The Woman who Fell from the Sky: My Year of Making News in Yemen Oldest City on Earth

Description

At a time of escalating tensions between the Middle East and the West, it's difficult to imagine a thirty-something single woman from Manhattan running The Yemen Observer in Sana'a, one of the oldest and most conservative cities in the world. But Jennifer Steil is no ordinary woman. When she is offered a job training young journalists in Yemen, she seizes the opportunity for a new adventure, despite the fact that she doesn't speak Arabic, loathes hot weather and has never taught a class in her life. In turn, her students think nothing of plagiarising articles from the Internet and can't distinguish opinion from news, but they are desperate for training and eager to learn. Never before in her career had she felt so useful. It was not until she took over as editor-in-chief for a year that the real challenges of living in a conservative Muslim country as a Westerner and a woman hit home. But along the way she makes friends for life with people whose culture could not be more different to her own and learns far more than she could ever teach. And proves that you often find love in the most unexpected places...

Before moving to Yemen in 2006, JENNIFER STEIL was a senior editor at The Week, which she helped to launch in New York in 2001. Her work has appeared in Time, Life and Good Housekeeping. She lives in Sana'a, Yemen, with her fiance, Tim Torlot, the British ambassador to Yemen, and their daughter, Theodora Celeste.