| Escaping Yemen |
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Page 2 of 3 Again, I turned to all the reasons it was good to be here: Yemen was so different from my world in Southern California; it reminded me of how most of the world lives today; it gave me a glimpse into a land that few foreigners see. But in the face of Aden’s oblivion, these heady rationalizations fell on more than deaf ears. Even the war photographer who had been assigned to come with me on the trip, I reminded myself, had declined.
The main source of income in the villages of Yemen, he had informed me, was the kidnapping of foreigners; it was a custom going back centuries. But I don’t plan to be traveling through any villages, I had told him. He had looked at me as if to ask if I’d ever been outside Southern California. And now here I was, traveling through those very villages in the dead of night—in a rickety car driven by a man who seemed to know as little of cars as I did of tribal kidnapping. I’d had a confirmed reservation to fly out the following day, but—this being Aden—the plane had been canceled, and the next flight out might be whenever peace returned (the 23rd century? the 24th?). If I didn’t get out soon, I felt, I could become an honorary citizen of Aden in all the wrong ways: like the man who’d shown me around the graveyard, whose part-English ancestry still hadn’t translated into a legal way out.
I’d scrambled around town, tried to
find another flight out (before the 23rd century), asked the hotel
manager if he could help, finally found someone who had in turn found
an old and desperate and kind man to drive me through the mountains
to make a 4 A.M. check-in in Sanaa, the capital to the north, which
had been, and still effectively was, at war with Aden in the south.
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