"It made a difference to me."
CMS Make A Difference participant Annabel Goodhead spoke to John Martin about her time in Yemen.

 

Annabel Goodhead sat savouring a break from the demands of nursing at the busy Aden clinic where she worked as a CMS Make A Difference volunteer. She’d taken a few days off and set out to discover the eastern part of Yemen.  

Suddenly, the building shuddered to the sound of an explosion. The apartment door blew open. There was shattered glass everywhere. Gunshots, sirens and general panic reverberated outside. Her mind flew to people she’d got to know who lived close to the epicentre of the blast. What was wrong? Had war broken out? It emerged, eventually, that a family feud had boiled over, culminating in the bombing of a supermarket.

This bombing, Annabel admits, was far scarier than another incident in which she was caught up that made headlines worldwide.   It was during staff prayers one morning that news came through that a group of Western tourists had been taken hostage. Tensions had been building in the run-up to Christmas 1999.  There were rumours of plots to bomb British interests by members of the Yemeni diaspora.  Eventually, the hostages were freed but not before some were killed and others wounded, and the traumatised and injured hostages were brought back to Aden.

“We were the only Western clinic in Aden and so they wanted our involvement,”  Annabel explains.  “I first learnt they were in Aden when I had a phone call asking what blood type I was.  I went to the hospital because I had the right blood group.”  For the next few days the team from the clinic spent all its waking hours treating and supporting the former hostages.   “I ended up being a runner, finding out what they needed: things like toothbrushes, or locating their credit cards and passports.”

One task was supporting the nursing care that the women hostages received.  There was a language barrier.  Also, not surprisingly, they were very, very scared of the Yemenis.

Annabel checks a child's health in the surgery in Aden.

Annabel confesses to feeling mixed emotions throughout.  “As a nurse you have to deal with emergencies and so you go into emergency mode, telling yourself, ‘This is what I need to do.   OK.’  However, from a different angle it was completely bewildering.   I was meeting all sorts of officials, security people, agents from the FBI.  There’s no way I would have met them in the job I’d been doing prior to going out there.”

Annabel was asked to accompany hostages on their flight back to Britain.  It gave her an opportunity to see her church, her family and friends, and reassure them that she was OK despite all the sensational headlines and that she was a godsend.  “It’d been my first Christmas away from home.   I’d found it very, very tough.”

Inner struggles
The hostage incident constituted just one small part of Annabel’s 18 months in Yemen.   Aden is a port.  Volcanic mountains form a dramatic backdrop to it.   The clinic where she worked, based in the grounds of the old Christ Church military chapel, dates from the time when Yemen was a British colony.  Clinic and church nestle alongside each other within a walled compound.  

Annabel candidly admits to a series of inner struggles that began with the offer of an opening in Aden.  “I went straight out and found an atlas.  I had this idea that a young, single female going to the Middle East would make for quite an oppressive experience and not prove much fun.  It took a long, drawn-out process, a combination of writing a list of pros and cons, and finding a verse in Deuteronomy to open a new horizon.   I said to God, ‘OK, I’ll go to Yemen.’  But I threw out a fleece and pleaded, ‘Please make it beyond doubt.’  And I’ve never had so much peace about a decision before.”

The issue of how to dress prompted a lot of thought.  “Wearing baggy clothes but not being completely covered up, I stood out.   People knew immediately that I wasn’t Yemeni.”  People asked her Yemeni companions constantly, “Is she a Muslim?”  She concluded that it was possible to dress in a way that respected local sensibilities but didn’t oblige her to ‘cover up’.  She found that local Yemenis were happy with this compromise.

Annabel at semi-playful work

Adjusting
She had to come to terms with the prospect of working with children.  “I very much enjoy working as an adult nurse.  I enjoy children but I hadn’t particularly enjoyed my midwifery placement and my children’s placement.  It was OK but I just seemed to catch all their bugs.  I knew that the work would have relevance but there are adults, as well as children, who need health care and I guess I was sticking to my guns.”
  
Adjusting to a prayer life in Aden after church life in London was a major test.  She set herself the task of reading the Bible from cover to cover.  Reading the Old Testament in the Middle East proved enormously interesting in itself.  Aspects of Middle East culture, like the practice of washing feet, made practical sense in such a context.

Another highlight was building close relationships with local women.  One encounter led to a fascinating conversation with a neighbour about Jesus.  “Her English wasn’t very good and nor was my Arabic.  Her husband had a grasp of English and ended up translating for us.  I told her what Christianity was about.  She found the concept of grace hard to understand.  She had genuine questions, such as how did I, Annabel, know I’m going to heaven, and why don’t I cover up?”

Would she go again?  “Certainly!  The programme’s called Make A Difference.  I can’t vouch for it making a difference to other people but it certainly made a difference to me.”

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