...and it was Christmas Eve

Bi Ali, Yemen

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a Christmas adventure on the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula from several years back. Click over to read the original published in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Behind us, a blanket of blinding white sand drifted two thirds the way up black volcanic mountains. The finger-like peaks rose up like a photographic negative taken of the Alps, that is until you looked closer and saw that palm trees rather than pines fringed the bottom of the scene. In the opposite direction the turquoise waters of a halfmoon bay ran out into the calm, deeper blue of the Arabian Sea. A calmness that was only disturbed by pods of dolphins that swam in and out of the natural harbor in search of tuna.

I unzipped my tent, shook out the sand and looked up at the craggy mound of black rock bordering the bay. Nestled up in the jagged rock was where, according to local lore, fed by a scarcity of pre-Islamic inscriptions, the ruins of the mythical frankincense and myrrh market of Cana were supposed to lie. Legend has it that one of the Three Wise Men set off towards Bethlehem, laden with local produce from these southern Yemeni mountains. It was already stifling hot and it was Christmas Eve.  

Further up the beach our mandatory security detail was also up. The young soldiers with feathery moustaches and patched up AK-47s squatted around a portable camp stove and were making qishr, a hot drink made from coffee bean husks, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom and generous amounts of sugar. Breakfast on the sand was fresh guava and flatbreads served with the thick black honey that local bees extract from the areas frankincense trees.

In between sips of the tea-like drink our driver Abdulilah advised, “It’s a six-hour drive to Aden from here, and that is if there aren’t too many sand dunes crossing the highway. If you want to get a last snorkel in, now’s the time to do it. We don’t want to be on that stretch of road after dark.”

As we sped down the mirage laden highway, adobe villages with whitewashed windows and tired looking date palms emerged from the sands. Live nativity scenes rolled past my window. Singing boys riding haggard donkeys up parched riverbeds happily waved as we passed. Less congenial women covered entirely in black were working the fields. They wore enormous conical straw hats perched atop their hijabs to beat back the unforgiving sun. When I asked Abdulilah to stop to take a picture I was met with a hail of stones that clearly demonstrated I should have asked first.

We pulled into Aden, a city some equate with the biblical Eden, just as the evening call to prayer echoed around the volcano crater that makes up the old city.

It was my task to find us something for dinner through the crowded streets completely devoid of any hint of flashing lights, Santa Clauses or snowmen. For our yuletide meal back in our hotel room I scrounged up a gaunt roast chicken, some flatbread and honey covered pastries to go along with the six beat up cans of Heineken we had found in one of the shadier markets.

Under the whirling blades of a rickety ceiling fan we looked back on the day’s events and enjoyed our meal. No lights, no carols and no sales, just the company of close loved ones was all that was needed for this festive evening.

Sectarian Schooling

Sectarian Classrooms

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look into some Spanish classrooms via the Levant and its sectarian divisions. Click over to read the original in Spanish published in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo)

I had never seen such provocative lingerie in shop windows anywhere else in the world. The silk strips found in the window displays in New York, Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo all seemed like chaste winter pajamas in comparison. True, it was the Armenian quarter of the city, but this was Damascus, the heart of Syria. It wasn’t a place I expected to see such open paeans to pleasure. But in the city where Saul of Tarsus started hearing voices and fell off his horse under the Bab Tuma gate, that’s how juxtaposed things were. That is, at least before the war.

Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood was akin to changing cities or even countries by simply crossing a street. The Shia neighborhoods with their posters of martyrs and the Sunni neighborhoods that flank each side of the walled city each meet in the Umayyad Mosque. A sumptuous building that was once a Byzantine church built from the ribs of a temple to Jupiter.

These predominant neighborhoods run cheek by jowl alongside Maronite Christians on one side of the street and Syriac Christians on the other, with the Druze just a bit further down. There is even a Jewish neighborhood, if now largely in name only. It’s a sectarian fragmentation that is reflected across the region, like the divisions found across the border in Beirut or 300kms south in Jerusalem, though without the physical barriers like their apartheid walls.

I hadn’t thought of my travels through the region for some time. At least since the world’s focus had been shifted away from Russia’s interventions in Syria to their more jingoistic intentions in Ukraine. That is until my daughter told me about the difficulties her class was having to choose what to do for their Christmas representation.

She believed her class should do one thing, something secular, while the other class should be able to do something more religiously oriented. This was because the classes had been split between those who go to Catholic religion classes and those who go to Valores.

At first, this seemed practical. No one had to leave their classroom simply because some were being taught the world was created in seven days while others were forbidden to learn anything new. But then I thought about it and realized that, while the ‘solution’ may be practical, it was the complete antithesis of the entire ethos of public schooling and its democratic principles of coexistence. A public school is  a place meant to bring together all different strata of society in one place where they can learn to live and work together. But my daughter’s classrooms had been divided along sectarian lines, just as the cities in the Middle East had been sundered and disjointed.  

The presence of sectarian religious education rather than a comparative focus in public schools has always puzzled me. The cognitive dissonance produced by hearing in one class about Adam’s rib, to learning about evolution, science and constitutional rights like equality in others, has to be daunting.

But if it is to remain a fixture of the system, the least that can be done is avoid a Balkanization of the classroom, because we all know where that can lead.