Qat Chew

So I may have dropped the ball over the last week; but let's face it, I'm in a new city wading through a language that makes the Labyrinth look like a McDonald's Playzone. Since it's late and I have an early get-up for class (the Yemeni weekend is Thursday and Friday) I'll post about the last two days rather than the entire week.
After another four grueling hours in morning classes on Thursday (we had class to make it up for lost time waiting for everyone to get it) it was time for the school-sponsored activity I was most curious about: lunch followed by a qat chew with teachers and staff. But Jo, what's qat?... I'll get to that.
After class about 8 of us hopped in the back of the school's pickup truck. Driving through the dusty, chaotic streets we made quite a scene - even before the troubles, foreigners were rare, and nowadays with the almost nonexistence of tourists, a truckload of white kids rolling through downtown was pretty conspicuous. If I had 50 riyals for every double-take I saw, I'd have a good $4 (that's a wad of riyals we're talking about). Drivers behind us would honk and wave or pull up alongside us to talk and Yemenis on the street, once they were convinced they weren't hallucinating, broke out smiles and shouts of "Amrika!" and "Welcome to Yemen!" with healthy doses of thumbs-up.
We walked en masse into a salta restaurant and grabbed seats on the floor for our low-set table. The restaurant staff brought out salta - large pots of a gooey mix of meat, spices and local vegetables that's cooked on top of blue flames in a furnace. They held these cast-iron pots, which when right off the flames could easily put you in the burn ward, with chunks of scavenged cardboard. Food is communal in Yemen and utensils are something only used by outsiders; salta is eaten by scooping it up with thin slices of bread (much like naan) and everything is shared with the others at the table; if you show up alone to a restaurant be prepared to share with total strangers. After the meal we gave one of our teachers money for him to take to the qat market while we rode back to my dormitory, which has the best mafraj of the college, a mafraj being a room on the top floor of a building that's either open-air or well-endowed with windows and lined with pillows and floor couches.
So you have some background on qat: the leaves from the qat plant are filled with chemicals that act as a stimulant (at its strongest it's been compared to Speed). Yemen is the largest producer and consumer of qat, though the plant is popular in several East African countries as well, Somalia especially. Qat's legality wholly depends on the country you're in; in the US it's a Schedule 1 (ie, like heroin, methamphetamine, etc), in the UK it's legal, and in Saudia Arabia its possession carries harsh penalties, even by Saudi standards. However, since qat use is constrained in the US to Yemeni and Somali immigrants, it's doubtful that a police officer would even know what qat was, much less that it was illegal. According to some of the older students here who've spent large amounts of time in-country and are familiar with the situation, some time ago the large number of Yemenis who work in the US embassy here were promised citizenship after a certain number of years; however, wouldn't you know it, right when a many of the Yemenis were about to meet the requirements set out by the embassy staff and State Department, qat was made illegal in the US; as those of you who are familiar with US immigration law know, any previous use of a Schedule 1 substance voids your application for citizenship. Qat is a near-universal phenomenon in Yemen and is conspicuously chewed for hours on end by men here. We're talking old sheiks, 10-year-olds, on-duty soldiers and, surprise, the embassy staff. These events could have been a coincidence, but it would have been odd timing for the DEA to suddenly decide to outlaw a stimulant that's very rare in the US (it's only a small, specific population that chews, and it's a huge pain to get qat into the country because it only has a 24-hour shelf life from the time it's picked half a world away. It's possible to find, though - several Yemenis were recently arrested in NYC for qat dealing). But as for the qat chew itself...
It's an extremely bitter leaf. You start with single leaves, gradually building up a ball of the stuff in the side of your mouth, making you look like a half-hearted chipmunk. Because of the bitterness, large amounts of sugary drinks are consumed throughout the hours of chewing, helping to explain the dire straits many Yemeni teeth are in. While apparently it takes more than a few qat chews to build up to the full effect, for my first time the worst thing that happened from this 'illegal' drug (remember, the same classification as crack) was having the same buzz you get from a good cigar. The worst thing about the stuff was scooping seven hours' worth of leaves out of your cheek - at least one of the students became violently ill in the process.
Today was low-key, with a trip to the supermarket and watching South Africa play Mexico. Watching the World Cup game wasn't ideal; while you have to buy a special card here to watch the whole month of games, the first day is free, meaning that 18 million Yemenis were tuning into the same al-Jazeera cable station. As a result we only got a signal some of the time, with the rest spent waiting around while listening to cursing Yemenis outside.