Day 354 - A Quick Trip to Yemen

Samira and Sumayya, two women at the Sanaa embassy

Since Eritrea is so close to Yemen, I took the opportunity to fly to Yemen for a long weekend before I left Africa. I was looking forward to seeing the places I had enjoyed so much and especially to see the people.

One of my Arabic teachers at the Foreign Service Institute is married to Tim, an American who had joined the Foreign Service the year after I returned from Yemen. They had met when Nisreen was his teacher with the military before she joined State. Since they were both Arabic speakers, there was no doubt that they would be going to the middle east for Tim's first assignment. Since Nisreen is originally from Iraq and still has family there, that was the only middle eastern country Tim knew he wouldn't be sent to. In the end, he was assigned to Yemen. Tim and Nisreen offered me a place to stay while I re-explored Yemen.

One of the people I was hoping to see was Sumayya, my assistant for most of the time I was in Sanaa. Sumayya's parents were determined that she should marry. They had arranged her engagement before I arrived in Yemen, but by the time I arrived, she had broken it off, insisting to her parents that she was not yet ready to get married.  Then toward the end of my year in Sanaa, they pressured her again, saying that they wanted her to stop working as they felt her involvement with the embassy was distracting her from focusing on getting married. We had a party for her on her last day in the office, but as she was leaving she told me not to worry because she had no plans to get married and she was certain she would make her parents regret that they had forced her to quit her job. She planned to be back at the embassy in a short time.

Sandra and Sumayya at Sumayya's farewell party

Sumayya was just one of many Yemeni women who countered the stereotypical image of women in the middle east. While she, Samira the Human Resources Assistant, and the other strong Yemeni women I met wore the traditional clothing and behaved modestly, as society expected from them, they were not weak-willed and did not do what others wanted just because they were told to. Sumayya wanted a future for herself, a future where she knew she could support herself. This may have been even more important in her case than for the other women I met because she was the youngest of the children in her family. Even in the west her parents would have been considered elderly.

After she stopped working at the embassy, I continued to see Sumayya as she and others invited me to join them in their homes where they could relax and not have to be constrained by abayas and hijab coverings. One of the most interesting women I met through Sumayya was originally from Aden. I didn't get to know her well, but I was struck by the fact that when her mother called her, the two of them spoke together in English, not Arabic. From 1937 until 1963, Aden and the immediate surroundings were a British Crown Colony. Even before 1937, Aden was under British rule, but administered as part of British India. The British presence ended in 1967 when the Federation of South Arabia became the People's Republic of South Yemen. In spite of the fact that 35 years had passed since the British left Aden, its influence was still evident.

Sumayya got in touch with me as soon as I arrived in Sanaa. Since it was very rare for Yemeni women to drive, Sumayya had arranged for a car and driver to take us out of Sanaa, to the village of Thula, where the young children seem to speak all the languages spoken by tourists who arrive there. I had been there several times during my year in Sanaa. What was on offer at the Thula souq was no more interesting than what was on offer in Sanaa, but just watching the children as they interacted with visitors was worth a return trip. In many cases, the shops themselves seemed to be totally in the care of the children. The boys in particular learned quickly how to strike a good bargain.

At the time of my quick trip to Yemen, Thula was out-of-bounds for embassy staff, but Sumayya was certain she and I would have no problem getting around, especially since we had a male driver with us. And I knew I had my guardian angel, so we headed out for the adventure. I couldn't just look without succumbing to at least one purchase.  After negotiating and then rejecting the best price on several items, I ended buying a bundled string of extremely small beads the seller said were coral. He also assured me I would not see anything like it in any of the shops in Sanaa. He was right. The coral beads were actually clay, worth much less than that best price I settled on.

Typical wall of jewelry in the Sanaa souq

I also made a trip into the Sanaa souq where one of the dealers I spent much time talking with during my year in Yemen, Mohammed, asked me if I was still dancing with my car. He insisted that I come home with him for lunch so that I could meet his wife. I did meet her, but only through the crack in the door leading to the kitchen because Mohammed had invited a few other of his friends, all men, for lunch as well.  Lunch was delicious. The conversation was all in Arabic, so I spent my time listening, trying to figure out something of the topic. And afterwards, Mohammed and I returned to the souq where I made the rounds to all the shops I had frequented before, picking up a few trinkets here and there, to be polite, not because I needed anything.

Nisreen invited many of the staff of the embassy for a party after work on the Friday. I still feel guilty for all the work she put into that evening, with nowhere near the help she should have gotten from her guest. Many of the people who came were interested to meet me since they couldn't imagine that there was a person on earth who would choose to come back to Yemen after having gotten out. Life in Sanaa was much more constrained than it had been when I was there.

And since then, life has become even more constrained. All the staff now live in a hotel near the embassy compound. They are driven to and from work in embassy vehicles. There is no more exploring the streets, varying the route on whim or caprice or dancing with cars on the roads.

I am so very glad I had the opportunity to spend a year in Yemen in what were clearly the good old days.

Day 328 - Christmas Around the World, Part II

I wondered if my first Christmas in Germany was going to my loneliest because I had only arrived a few months before, I didn't have my Christmas things around me, and it seemed as though everyone else had somewhere to go for Christmas. Since no one invited me to join them, I decided I should invite a few to join me. But I didn't really want to learn that everyone else had plans to confirm that I was left out. So I came up with a back-up plan. I called a friend from my German class, Janice, who was in Bonn, and asked her if I could spend Christmas with her if it turned out that those I invited had plans already. She agreed, so I issued invitations. It turned out that several people agreed to come to my house for an early dinner on Christmas Day even though they had other plans for later, so I didn't travel to Bonn until New Year's Eve.

The loneliest Christmas I ever spent overseas turned out to be our first year in paradise, Barbados. I had arrived in Barbados right after Thanksgiving, and Alex and his son arrived the week before Christmas. Because Barbados did not have leased housing, we were stuck in a hotel room until I could find a house to rent. That is where we were for Christmas.

No one invited us to spend Christmas with them. I think it was because landing in Barbados is such a shock to most Americans that the tendency is to withdraw. The people I worked with had either just arrived (and were in shock) or were close to leaving (and were busy getting ready to leave). I suppose there were some who knew Alex and his son would be arriving and they thought we would like some alone time.

But on Christmas?

by  smcgee 

We joined the other guests at the hotel, all of them tourists, for a festive Christmas buffet on Christmas Eve. That, and the fact that the TV reported that President Nicolai Ceaucescu and his wife Elena of Romania were shot by firing squad that morning, is all I remember from that Christmas.

Our second Christmas was much better. One of the secretaries, Brenda*, invited Alex and me along with her boss and his family to her house for Christmas Day. She had picked up a large piece of driftwood from the beach in front of her house, painted it white, stuck it in a bucket and hung her ornaments on it as a Caribbean Christmas tree. The only black mark on the day was when Brenda's boss' wife said something about the embassy needing some good admin people. I felt compelled to counter that the embassy needed some more good admin people. Conversation died at that point for a few minutes.

Christmas in Moldova rivaled Christmas in Iran for discomfort as our Codru Hotel apartment in Chisinau was on the city's, not something so small as a building's, central heating plant. Most office and apartment buildings relied on steam heat which was never turned on before October 1 and was turned off in March. The year we moved to Moldova, however, the entire steam delivery system had to be repaired, delaying the start of the plant by a month or more. Again, the laws of physics didn't seem to apply as the heat never rose to our level. We used to go to work on the weekend to keep warm. In the evening, I went to bed very early so I could warm up under the covers.

Christmas tree in our Hotel Codru
apartment

Our second Christmas in Moldova, we were living again at the Hotel Codru, but by this time we had filled the apartment with furniture which helped warm it up. And we also invited lots of people over all the time. Body heat, as well as conversation, added a lot to our comfort.

That year, we also celebrated with the local employees. It turned out not to be such a good idea, but we Americans all brought in many wrapped gifts for a New England gift exchange - the kind where everyone has a number and when your number is drawn from the hat, you pick out a present from the pile unless someone has already opened a present you would like instead, in which case you can take that one and the person who had it gets to pick again. It probably has a few other names, too. It wasn't such a good idea because the local employees had a hard time understanding why anyone would want to take away a gift from them. It was fun for the Americans, but mystifying or even cruel in the eyes of the local employees.

While I was in Yemen, I got away twice to spend time with Alex. The first time was after the travel conference I attended in Budapest, and the second was at Christmas when I joined him in England where we stayed with his mom. Alex's son was still living in England at that time, so it was a great opportunity to spend the holiday with Alex's family - Mom, son Simon, brother Wayne, sister-in-law June, their son Steven and his wife Shelly.

Alex at the embassy Christmas party

Alex and I were able to spend Christmas together while I was in Africa as well. I was in Madagascar, the first of my three African countries. Alex flew in just before Christmas, in time for the embassy part at the ambassador's residence. After that party, Alex and I drove with Gary and Kathy, my next door neighbors, to a nature reserve where we had separate cabins, spent the days wandering the reserve to watch and interact with the lemurs, and explore the other unique plants and animals on the island, the fourth largest in the world.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 325 - While Actually Employed

by  SalFalko  I knew there was life after retirement. I had been introduced to the While Actually Employed, or WAE, opportunities all the way back to my assignment in Doha when John was sent as our communicator while Steve was on leave in Australia to be with his wife for the birth of their second child. John wasn't the first TDY or temporary duty communicator, but he was the most memorable. He became part of our small embassy family so quickly that when we later needed a TDY communicator again, we asked for John. The TDY coordinator wasn't used to being asked for a specific individual and warned us that she couldn't make any promises, but she did send John. We ran into John again in Barbados and eventually spent a very pleasant weekend with him and his wife in Pennsylvania a few years later. In Moldova, we had a number of TDY staff, some sent from Washington where they otherwise worked, some, WAE. But it was Yemen where I began to see that working on a WAE basis after retirement was something quite desirable. One couple who arrived as a pair to help us were Ann and Allen. Ann was a retired consular officer who was one of several TDY consular officers sent to help Pat while Cynthia remained in Aden. Her husband Allen had been a foreign service officer back in the 1960s, although he resigned after a few years and chose instead a career in education. When he retired from teaching, Ann decided it was her turn to explore career options. She took the foreign service exam and entered the service just before she turned 60, right at the age limit. When she retired and explored WAE opportunities, Allen learned as a former Foreign Service Officer he too could work part-time for State. Allen was the first WAE GSO to fill in after David resigned. I think his first week on the job was the week of the ambassador's plane being hijacked.

Another of the WAEs who worked for me in Sanaa was Irene who also filled in as GSO. Her husband, Mel, was a retired regional security officer who worked for a company that provided training to law enforcement and security personnel. The ambassador had run into him while she was in the U.S. after the attack on the USS Cole. The ambassador arranged for Mel to come to Yemen to set up a training program for Yemeni security staff. Irene was our bonus.

Many more WAE staff were sent to Aden, some of them previously quite senior within State. When the FBI abandoned their Aden offices and moved back to Sanaa, these retired senior officials ended up in Sanaa, purportedly working for me. It was a bit intimidating to have the man who was the executive director of the Near East Asian Affairs bureau while I was the administrative officer in Doha nearly 15 years earlier working as GSO in Sanaa. I was especially pleased to have the opportunity to work with Georgia who had previously been the administrative officer in Doha and Sanaa. I knew how similar our situations were because people who knew her told me all the time. But since she was always ahead of me, she didn't know about the parallels in our personal and professional lives. She had also met her British husband in Doha, for example.

Working after retirement on a WAE basis is less than half-time work, but the idea of continuing to travel while the government paid for both the travel and accommodations made it a very attractive prospect for my post-retirement life. My career plans were set at that point for me to retire after two more years, at my 20th anniversary with State.

But plans, they have a way of not working out.

Day 324 - Ordered Departure

by  Loui Loui 

Each embassy must have a emergency action plan (EAP) and an emergency action committee (EAC) that develops, modifies, and approves the plan. At the time I was in Yemen, once approved, the plan was sent to Washington with a copy - and I do mean ONE copy - stored in a safe at the embassy because we wouldn't want the bad guys to get those plans. The fact that almost no one else within the embassy could get a copy wasn't as big a problem as it might at first seem. More on that later. But lest I leave an inaccurate impression, I want to state now that much has been done to improve access to those plans. My time in Sanaa was pre-Intranet, so hard copies were the primary documents. Soft copies existed in so many variants it was difficult to keep track of which was the final version. And the soft copies didn't have maps or other pictures worth a thousand words in them.

EAPs are the best example I can think of to prove the truth of President Eisenhower's statement, "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." I was rarely involved in situations requiring implementation of EAPs since my guardian angel kept me out of harm's way, but it was clear to me that no amount of anticipation could make a plan fit an actual event. Plans required that we identify essential positions and non-essential positions so we could quickly identify who would be ordered to leave and who must stay if the situation deteriorated. Ahead of events, position titles were handy shortcuts for these decisions. One consular officer, usually the chief of the section, would be identified as essential as resident American citizens would need assistance. The chief of the political section would be declared essential because that person was expected to have good working relationships with the leaders in the local government. The ambassador was designated essential. In the management section, the chief of the section was designated essential, but positions such as the financial management or human resources officers would be on the non-essential list.

But when an event occurs that triggers the need for ordered departure (we rarely used the word evacuation because that conjures up very negative images), the facts on the ground require adjustments. For example, in a deteriorating situation, the ambassador is often recalled to Washington either for consultations or to make a point with the local government about our government's displeasure with their actions or inaction. Or the chief of the political section may have just arrived and not yet met all the local officials, but a more junior member or the economic section chief has. Or the situation looks like it may require complicated logistics which makes the general service officer essential. Or the political officer may be a single parent who has no one to send the child to for the period of separation. The planning that went into developing the plan answers the question of how many people should remain behind, but the specifics of who should go and who should stay cannot be decided until the event happens.

When an embassy is in ordered departure status, no government employee or contractor is allowed to travel to the country without the specific approval of the Under Secretary for Management. The importance of that will be clearer later.

Another factor that no EAP can figure in is the experiences of those at the embassy when the crisis point hits. In our case, the ambassador was the DCM in Kuwait when Saddam's troops invaded. And she regretted not being able to get more of the embassy staff out of the country before they were beseiged behind the embassy walls. She didn't plan to repeat that, so her inclination was to order more of us to leave than the plan called for.

by  Rush Murad  Alex was able to come to Sanaa only once while I was there and his timing couldn't have been worse. He arrived just before we ordered dependents and non-essential personnel to leave. Because he was not on my orders, he couldn't be ordered to leave, but the ordered departure completely screwed up our plans. We had planned to travel to the Hadramaut to see the Manhattan of the desert and other interesting archeological sites. We also had planned to fly to Abu Dhabi for a few days. The ambassador insisted we not go to the Hadramaut as traveling there overland would take us very close to tribal areas that were not under control of the government. And if we left Yemen for Abu Dhabi, we wouldn't be able to return. It would not do for a request to the Under Secretary for permission for me to return because the request would have to explain why I was allowed to leave in the first place.

Another couple got caught up in the ordered departure as well. Pat was the head of the consular section. Her husband Steve had traveled with a TDY consular officer to Ethiopia where Steve had been a Peace Corps volunteer. They planned to be Ethiopia for just a few days. But the ordered departure began before they could return. The consular officer's suitcases were still in Sanaa. He had to travel to his next destination without them.

Steve's situation was more complicated. He couldn't return to Sanaa, but he didn't want to return to the U.S. because their daughter was getting married in Europe within a month. Pat and Steve planned to take their Rest and Recuperation (R&R) trip to attend the wedding. They had already made a significant adjustment in their plans as Pat had been assigned to two years of language training, one in Washington and the second in Tunis. Their plan had been to travel for the wedding from Tunis once Pat had completed the second year of training and then arrive in Sanaa for her assignment. But Pat was asked to give up the second year of language training in order to arrive in Yemen a year earlier when her predecessor made a last minute decision to retire. Pat gave up the training, arrived early, and now the ordered departure happened two weeks before she and Steve planned to travel for the wedding. The ambassador encouraged Pat to begin her R&R early. She did. Since Steve couldn't return to Sanaa, he also traveled to the wedding location early. I assumed (and you all know how that word can be broken down) that Steve's expenses for the extra weeks would be covered by the evacuation allowance (the only context where that term is used). I learned much later that because Pat traveled on R&R orders, their unexpected additional costs were considered their own, at least the first time the travel vouchers werer submitted. I encouraged Pat to resubmit them with an explanation from me, but I don't know if that happened.

Another couple who were expected in Sanaa also got caught up in the ordered departure after first adjusting their plans to accommodate the embassy. Michael was a first-tour officer who was assigned to Sanaa as general services officer. He expected to complete 30 weeks of Arabic, 4 more than junior officers usually were given for language training, because when he was assigned in the fall of 2000, we expected GSO David to complete his tour which would end in August of 2001. But then David resigned in December. So we asked Michael if he could arrive early in the summer instead of at the end of summer. This complicated Michael's plans because he and his wife had hoped to spend time in Italy with friends on their way to Yemen. After some negotiating, Michael agreed to come in May, provided the embassy would allow him take time off in September so he and his wife could attend a friend's wedding in the U.S. We agreed, and the bargain was struck. Michael kept up his half. We didn't do so well on our end.

First, the ordered departure occurred a week before Michael planned to leave Washington for Sanaa. His departure was delayed. But they had already sold their house, so they didn't have a place to stay. There is a predeparture allowance to provide ten days in a hotel, but the ordered departure extended past that period of time. They hadn't been evacuated, so the evacuation allowance didn't cover them. No one in Washington was willing to find a solution to their situation. I kept contacting new offices on their behalf until someone understood the need for their orders to be amended to provide extra days for predeparture.

House on a rock

Eventually the ordered departure was lifted, Michael arrived and got into the swing of things right away. At the end of his 30 weeks of Arabic training, Michael had achieved a higher score than most people did with two full years of training. We were very lucky to have him on our staff. He arranged for the farewell reception for the ambassador at one of the most dramatic locations near Sanaa, the house on a rock. The ambassador and I left Sanaa on the same plane at the end of August. In early September Michael and his wife returned to the U.S. to attend that wedding as we had agreed. 

And then two planes flew into the World Trade Towers in New York and another flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, VA on September 11. That resulted in another ordered departure from Yemen. That meant Michael couldn't return to Yemen. But no one from the embassy or the Near East Asian Affairs bureau of State contacted him to tell him he couldn't return. I sent him an e-mail message, his first indication that things had gotten complicated again. This time there was no question that he and his wife would be reimbursed for their expenses while the ordered departure continued. Once the ordered departure ended, Michael rerturned to Sanaa, but his wife decided not to return. She had never been all that keen to live in Yemen. But since they had sold their house, she had nowhere in Washington to live. I think she went to stay with her family elsewhere on the east coast.

Michael went back to Sanaa, but didn't want to be separated from his wife. The State Department hadn't yet started advising new employees that they would be required to serve tours without their family members, so he wasn't prepared for that. He requested his assignment be curtailed. Several others had done the same after the first ordered departure and the Department approved nearly all of them. But since this was Michael's first tour, his request was denied.  Michael stayed a bit longer, but he decided eventually to follow his predecessor's action and he resigned from the Foreign Service. 

The Department lost a very talented employee.

Day 323 - Death of a Local Guard

  

by  orangesky3 

In the midst of all the stress of the investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden and then the ambassador's plane being hijacked, there was a more personal trajedy for the embassy staff. One of the local guards, Rashid*, was killed in an automobile accident. He was one of the roving patrol team of guards. We also had stationary guards at both the embassy and at our residences. The roving patrol traveled around the city, checking out traffic conditions and potential security problems. Because they were on the road while they worked, they were usually the first guards sent when an embassy employee needed help, such as the two times I had flat tires with my Rav 4 in the first week I had the car. The first time, I didn't know where to find the jack. The second time, I no longer had a spare - it was on the car, replacing the first flat.

The roving patrol guards traveled in pairs in their vehicles. The driver in the car survived the accident. Rashid was in the passenger seat. He had been with the embassy's guard program less than a year. His parents were divorced and his mother relied on his salary for support. Several of us from the embassy went to sit with his mother, as is the custom in Arabian countries. It was one of the most uncomfortable hours I have ever spent. There was nothing I could say except that I was sorry. And that sounded so small, so insignificant.

As the management officer, I had responsibility to process the death benefit for Rashid's family. What we thought would be a simple process got complicated right away. First, we had to investigate what local labor laws would provide in this case. If that benefit was less than what U.S. law would provide, the  family would get the difference from the U.S. government. Getting the answer to the question took much longer than we expected. But it was necessary before we could process the rest of the claim. 

That is when things got very complicated.

by  DonkeyHotey  Because so many employees of the Department of State, both American and local, live and work in dangerous and risky places, State considers Workers Compensation as a benefit that employees can rely on. Most agencies consider Workers Compensation as a risk to be mitigated. And the Department of Labor manages the program for all of the federal government. They consider Workers Compensation as a risk, something to be managed, something to be thoroughly investigated and denied whenever the claim doesn't fit every requirement. And the first criterion they consider is whether the employee making the claim was in the process of doing his job at the time of the accident. We could hardly believe it when the Department of Labor asked us to confirm that the driver was on duty when he was killed. We thought it was self-evident. He was a guard with the roving patrol. Roving patrols drive around the city. He was killed when the car he was in was hit while he and guard driver were driving around the city. Therefore, we thought it was clear, he was working. But the Department of Labor often refused similar claims when, for example, a mail carrier was injured in an accident when his van was hit while he was driving to a restaurant for lunch, because he was off duty for lunch.

Once it was clear that the guard was on duty at the time of the accident, the Department of Labor claimed we took too long to file the claim so we had to start over, providing even more documentation. By the time I left Yemen, I understood the claim had been accepted, but the family hadn't received the settlement.

Fortunately, the office I was next assigned to, in the bureau of Human Resources' Office of Employee Relations, was the office at State that handled liaison between State and Labor for Workers Compensation claims. It was fortunate because things still didn't go well. Labor told us the check had been sent, but the HR specialist in Sanaa, Samira, contacted me about six months later to ask if I knew what happened. No check arrived. I went back to Labor to ask and learned that Labor had instructed that Treasury send the check using the embassy's pouch address. When the envelope arrived, the mail room staff didn't recognize the name. Too much time had passed since the accident, so their supervisors also didn't recognize the name. Since the name wasn't one of the American employees, the only people eligible to receive personal mail via pouch, and they didn't know there was an official reason for someone they didn't know to receive a check from Treasury, they sent it back to Treasury. Labor didn't know the check had been returned until I called to tell them the family hadn't received it. Once they verified that the check had been returned, they requested a replacement check be sent. I contacted Samira to let her know a replacement was on the way. But no check arrived. So we started again. Labor confirmed that the replacement was never sent and they requested it again, I advised the embassy the check was in the mail, the check never arrived.

I was in that office for two years and during that time, checks were requested again and again, but no check ever arrived in Sanaa. I concluded that the software that processed the check request - probably within Treasury, not Labor - had a safeguard in it to prevent a duplicate payment from being sent in the case of a death benefit. I believe Labor requested replacement checks. But nothing happened. And Labor dismissed my suggestion of the possible explanation.

 by  DonkeyHotey 

At the end of that assignment, I went overseas for another year, to Africa, followed by an assignment back in the same building in Washington, also with Human Resources. That gave me the opportunity to check on the death benefit again. More than three years after Rashid died, Samira was no longer working for the embassy and the family still had not received the death benefit. I am afraid I became a pest during the next year as I asked repeatedly whether the check had been resent. During that year, four years after the death, Rashid's family finally received a check.

Bureaucracy, don't you just love it?

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 321 - The Ambassador's Plane Has Been Hijacked

It turned out that the ambassador and her team on the hijacked plane were likely less stressed about the situation than those of us in Sanaa who just heard about it but weren't living it. It was the fear of the unknown that was so oppressive to us.

by  bottled_void 

We didn't know, for example, if the hijacker had targeted the ambassador and her team or if it was coincidence that the plane he chose to hijack had so many representatives from the U.S. government aboard. So we started from the worst assumptions. My head was filled with images of hijackings from the 1970s and 80s where Americans were shot and dumped from planes onto the tarmac at airports where the planes had landed for refueling and where negotiations between the hijackers and the local government never seemed to get anywhere. Stories of how the other "lucky" passengers on the planes were treated, especially Americans whether they were with the military or government or not, still conjured up nightmares.

Fortunately, I didn't have to think about those scenarios for long. And then, once the plane returned to Sanaa, we heard about how things went on the plane from those who lived it. Their retelling of the tale provided us with great comic relief.

First, here is what they didn't know.

The hijacker was alone. He managed to get onto the plane when he arrived at the security checkpoint at the very last minute. He had a pen pistol hidden in his shoe which set off the metal detector as he walked through it. But once he was on the other side, he removed something from a pocket and said it must be what set off the detector. He handed it over to the security guard and rushed to the gate to get on the plane. The security guards didn't stop him. Remember, this was eight months before 9/11.

by  Mycatkins 

The hijacker didn't speak English. When he entered the cockpit, he explained in Arabic that he wanted the plane diverted to Baghdad. When the pilot and the crew realized he didn't understand English, they communicated with one another in English, giving instructions that appeared to comply with the hijacker's demands while actually setting up the means to subdue him. The pilot told the hijacker the plane would need to refuel if they were to fly all the way to Baghdad, so he diverted the plane to Djibouti.  The pilot gave the crew instructions in English to be sure the passengers were not alarmed while he circled over the Red Sea as they formed a plan for subduing him. Once on the ground in Djibouti, the crew accomplished that by hitting him over the head with a fire extinguisher.

The hijacker didn't know there were official Americans on the plane. And he certainly didn't know that one of them was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen who had been the deputy chief of mission in Kuwait when four of Saddam Hussein's elite Iraqi Republican Guard divisions invaded that country. For the seven months Kuwait was occupied, the ambassador and the skeleton staff still in Kuwait were barricaded into the U.S. embassy. That experience colored many of her decisions when the embassy in Sanaa was ordered to evacuate non-essential personnel and dependents. But that is a different story.

Here is how the ambassador and others on the plane related the story as they realized something wasn't going according to plans.

The ambassador saw the hijacker go into the cockpit, but there were no announcements and there didn't appear to be any panic as flight attendants also entered the cockpit and returned to the passenger area without indicating there was anything alarming happening. But then she noticed that the Red Sea was on the wrong side of the plane. It should have been visible out of the windows on the right side of the plane as it headed south to Taiz, but she could see it out of the windows on the left side of the plane. Then she realized the flight was taking much longer than expected. She commented on this to the person sitting next to her, but neither of them were alarmed as there didn't seem to be anything else out of order.

When the plane landed in Djibouti, the flight attendants walked through the plane and quietly told the passengers they should all go to the back of the plane. Once they were in the back of the plane, the attendants explained that the plane had been hijacked, but they expected to get control of the situation, suggesting that everyone remain calm and quiet at the back of the plane.

Djibouti airport
by  saraabâ„¢ 

The defense attache and one of General Franks' advance team members pointed out that there was an exit out the tail of the plane and suggested they should instead open it and leave the plane. They opened the exit and urged the ambassador to take off her shoes and exit using the inflatable ramp that opened up. The chief political officer told me that his first, but only very transitory, thought when he saw the exit door being opened was that now they were really going to be in trouble because they weren't following the flight attendant's instructions. All the passengers were able to exit the plane.

Members of the U.S. embassy staff in Djibouti (two of them my former colleagues in Barbados) were at the airport when the plane landed. I imagine they all had similar nightmare scenes in their heads as the plane landed. What a relief it must have been to see the ambassador running across the tarmac toward the main building in her bare feet.

Did the hijacker see the passengers leaving the plane? Maybe. Maybe that was just the diversion the crew needed to knock him on the head.

Day 320 - Face Your Fear

 by  Kevin B 3 

Recently I presented a module from the Toastmasters International Better Speaker Series to my club in San Diego. The title was Controlling Your Fear. In these modules, Toastmasters International provides a general outline of the material to cover, but each presenter is encouraged to provide specific examples from personal experience, or even better, from the experiences of club members generally.

The Controlling Your Fear module began by describing triggers for anxiety, followed by describing symptoms of anxiety, and concluded with tips for how to control the symptoms in order to get through what has triggered the anxiety.

Triggers for anxiety include being confronted by new and unknown situations, facing the risk of failure or of looking foolish, and for budding public speakers, the possibility of boring the audience. The module outline goes on to identify the physiological responses our brain and body kick in when facing an anxiety-filled or fearful situation. The body releases adrenaline which is the source of all those stories I recall hearing as a child of people being able to do super-human feats such as a mother being able to lift the front end of a car so that someone could pull her child trapped under a wheel to safety.

What makes it possible for humans to do the near impossible, for a few seconds at least, is adrenaline causing the heart to beat faster which leads to extra blood and oxygen rushing to the brain, providing the boost in energy. But that blood rushing to the brain when there isn't some super-human feat to accomplish causes other physical responses: butterflies in the stomach, uncontrollable shakes, lightheadedness, and dizziness.

As I read through all the outline material for the presentation, I kept thinking about a January day in 2001 in Sanaa when I experienced nearly all those symptoms in response to being confronted by a new and unknown situation that had very great risk of failure.

It happened one day around lunchtime when the assistant regional security officer, Chance, came into the lunchroom and asked me to come out into the hall with him. The look on his face was very serious so there was no doubt that I had to follow him. But when we got into the hallway, he didn't stop. He kept walking in front of me. And I noticed that the back of his neck was red. I mean really red. It looked like he had fallen asleep under a heat lamp. And still he kept leading the way as we headed upstairs to the Community Liaison Officer's office. When Chance and I arrived in Kay's office, I saw that the regional security officer, the regional medical officer, and the regional psychiatrist were also there.

And that is when one of them - the RSO or A/RSO - said that they had just learned that the plane the ambassador, the deputy chief of mission, the defense attache (Kay's husband), the public affairs officer, the political section chief, and three members of General Tommy Franks' security advance team were on had been hijacked. The ambassador and the rest of the team were heading to Taiz where President Saleh was at the time. They had planned to meet General Franks in Taiz for meetings with the president who couldn't come back to Sanaa in time for the meetings.

I felt my knees buckle. I leaned my back against the wall and pressed my hands against it to keep from falling over. For the first time I realized that swooning wasn't just something women in Victorian times did. My knees nearly gave way and if I had become more lightheaded than I already was, I would have been in a heap on the floor.

Several of us then headed up to the DCM's office where the guy who had been filling in until the DCM who was on the hijacked plane arrived was watching CNN. The hijacking was on the news, so I thought I had better make sure I let my parents know I was OK. It was the middle of the night in Minnesota, so I settled for sending them an e-mail message - a very short one saying I was fine.

Then the crisis ended. Almost as soon as everyone who needed to know had heard the news of the hijacking, the news came that the plane had landed in Djibouti and all the passengers were fine. I sent another short message to my parents to tell them everyone at the embassy was fine.

The ambassador and her team never made it to Taiz. Once the hijacker was removed from the plane, it was refueled and headed right back to Sanaa. General Franks came straight to Sanaa and the ambassador hosted dinner at her home that evening.

During dinner, the phone rang and a member of the ambassador's staff came to tell her the call was for her. Initially she admitted she was annoyed that the call interrupted the meal. But on the other end of the phone was Secretary Colin Powell calling to let her know how pleased he was the everything had turned out all right. It was his first day on the job as Secretary of State. His call was so unlike anything we had experienced from the occupant of the seventh floor's most important office. It set the tone for the relationship between the Secretary and those of us who worked for him for the rest of his four years.

The next morning I got my mom's reply to my messages, "What happened?" was all it said. CNN stopped covering the event once it was resolved. I could have pretended it never happened.

But it did.

Day 319 - G-Men

by  Joss U 

When I was a child, I wanted to be an FBI officer. There were lots of TV programs about the FBI, including The Untouchables in the early 60s and The F.B.I. with Ephram Zimbalist, Jr, in the later 60s.

They were G-Men, Government Men. I thought of them as the ultimate good guys. I couldn't imagine why anyone would try robbing a bank or kidnapping someone because the FBI always caught the bad guys. Always.

I read somewhere that J. Edgar Hoover was determined no women would ever be accepted into the FBI as agents, and I thought it was entirely unfair.  So my goal became to become the first female FBI agent. But at around the same time I also wanted to join the Army because TV commercials showed women wearing ball gowns in front of mirrors while the narrator promised new wardrobes with the career that offered an opportunity to see the world. I was too much influenced by marketing.

During college, I got a different impression of the FBI while I worked one summer for my church. One afternoon a man in a black suit, white shirt, and tie came into the church office and flipped open his wallet to show his badge. He was from the FBI and told me he was there to confirm the employment of one of the upper classmen of Concordia by the church as a camp counselor two summers earlier. Since I had been at camp that summer and I knew the upper classman, I told him I knew that he had been at the camp that summer, smiling because I was pleased I could help. Remember that at this point I had positive impressions of G-Men. But his response to my statement took me aback. Instead of a thank you or any other positive acknowledgement, he told me it didn't matter if I could confirm where he was for one week of the summer because he needed to know the exact dates he arrived and left. And if he had left the camp during that period of time, the FBI wanted to know.

Well, that was me told off. So I contacted one of the pastors for the G-Man to talk to.

The upper classman in question was one of the only African American students at Concordia. Later I learned he had applied for conscientious objector status so he wouldn't have to serve in the army as a soldier. I concluded that the FBI was looking for reasons to question his patriotism or find even more damaging information about him. Or maybe it was just because he was black.

My next encounter with someone from the FBI was in Berkeley where I once again worked for a church and a guy wearing a black suit, white shirt, and tie came in to ask where the guy who lived next door in the apartment above the garage, also an African American, was. I had met the guy next door but the church rented the apartment to a woman so I saw her at least once a month when she paid her rent, but not him. I could honestly tell the agent I had no idea where the guy was. He gave me his card and asked me to call him if I saw the man next door.

As soon as he left, the woman next door came in quite aggitated to ask me if an FBI agent had asked about her husband. I told her he had. She said the issue was nothing and she hoped that I would just ignore the agent's request. Again, since I rarely saw her husband, I had little reason to think I would face the dilemma of having to decide to make that call. And the shine had definitely gone off the FBI's star for me.

During my State Department career, I only had one assignment where the FBI had assigned a Legal Attache (or Legatt, the title members of the FBI were given overseas), in Barbados. And that was a positive experience overall. But I did learn about the interagency rivalry among law enforcement. The regional security officer was jealous and suspicious of everything the Legatt did. Of course since then I have become an NCIS addict so the competition among law enforcement agencies is no big secret to anyone these days.

by  IceNineJon 

But my thirteen months of service in Yemen was an intense experience with the FBI, almost none of it pleasant. 

More than 100 FBI agents arrived in Aden after the attack on the Cole. Most of them - or those who came in waves as their replacements - stayed in Aden. The numbers scaled back considerably, but there were as many to protect them as there were agents to investigate. One agent, Jennifer, was assigned on a temporary basis to Sanaa as a liaison between the Aden operation and the embassy. When it was clear that Jennifer had established a good working relationship with the ambassador and the rest of the staff in Sanaa, her colleagues in Aden seemed to think she had been co-opted by the embassy. What a can't-win situation she was put into.

There was pressure from the FBI at all times for the ambassador to press the Yemeni government for more cooperation. The ambassador believed the Yemeni government was already doing all it could. Seven months later, the FBI informed the ambassador that they had credible information that they were in danger in Aden so they planned to relocate to Sanaa. The whole operation in Aden was packed up, put into the embassy cars, trucks, and buses, and driven up the country through some very rugged terrain to Sanaa. The FBI team took residence in the Sheraton Hotel in Sanaa, taking up whole floors for their living and working spaces, setting up metal detectors at the entrance to the hotel for all hotel visitors to have to pass through, and armed guards at the entrance to the parking lot. When they traveled between the hotel and the embassy, they traveled all together in a bus with armed guards sitting on the roof. We referred to them as a pod. 

A few days later, the lead agent told the ambassador they had further intelligence that it was no longer safe for them to remain in Sanaa either. She gave the ambassador no details. She said only that they would be leaving. Nothing the ambassador said could convince them to stay.

And then they were gone. 

Day 318 - Children

 by  CharlesFred 

Children were everywhere in Yemen. They were in the souq, at parking lots, outside of shops, they were wherever we went. It isn't that I saw them playing on the streets, at least not the way we played on the streets. It was more like they were working, at least when foreigners were around. But their work involved one of two things - asking for something or offering something.

The children around gasoline stations out of town all asked for pens, qalam in Arabic. Pens seemed more popular than gum or candy, the two things I thought they would want.

On one trip, we were surrounded by kids. It was a challenge to keep track of them as we handed out pens. One boy kept coming back for more. Each time he came back, I asked him if he hadn't already gotten one from me, and he shook his head insistently. I think I gave in once more, but I told him more often that I remembered giving him pen already. Still he smiled and shook his head with his hand still outstretched.

Children were also at intersections and in the dividers between lanes of the largest streets. Most often these children were there to ask for money, usually pointing to their stomachs or mouths to indicate they were hungry. Some people carried apples or oranges in the car to hand out to the children. We all heard that some of the children were sent out to beg by their parents who would beat them if they didn't come home with enough money. Maybe poverty would lead parents to mistreat their children, but what I saw of families was much love and care of children.

by  Kate B Dixon 

After the Thanksgiving iftar, one of the local employees, Abdul Ghani*, invited me to join his family the following Friday. It was still Ramadan, so we didn't have a meal. We sat around the living room as the children introduced themselves to me one at a time and then sat down near their mother. As each child joined the others, I saw how they leaned over to rest on their mother, some sitting on cushions at the back behind her so that they could all sit right next to her, the youngest laying his head in her lap. Abdul Ghani's wife brought out some henna and she and I, as well as the girls, dyed our hands with henna. We ended the day by taking a drive out of town in the direction of the mountains. Because we knew we might run into a police check point, Abdul Ghani's wife gave me one of her veils and abayas to wear so that the police would not realize there was a foreigner in the car with them. On that trip, the children sat with me and their mother in the back of the car, more across each seat than the cars were designed for, exactly like the road trips I recalled our family took in Dad's sedan - four kids in the back, Mom and Dad and the twins in the front.

There were adults as well as children at intersections, selling products to drivers as the cars passed, anything from soap and shampoo to boxer shorts for men. I always got a kick out of seeing Yemeni men in their dresses, scarves, sports coats and jambias hawking underwear along the streets. I bought a bug zapper from one of these vendors. It ran on batteries and looked like a badminton racquet. I threw it away, however, when I got a bigger belt of electricity myself when I touched it without knowing I had it turned on.

by  kgbbristol 

In the souq, whenever a camera appeared, and the sights were all begging for a photograph to be taken, children would appear and jump into the frame, always smiling. Whenever I carried bags in the souq, children, boys of course, would come up to offer to carry them. Sometimes the bags were as big as they were. They would follow me whereever I went and for however long I stayed, trading phrases in English they had picked up. The supply of children seemed unlimited. I don't recall seeing the same one twice. When we reached my car, I would give them a tip for their trouble.

There was one area where the children were the same each time I was there - outside the grocery store I shopped at most often. I saw them so often I got to know their names. The one I recall most was Sadam. Sadam and the others would approach cars as we parked them and ask for money. I used to slip them small bills most times. Then I learned that instead of giving money many Yemenis would point up to the sky to indicate that Allah would take care. When I did that when Saddam came up to my car, he replied by pointing down to his feet. He was extremely pigeon-toed, with his toes touching and his heels pointing completely the opposite direction. I never pointed to the sky again.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 317 - Where Did All the Garbage Go?

Garbage on the side of the road in Sanaa, 1999

During Alex's and my first trip to Yemen, we were overwhelmed by the sight of garbage on the side of the roads. More than a year passed between that visit and my arrival for my year in Yemen, and one day it struck me that I wasn't bothered by the trash. My first thought was that my brain was playing tricks on me by making what was common - the trash - invisible. Both Alex and I had noticed that phenomenon when we lived in Doha, although it took newcomers to help us realize it.

In Alex's case, the newcomer was the guy brought in from England to take his place. While Alex was driving the guy around the country, the guy kept asking him why there was so much litter on the side of the highway. It wasn't on the same level as in Yemen, but in Qatar people abandoned what they no longer needed by taking it into the desert and leaving it.  Refrigerators, washing machines, tires, and even occasional cars in the desert within eyesight of the highways were so common that after a few months we no longer saw them at all.

Example of the green in the distance
in Qatar that I just didn't see
by  derekbruff 

In my case, the regional medical officer came from Riyadh and I took him to the beach so he could see one of the few sports activities available to expats in the country. In his case, the phenomenon was reversed. He was so used to seeing nothing on the side of the highways that he kept commenting on how green the desert was. When I looked more closely, I did see the few green plants that hugged the desert surface. Later, when I traveled to Riyadh for three weeks of rest to overcome a case of bronchitis that I just couldn't shake in Doha, I understood better. The desert around Riyadh was uniformly brown.

When Gilder came from Bahrain shortly after my arrival, it wasn't her first trip as she had been traveling between Manama and Sanaa for more than a year already. So I asked her how long it took for her to stop seeing the trash. She laughed and responded, "Sandra, there isn't any trash anymore." She had been traveling to Sanaa since before the trash disappeared so she understood my question. But when I looked closer, I saw what she meant. My brain wasn't playing tricks on me. The trash was gone.

Clean streets after September 1999
by  stepnout

The September after our familiarization trip to Sanaa and before my return, Yemen celebrated its tenth anniversary of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) and the Yemeni Arab Republic (North Yemen) uniting as the Republic of Yemen. The then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh had all the streets in Sanaa cleaned in advance of the celebrations. Afterwards, crews of men wearing blue jumpsuits continued to pick up trash from the side of the streets.

The clean-up effort hadn't reached throughout Yemen, however. When we traveled outside Sanaa through villages, the trash was back, much of it having been first stuffed into plastic bags. The goats had no trouble getting into the bags to pick through the delicacies.

Poor goats in Sanaa.

Day 316 - The Souq

  

Tehran Bazaar
by  kamshots 

I didn't always enjoy shopping in the middle east. In Iran, I made my way through the bazaar often, but I didn't enjoy anything more than looking because in Iran bargaining usually involved trading insults. Bargaining went something like this in Tehran bazaars:

Prospective buyer says, "You want how much for that? You must be joking. It isn't worth half that."

In reply, the seller says, "Your offer is an insult! I wouldn't accept twice that amount. You clearly don't appreciate quality."

Or the salesperson simply grabbed the item out of my hands and put it back on the shelf.

Then there was the fact that my explanations for why I didn't want something were never accepted. "It's too small," I would say to explain why further discussion was not necessary, at which point the seller would lower the price. It took me far too long to realize that pointing out the flaws in the item was a buyer's strategy to get a lower price. I thought it was telling the truth.

But when I got to the other side of the Gulf that has two names, I noticed a different pattern. On the southern side of the Gulf, bargaining was a conversation among friends.  Prospective buyers and sellers got to know one another, usually over a cup of tea or soft drinks, before discussion of prices came up. This was a much more pleasant way to shop.

I enjoyed shopping in the souqs in Doha, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Dubai, Sharjah, Muscat, and Amman before I arrived in Sanaa. But I have never enjoyed shopping in the souqs more than in Yemen.

The souq in Sanaa's Old City is not like anywhere else, although Cairo's Khan el Khalili was impressive, too. The Old City is not just a marketplace. People live in the buildings there. It is a city within a city where getting lost was likely, but always a pleasant adventure.

Badeehi-style pendant

Bowsani-style pendant

Bowsani-style bracelet

Each person who went with me into the souq introduced me to a different aspect of it. Howard brought Alex and me into the souq from a direction it took me months to rediscover. The part of the souq he introduced me to would forever be Howard's souq to me. The public affairs officer, Chris, brought several of us on an tour of the souq in my first week there and introduced us to World Friend, one of the shops where the owner, Kamal Rubaih, made stunning modern jewelry from bits and pieces of traditional jewelry as well as pieces in the style of the traditional Jewish Yemeni silversmiths. I made many trips back to his shop where he also had museum quality pieces of art from pre-Islamic times hidden away in his attic. He brought a couple of them down for me to see once I had shopped there several times. The regional personnel officer from Bahrain, Gilder (who was also in Barbados while we were there) made one of her regional visits and introduced me to several shops in the central area of the souq where some of the shopkeepers pointed out the various styles of Bedouin jewelry - Bowsani, Badeehi, and Mansouri.

Necklace using Hadramaut design elements
by Kamal Rubaih

Necklace of grapes design by Kamal Rubaih

And then Kathy, who had been in Sanaa on TDY when Alex and I visited in 1999 and came back to help out while the financial management officer was in Aden, introduced me to Mohammed whose shop was just off the main alley and who made it possible for Kathy and me to sit in his shop to study Arabic and try out what we learned with him. I told Mohammed how much I enjoyed dancing as I drove down the street in my car. Three years later when I was able to travel again to Yemen, I stopped in Mohammed's shop and he asked me if I was still dancing as I drove. He also insisted that I have lunch at his home with his family. I let him lead the dance with the car as we traveled from his shop in the souq to his home.

  by  dietmut 

Gilder also introduced me to the Kashmiri Shawl shop which was stocked from ceiling to floor with the most colorful of designs, but hid an even more impressive treasure behind a door that didn't look like a door and was so low we had to duck down to get through. Behind it was a smaller room with every possible color and pattern of Pashmina shawls. I started out with basic black. But then I needed one that I could wear with my Yemeni-style evening dress for the Marine Ball. And who could stop there? I needed a red one. Then a black one with a border. Then a black and brown one with alternating squares of intricate patterns. Then a gray one with turquoise in the pattern that was reversible as a turquoise one with a gray pattern.

I spent more time in the souq than in any other place in Sanaa except my house and my office. I never felt threatened or in danger. Wherever I went, I was surrounded by children who asked me for a pen or to take their picture. They offered to carry my bags and when we reached my car, they would go through the motions that they had seen over and over, presumably without realizing what it meant: they would walk around the car, leaning down and looking under it and in the wheel wells, precautions we took whenever we had left our vehicles unattended in a public area to ensure nothing had been planted. One day during Ramadan when I foolishly entered the souq in my car, not thinking about the fact that the alleys would be packed with shoppers since the fast had just been broken, two men walking alongside my car got my attention as they indicated they would fold my side-view mirrors against the car to reduce the width I needed to get through and then they directed other cars and pedestrians to move out of my way so that I could get through. I knew my guardian angel was on duty, and she had lots of help.