U.S. Ideals Meet Reality in Yemen

This is his attitude not only for Iraq, but also for Yemen, which shares a porous thousand-mile-long border with Saudi Arabia, is crisscrossed with smuggling routes and was described not that long ago as a haven for terrorists. "You have a poor country that's important to us strategically because we don't want to see it become a failed state," he says. "Yemen's right at this point where it could go either way. It's a race against time."

Carpenter is not alone in such direness: Freedom House ranks Yemen barely above "not free," Save the Children ranks it as the fifth-worst place in the world to be a mother or child, and the United Nations Development Program ranks it as No. 151 of 177 countries on its Human Development Index, which makes it one of the least-developed countries in the world

A Yemeni joke: "God went down to Earth to check it out. He didn't recognize anything until he came to Yemen. 'Oh yeah, I remember this place. Just as I created it.' "

Or as Mohammed Al-Tayeb, a longtime government official in Yemen, puts it, "So we are almost a dying nation."

Or as Robin Madrid says, "Absolutely I want to change it. I mean, I hate seeing people suffering. I hate it."

She is 65, a grandmother and the country director in Yemen for a Washington-based nonprofit called the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). She works in an office with bombproof windows and lives in a house with round-the-clock guards.

She has been married several times, first to a Chicano activist, then to an Iranian Marxist, then to a development specialist with the World Bank. Before NDI, she worked in Washington, Indonesia and various parts of the Middle East, where she dodged stones thrown by young boys whose anger she tried to understand, and never learned Arabic, something she continues to regret.

She chews gum constantly, likes jazz, likes beer, reads Anthony Trollope and misses pork. She always introduces herself as an American. She believes in democracy and in American efficiency. She likes it when the staplers in the supply room are in a neat line, speaks endlessly about "transparency" and "capacity building," says that "I'm living a life I'm proud of," and every so often, when Yemen gets to her, as it inevitably gets to everyone, including Yemenis, she announces, "I'm going to be quiet for a few minutes" and shuts her office door. And then 10 minutes later opens it and gets back to work.

"The workaholic," her staff calls her.

"Dr. Robin" is what the sheiks started calling her after she told them she has a PhD in anthropology.

She arrived in Sanaa on May 5, 2001, just after midnight and still remembers her first view from her taxi of what was ahead: "Potholes. Mangy dogs. Burned-out lamps." But she also remembers a walk the next day at twilight, when partway across an old stone bridge, she caught her first glimpse of the gingerbread buildings of the Old City. "I cried. I mean, it was magical." And then being in front of her hotel the following day when a man dropped his machine gun, which hit the ground and fired a bullet into a car tire a few feet from where she was standing. "First there's this horrible city, then there's this beautiful city, then I almost get shot," she says of those first few days.

And then she settled in to do the typical work of democracy promotion: Working with Yemen's various political parties. Trying to increase the political participation of women, who exist throughout much of Yemen as shadows. Trying to help Yemen's marginalized parliament, where one day, a cartoon circulates of President Bush and Saddam Hussein sitting next to each other washing their socks over a caption that reads, "Saddam washes the shame of the Arabs and Bush washes the blood of the innocents."