Premature Evacuation

I have had 100 lifetimes of "goodbyes". The trade-off of getting to explore new corners of the globe is you have to leave the old ones. Nearly 2 decades of continuous travel, living in a baker's dozen+ of countries (plus a couple more than once) and carrying out voyages in over 100 others, one might even call me a professional nomad. But one thing was always consistent, i left on my terms. Whether the end of a contract or i just got bored, i packed my bags and wandered off into the unknown when i felt it was time. Yemen, however, was a different story.

Moving to a country on the edge, i guess there was always the real possibility of the s**t hitting the fan. Yemen has long been predicted to follow in the footsteps of Somalia or Afghanistan. Perhaps that was part of the original appeal. But with recent events in Yemen crossing some sort of imaginary line with the State Department, I had no choice but to leave with notification of evacuation. There were no possibilities to stay. The State Department is my visa sponsor and without thier support, the visa is cancelled. Trying to find another sponsor on no notice was not an option. The evacuation package is a nice one, as i sit here in my over-fancy hotel in Istanbul. But the worst part of the whole thing is the evacuation orders came from some suit in an office a million miles away. It was entirely unneeded, or at the very least premature.

The thing is, there's always something going on. Houthi rebels in the north, separatist in the south, so-called Al Qaeda in the east, Yemen is a perfect storm of problems. But this is common and even blasé. Sure the current anti-government demonstrations added a new tension, but it's all part and parcel of living here. And, as always, things looked MUCH worse on TV. In my neighbourhood in Aden, kids still played soccer on the street and old men gathered night after night to play dominoes on the corner. There was normalcy amongst the reported chaos.

Each city was different in terms of how the demonstrations affected day-to-day life. In San'a, things were organized and highly focused. If you didn't go anywhere near San'a University, you wouldn't even know anything out of the ordinary was going on. The protestors would chant and scream for a few hours in the morning, then settle in to chew Qat for the rest of the day. Aden was different, being a much hotter coastal town, most activities were in the evening, after Qat. There was no organization or leadership. Hence, camp were fractured into several different locations about town. The news would report "1,000s demonstrate in Aden" What they failed to mention is it would be a couple hundred people at different times and different suburbs, rarely lasting more than an hour.The sad part of the whole thing is people are dying, and they don't even know what they want. Asking around some want Saleh to leave, some want him to merely change his policies while others are protesting for southern independence or even "'cause my friends are doing it". Ask any of them about the day after the president steps down and no one has even the slightest idea. Tunisia has an ironclad constitution allowing for smooth transition. Egypt has an all powerful military. Iran demonstrations were led by strong opposition leadership. Yemen has none of these. I have no idea what the future holds for Yemen, but i was looking forward to being there while it unfolded.

Honestly, Aden was not my favourite place i've ever lived (it's hard to compare it to Moscow or Istanbul or Beijing or Tokyo or....). But the people are nice and the living is easy. It pisses me off i was forced to leave by bureaucrats and not by actual danger. But it's done. I have to laugh at their concern for my safety as i apply for new jobs in Iraq, Palestine and Sudan.