A Bus in Yemen
When I traveled the Middle East on my own, I always went wherever my heart guided me. This is one of those moments when I worried that my heart had betrayed me in the deserts of Yemen.
At the first checkpoint that was meant to deter the smuggling of guns and terrorists, a young soldier wearing a uniform that was two sizes too big, slowly climbed up the stairs to the bus,
“Where’s the American?”
I was shocked. I wondered whether he was talking about me,
“Of course he’s talking about me. How did he know I was on the bus? Did the police chief rat me out?”
I was motionless.
The other passengers on the bus were more confused than I was,
“There’s no Americans on here!”
One of them dismissed the young soldier’s question and another made a loud joke,
“Here I am!”
The officer lost his nerve and fumbled his way off the bus and disappeared into their makeshift stone office building in the middle of nowhere, Yemen. We all waited and everyone else chatted about how ridiculous that officer had been when an older, fatter officer stormed on the bus,
“Where is the American?”
By then I was prepared to answer,
“Here.”
Everyone on the bus craned their necks to see me slowly raising my hand.
“Bring me your passport!”
I got up as quickly as I could, but barely forced my legs to make the long trek down the aisle of that bus before he snatched the passport from my hand and stormed off. I had been stripped of my most valuable possession and didn’t know whether I should return to my seat or stand there with dozens of eyes boring holes in my back. My passport was my only connection to the outside world. No one knew where I was and my only hope, if I got lost, ran out of money, or was kidnapped was that my blue passport would get me out of trouble. I could hear Abdullah,
“They kidnap foreigners for fun!”
As my feet grew roots into the bottom of that bus, the other passengers grew more angry with the unexpected delay. Finally, he returned and thrust the passport back into my hand. I dropped my head and lumbered my way back to my seat and hoped the rest of the trip would go without any more delays.
The police chief had indeed phoned ahead, but he wanted to make sure I didn’t disappear along the way. Unfortunately, I was called to the front of the bus at every checkpoint and by the fourth time, the men on the bus had enough of the delays and started interrogating me.
“What are you doing in Yemen?”
“I’ve heard so much about how beautiful Yemen is that I had to see it for myself.”
“Are you Muslim?”
“No, I’m Catholic.”
“Do you work for the CIA? Is that why you are in Yemen?”
The tone of the questions immediately turned hostile.
“No. I’m a student.”
“Where are you a student?”
“In Chicago.”
Different men were firing questions in my direction and I was having trouble figuring out how to respond. When I was speaking Arabic one-on-one, I knew how to crack a joke at the right point to break the tension, but I was completely surrounded and the questions just kept coming. I could see people in the front of the bus shaking their heads as I stuttered to explain myself. All of the knowledge I had about Islam slipped out of my head. All of the arguments I had developed for why U.S. policy could be fixed and how we could partner with Muslim countries escaped my tongue. My trepidation emboldened them and brought more people to the conversation.
It was in that moment that I first experienced the deep suspicion that people all over the Middle East had for the CIA. Everywhere I went, people thought it was ridiculous that a tall, black man could be from the U.S. and if they believed I was American, then I had to be a CIA spy. If I weren’t living my life as an experiment to solve U.S.-Middle East relations, I would have just lied and said I was from Kenya and my native language was Swahili—or English. No matter where I went, though, I forced myself to experience the biases of fundamentalists and everyday Arabs. It was painful, but a necessary exercise if I wanted to have the influence over policy that I thought I deserved.
Just as the men started to really organize against me, the bus driver pulled over at a convenience store on the side of the road in the middle of the empty desert. In an instant I stopped being the most important distraction to the emptiness of the Yemeni desert and we all filed out of the bus. It was a small, one-story building painted immaculately white on the outside and miserably dirty on the inside. There were metal plates on the counter with cooked chickens for travelers who needed a quick snack before they hurried back to their nothingness. I had no idea how long those chickens had been there, but I got in line like everyone else and held my plate out as the man behind the counter slopped rice and tomato sauce on it. Once we paid, everyone sat on the benches together outside. Except me, I ate inside the store hoping to get some distance between me and my interrogators.