The cats

Animals are instant giveaways on how developing or poor a country really is. One of the first things I noticed in the Dominican Republic was how crazy thin the dogs were. They were everywhere (not really pets but they weren't "wild game" either) and they were clearly starving. When even the animals are starving, the creatures that eat the trash of the trash and often a number of items that aren't meant for any type of consumption, you know poverty runs deeper than you're likely to see or understand from a cursory glance.

The same can be said for Sanaa and throughout Yemen. When we first arrived in Sanaa, I was struck by two things: First, there are cats EVERYWHERE. Literally. I'm used to seeing dogs in other countries, but here, it's cats. The second thing I noticed is that there wasn't a well-nourished one in the bunch. As a matter of fact, the few that looked mildly healthy, I've been told, are probably pregnant - thus the "meat on their bones" in a very literal sense. They cry constantly for food whenever it's around outside, they'll hiss and snip and fight each other for a scrap of meat in particular, and sometimes they sound so terrible that they don't sound like cats at all. More like sick children trying to meow like cats.

Sadly, the cats in Sanaa looked almost healthy to me when I got back in town yesterday. In a few cities we travelled to on the Red Sea, the cats looked like some creatures out of a Disney film...many hairless, some with eyes of different sizes or dialated to different sizes, and they really didn't look like cats at all. Beyond scrawny, they were more like deformed creatures with the head of a cat.

Yemen is the poorest country in the generally accepted definition of the Middle East region. Big cities can be deceiving sometimes. Sanaa certainly has its share of poverty that you could see instantly, but little things like the size of the animals or the color of the hair of a child give you insight into the reality of the homes or what life is like off the main drag. But I think that in many ways Sanaa has it much better than the rest of the country.