WikiFriday: Yemen

Ruins of the Great Dam of Marib

Yemeni Crisis (2011-present)

I have managed to learn and know almost nothing:

People in Yemen started protesting in 2011 against poverty, unemployment, corruption, and the then-president Saleh’s plans to change the constitution to stay in power forever. 

Saleh stepped down, a man named Hadi got to be president, but then the Houthis – their flag reads, "God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam" – took over the capital with the help of Saleh. Saleh was shot dead by a sniper in December 2017 (this last December!), resulting in a new civil war and a Saudi-led military intervention aimed at restoring Hadi’s government.

The war has blocked food imports. A famine affects 17 million people. 

Almost one million people have cholera, due to the lack of safe drinking water, caused by depleted aquifers and the destruction of the country’s water infrastructure.

In 2016 the United Nations reported that Yemen is the country with the most people in need of humanitarian aid in the world with 21.2 million.

Yemen

The Romans called it Arabia Felix (happy Arabia), as opposed to Arabia Deserta (deserted Arabia).

Have you heard of the Queen of Sheba? Apparently she used to live in Yemen, ruling over the Sabaeans, whose state flourished for over a thousand years and included parts of modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. Judaism, Christianity, and then Islam all touched Yemen. It’s been notoriously difficult to administer for a long time.

It was the Sabaeans who built the Great Dam of Marib around 940 BC. The dam was built to withstand the seasonal flash floods surging down the valley.

Yemen's motto:

 الله، ٱلْوَطَن، ٱلثَوْرَة، ٱلْوَحْدَة

Allāh, al-Waṭan, ath-Thawrah, al-Waḥdah

“God, Country, Revolution, Unity”

Revolution and unity. Hmm.

Per capita GDP (nominal, vs. PPP, whatever that means) in Yemen: US $1,500 US

In Canada: US $48,000

Did you know that Yemen's territory includes more than 200 islands?

Things I couldn’t touch on:

Aden and the Queen

Marxist South Yemen

Ottomans

malaria mosquitoes

Until next time.

WikiFriday: Blackstock, Sinclair, Senate, fertility

WikiFriday posts appear when I take the time to pursue my curiousities, often on Wikipedia. They started when I live in Morocco and I spent Fridays processing the thoughts and questions from the week.

Cindy Blackstock

David keeps mentioning her – “force of nature” – so it was time to learn. She is a Gitxsan woman, an activist for child welfare, and the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. She was born in Burns Lake, British Columbia, which lies along Highway 16 between Prince George and Smithers and apparently has a population of about 2,000. She was involved in a landmark decision in 2016 in which the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government has been discriminating against 163,000 First Nations children with chronic underfunding and the failure to ensure access to services. She has a bachelor from UBC (me, too!), two Master degrees, and a PhD. “Force of nature.”

Ok, I was going to stop there, but then I read more about the federal government spying on her, cutting her funding, and blocking her from meetings with chiefs. And then I read this Globe and Mail article on how she does ‘self care’, and have to share a few lines:

"I don't give power to negative forces. I've never been someone who dwells on barriers. I only keep focused on what we need, which is these children having a positive childhood.”

"I just need days by myself; I call them 'days of infinite possibilities.” Yes.

Murray Sinclair

The Honourable Murray Sinclair. Likewise, a search prompted by many mentions by David.

Senator, lawyer, and Chair of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009-2015, he was born outside of Winnipeg. He dropped some truth during the TRC work: “Reconciliation is not an Indigenous problem. It is a Canadian one.” After the TRC completed its Final Report in 2015, he stated his intention to retire from public life, but with encouragement from Manitoba’s Indigenous community, agreed to a nomination for senate-ship.  He has been a senator since 2016.

Senate of Canada

Ok, so then I had to look up the Senate of Canada, because, like most Canadians, I know nothing. And, like most Canadians, I respond to my senate education with, “Wait, what?”

Wait, what?

First, that it’s based on a “House of Lords.” That’s just funny.

Second, that there are 105 (105!) seats, and that their distribution is based on four “regions” – Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and the West. I see what you did there, Ontario and Quebec.

Third, senator “entitlements”.

Based on this Ottawa Citizen report in 2015, each senator gets a yearly salary of $142,400 before any extras for committee work, and $150,000 for research and office expenses. Yes, I multiplied that by 105 out of curiousity.

Senators also travel free on the VIA Rail. 

And:

“Senators who travel to countries where tap water may endanger their health are entitled to claim for bottled water (with receipts).” Ha.

"Senators are reimbursed for membership of Air Canada’s exclusive Maple Leaf club ($665 for worldwide membership)."

That last one is my favourite. How quaint.

fertility

I’m in my 30s. This comes up.

“a woman's fertility peaks in the early and mid-20s, after which it starts to decline slowly. While many sources suggest a more dramatic drop at around 35,[1] this is unclear since studies are still cited from the nineteenth century and earlier.” [Bold my own]

“One 2004 study of European women found fertility of the 27-34 and the 35–39 groups had only a four-percent difference.” [Bold my own]

And, because apparently I didn’t retain anything from sex ed (I’m not actually sure I had any sex ed): the fertile window is basically the five days leading up to ovulation, and ovulation day, which will come between day 10 and 17 (start counting with Day 1 being Day 1 of your period). Thanks, internet. Please, no one read anything into this.

That’s all I have time for. Next week I plan to be back, possibly with something around the Yemeni Crisis and the distribution of schools and teachers in B.C.

putting stones in moorland streams

èit: practice of putting quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn (Gaelic, Isle of Lewis).

How amazing is that? How long would it take to relearn that practice of placing quartz if we lost the knowledge of this term now? Are there even salmon still in the Isle of Lewis?

This makes me think about British Columbia, the salmon here, and all the vocabulary around hunting, fishing, and gathering contained in Indigenous languages. I wonder how much has been lost. I wonder what is still known.

Robert Macfarlane, in his book Landmarks, hopes that his European word lists about place "might offer a vocabulary which is 'convivial' as the philosopher Ivan Illich intended the word – meaning enriching of life, stimulating to the imagination and 'encouraging creative relations between people, and people and nature'.

"To celebrate the lexis of landscape in not nostalgic," Macfarlane writes, "but urgent."

'People exploit the what the have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love,' he quotes American essayist and farmer Wendell Barry, 'and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.'

My friend John just finished writing a novel set in California. He uses particular language. It shows love.

I feel so poor in language for the landscape around me. Coast. Kelp. Tide. Narrows. River. Island. How basic. Only recently did I begin to understand 'watershed'. As for 'doing in landscape' words, like èit, I can think of almost none. I wonder if this will change.