entered the hut quickly and sat on the cot, tucking our feet under our skirts to keep from showing their bottoms.

  I caught a whiff of a wood fire. “Is something burning?” I asked Arwa.

  “They are cooking the bread for lunch,” Arwa explained. “Come, I will show you.”

  We followed as she led us outside to a round cement pit in the ground. It was three feet in diameter and less than three feet deep. Wood and charcoal burned in the bottom, heating the sides to a fiery hot. A woman took balls of dough and flattened them, twirling them in her hands like miniature pizzas. She handed them to another woman, who slapped them inside the oven pit. After they had baked, the woman scooped them out with a stick and stacked them in a straw basket.

  The bread smelled wonderful. “I’m starving,” I whispered to Annie. The women smiled, understanding my meaning. “Besurah [Quickly],” Arwa said.

  Back inside the hut, the baby girl swung in a hammock made from a strip of cloth tied between two cots. She had been given a bottle of milk to drink by herself as the women sat around chatting. Suddenly one of the women shrieked and clicked her tongue. I followed her eyes. A thin trickle dripped from the hammock to puddle on the dirt floor.