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May 20
2010
You Know You’ve Been in Yemen for Too Long When…

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  1. You understand the true meaning of “Inshallah”, and you find yourself use it even when you are speaking English.
  2. If someone tells you he/she will finish something today for sure, you wait for at least a week before you inquire about the status.
  3. You have multiple flashlights placed at strategic places throughout the house, and you designate specific activities, such as listening to audiobooks or exercising, for when the power goes out.
  4. The first thing you do when you get your TV and dish set up is to find all the English channels amongst hundreds of Arabic channels and move them to your “Favorite” list, or if you are not tech-savvy enough to do that, you write down the channel numbers on a piece of paper: BBC 46, CNN 87, Al Jazeera English 265, MBC2 345, DubaiOne 456…
  5. You are so used to eating with your hand that you skip utensils when you are eating alone at home.
  6. You hesitate to shake hands with someone from the opposite sex even if he/she is from your own country.
  7. You say bebs instead of Pepsi, bolees instead of police, and blaza instead of plaza.
  8. For women only – You can don a baltoo (the black robe) like a pro, but you can’t get the scarf on right.
  9. You have a dress (f) / white robe (m) set aside for attending weddings, and you hang it in a separate closet because it always smells like smoke.
  10. When asked how many children you have, you answer sheepishly : “Sorry, only two.”
  11. You have ready answers for personal questions like your age, marital status, religious affiliation, monthly salary, rent, and how much you paid for the dress/baltoo/TV/washing machine … and you wonder why you get dirty looks when you ask your countrymen the same questions.
  12. You can’t really speak Arabic, but you find yourself use “La”, “shuiya” and “khalas” all the time.
  13. You can’t really speak Arabic, so you try to get the most mileage out of the few words you know. “hatha good, hatha no good, hatha how much? hatha silver?” “Ana (while pointing to yourself) live in hatha bait.”, and you are optimistic that your Yemeni counterpart who knows as much English as your Arabic can actually understand you.
  14. You can’t really speak Arabic, so you use “la” to negate everything — “Ana la Amreekia.”, “mafeesh” to mean “don’t have any” — “Ana mafeesh fuloos”, “anta” when you are speaking to a man, a woman, or more than one person, and you skillfully avoid talking about two of anything. Miraculously, Yemenis can understand you just fine and would praise you for your excellent Arabic.
  15. You’ve been in Yemen for quite a while and you’ve even taken some Arabic classes, but you still call Khalid Kalid. Khalid is too polite to correct you, so you keep calling him Kalid.

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