Arms & The Man

Or, how to interview a heavily armed geologist.

This is the first of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers.

Recruiting geologists for a project is a tricky business. For all sorts of reasons, someone who comes across well in an interview can be an absolute antisocial nightmare in the field; hygiene issues, weird sexual proclivities (see Geologists Gone Bad), fucked up political or religious opinions, drugs… the list of transgressions is endless, but the end result is always the same; someone sitting alone in a corner of the cook house while everyone else plays cards and throws things at them.

I’ve hired nose combers to work in Pakistan, Iran, and Bulgaria. The biggest success was a team of young Bulgarian geologists we hired in the mid-90s for Anglo American’s exploration office in Sofia. The 4 guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250/month -good money in post-communist Bulgaria- they were thrilled to be working for a major mining company that wasn’t owned by a Russian oligarch. Each of the guys had a different skill set to add to our group -prospecting, logistics, drill program supervision and so on; a competent and adaptable project team that we used all over the world.

Yemen

A few years later I was back on the hiring trail again for the same company, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to hire a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.

Yemen is a beautiful country which has been well and truly screwed by decades of on-again-off-again (but mainly on again) wars. It’s also very tribal so you need good local knowledge to negotiate the complex inter-tribal politics.

There’s a not-very-reassuring definition of tribalism, Yemeni style: “tribal (is) those … whose primary identification is tribal, i.e. if the sheikh calls them to war, they come to his aid. And that applies to about 20 per cent of the population. The other 80 per cent are either urban or peasants, and they are non-tribal.” That’s OK then – only 20% of the population is prepared to shoot whoever their Sheik says needs shooting.

They’re Gooned.

To make matters significantly worse in this sad little country, most of the adult male population spends every afternoon stoned out of their tits on the narcotic leaf Qat. Businesses shut down mid afternoon while the men lounge around, big balls of masticated Qat leaves in their bulging cheeks, swallowing the juice.

Apparently, the effects of Qat are excitement, euphoria, loss of appetite and as I can attest, a massive drop in anything related to productivity in the hot Yemeni afternoons. A word of advice, try not to be in a 4×4 with a Yemeni driver when chewing time comes around.

As Qat cultivation has grown, agricultural production in Yemen has dropped and the country now struggles to feed itself. So, if anyone ever tells you Qat is harmless, tell them your mate Ralph says they don’t know wtf they’re talking about, and they should spend a week or two in Sana’a hanging with habitual users.

The Don

When we arrived in the city, we were blissfully unaware of the complexities of Yemeni culture and naively got down to work to establish a field team. The plan was to explore a couple of zinc oxide projects and eventually to drill them assuming Yemen’s nightmarish politics didn’t intervene and muck it all up (Spoiler alert: it did.).

Our local contact in country -a British expat called Don who worked for an Egyptian industrial company- had put the feelers out to the local university and let them know we’d be needing 3-4 English-speaking geologists. The University drew up a short list and Yasar and I set aside a day or two for interviews hosted in a meeting room in the Taj Sheba hotel, a small oasis of calm amidst the total chaos of Sana’a.

Yasar and I secured a big important-looking desk for the interview room and prepared a list of stock questions to ask in simple English, including which of the local tribes they identified with; a vital piece of knowledge given the different traditional tribal territories we’d be working in.

Thoobs & Futas

On the appointed day, the first geologist was shown in for the 9am slot. He was dressed in the traditional Yemeni men’s way, sporting one of two types of skirts, either a Thoob or a Futa: both good Scrabble words. The Thoob is an ankle length, long sleeved skirty thing worn by men in many Arab countries (see photo above). A Futa is more of a metro-sexual wrap around skirty thing -the type David Beckham might have worn on a Thai holiday in the prime of his fashion disaster years. They’re usually offset by a formal grey jacket, a small turban which I’ll call a small turban, and a cloth belt around the waist holding a traditional J-shaped Yemeni knife, the Jambiya. I was well used to the sight of knife-carrying men and knew they’d come to the interviews sporting them as part of their business finery.

Why, Hello There.

As he sat down I looked up cheerfully from my notes to introduce myself, trying hard not to butcher the polite “salaam alaikum” greeting. It dawned on me mid-greeting that he’d placed a loaded AK47 unthreateningly on the desk between us. Slightly alarmed, Yasar and I glanced at each other. Our Yemeni geologist friend didn’t notice our worried glances. He was busy taking 2 live hand grenades and a nasty looking pistol out of his jacket pocket which he arranged tastefully with a few metallic clunks next to the AK47.

The amount of weaponry shouldn’t have been a surprise to us. Most Yemeni’s cities are lifted straight from the slimy wet dreams of full-patch NRA members. Every man of a certain age openly carries a rifle, and some towns are known for their open-air arms markets where you can buy knock off AKs, rocket launchers, and tool yourself up for a full-on Rambo session if you really want to.

You’re Hired.

A man thinks of many things when faced with a heavily armed tribal stranger. Front and centre in my mind was how the fuck can I NOT offer this guy a job? He’s armed, he knows where I’m staying and at 6ft 1 I’d be easy to find in the old town of Sana’a where the average height of a grown man is 5ft 2. (They’re officially the 7th shortest population on earth.) It’d take him 5 minutes to track me down and introduce me to his fully automatic recruitment guarantee.

The rest of the day went the same way. Every 40 minutes Don introduced another geologist who’d come in armed to the teeth, clanking and banging as he stacked up his weaponry on the desk, while me and Yasar nervously shuffled our notes. I’d already scoped out the best spot in the room to avoid hot flying shrapnel.

When their time was up, they’d stuff the weapons back into various pockets and holsters, belt their Jambiya, and leave with a polite goodbye. In the end we arrived at a list of geologists we wanted to hire, and I left the daunting task of informing the unlucky rejects that they were still on the bread line to Don. Good old Don. Oh, and the project was a bust.

And Remember.

You need to immediately subscribe to this lightly armed blog using the bullet-proof subscription box at the top of this page. If you don’t, I’m going to turn up at your place with my Yemeni geo-pals and you’ll soon find out whether they like your tribal affiliation or not.