Yemen My Life: A Peace Corp Volunteer’s Memoir This weekend was the thirty-five year reunion of Peace Corps volunteers, Irish Concern, and other international organizations who served in Yemen together. We were innocent ambassadors to the ways of the country and Islam.  The baptism of my youth was in the glorious, incomprehensible, but always welcoming, land of Yemen. In the thirty-five years since, the world itself has changed dramatically. It’s not safer, ecological, or saner; in fact, it is the opposite.  Then it was possible to walk or drive from Europe, through Afghanistan, to Asia.  Sex was without the fear of AIDS. China was in the painful paroxysm of the Cultural Revolution, and the USSR was the sclerotic stalwart of the Marxist-Lenin-Stalin ideology (with far more Lenin and Stalin – I wish they’d had a bit of John Lennon, but that was a different revolution.)  It was impossible to imagine the Berlin Wall falling or the Iron Curtain rusting.  As we now have the media and government-fueled fear of Islam, at that time we had the fear of the big, bad “communists,” though the Marxism had been thoroughly bleached out, and the Stalinism and Maoism firmly pressed into every seam.  We were still wondering if the Beatles would get back together and if Paul was really dead. Nevertheless, it wasn’t safer or any saner; the insanity was different, with the Red Brigade and the Red Army factions in bell-bottom trousers spreading mayhem across Europe, and the PLO and Israeli Mossad (the un-secret service) engaged in their own unique terrorist activities.  There were oil shortages and the emergence of the oil cartels, the non-aligned movement – colonial states taking their first steps to independence.  And then there was Yemen at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula situated at the Bab Al Mendeb, the Gates of tears, the narrow entrance to the Red Sea. Yemen, the blessed Arabia, was hidden like a secret jewel, yet from the earliest recorded time, was always part of history in its own unique way:  The Queen of Sheba lived in Western Yemen in her Queendom called the Marrib, and her visits to King Solomon are noted in the bible. Yemenis were the earliest converts to Islam and the vanguard of the Islamic armies in the seventh century. was  the source of the frankincense trade to Petra and Rome, and the silver jewelry produced by the Jewish craftsmen was the most highly prized in the ancient world. Stories abounded of this verdant enchanted land with its legendary hospitality and fierce looking men, and when we arrived in the l970’s, the men still carried curved daggers called Jambias and Kalashnikov rifles in the city streets.  Nevertheless, like most Westerners, we were clueless to this culture and its history, and entered  armed with our Western expectations: No toilets?  No running water in most houses? Women in veils? Islam – few of us understood even the basics of what it was. Was it a bearded guy by the name of Mohammed from the Middle Ages? A God called Allah and several billion people who called themselves Muslims?  Lawrence of Arabia the King of the Arabs? This fog of ignorance was the foundation of our entry into the Blessed Arabia. The glorious part of our adventure was that we were so ignorant and such tabula rasa, though many of us had very useful technical skills, i.e., we were engineers, registered nurses, doctors, teachers, and such, but this technical prowess did not allow us a carte blanch entrée into this labyrinth culture that was a riddle inside of a conundrum.  The entrée had to be earned through trust, failure, disappointment, and surrendering all expectations. Yemen was always about context and relationship, but we did not really understand relationship; we understood the Western sense of affability, cordiality, and family, but we didn’t have the bone-rooted awareness of tribe and kin. Tribe and kin in the desert mentality is survival. Outside of tribe is exile. We came with our Western sense of impermanence and instant relationship, the randiness of the libertine l960’s, a healthy appetite for beer and pot, and naïveté firmly rooted in the lacuna of our experiences with life. Those who were most successful surrendered their expectations. Ironically, the night before leaving for Yemen I opened a fortune cookie that said, “Be prepared for anything and expect nothing.”  I kept that message very close at hand and near to my heart. The Fates were laughing and warning me.. Despite the cross cultural training we received, I still kept my Western sensibilities of what should be done,  how work should be conducted, when to show up for meetings, and the social conventions of modernity, i.e., like when a meeting is scheduled for 12:00 noon, you arrive fifteen minutes beforehand and the length of the meeting is as established. What a foolish concept in Yemen!  Life exists on Yemen time kept on a Salvador Dali kind of watch. You arrive more or less when the meeting is to start, you have some tea, you chat with the people in the office, and if the meeting starts within an hour – marvelous! Everything happens through the will of Allah: whether or not you show up for a meeting, when it starts, when it doesn’t, whether or not a person is ill, whether or not someone dies, and  every facet of life is through Inshallah – the will of God.  A fatalism perhaps born of necessity, and impervious to our Western desires for order and modernity. In Yemen, though occupied on the shores by the Ottomans,  unsullied by European colonialism and barely influenced by the intellectual richness of the Islamic renaissance,  a blind fatalism was a logical outcome, and it fueled the social and intellectual inertia that bound this country to an archaic past.  Even the notion of the world as being round was still seen as preposterous, strange in a country with high mountains that afforded the vista of sunrise and sunset on an arch across