Relatives Galore

This morning, my lit teacher was sick, so we had an interesting lit class. Our sub was a strange lady. I had never seen her before, and she said to call her Mrs. PC. Go figure. She said she had some funny name like Pedro C....tzee. I forget how the middle part goes, but anyway, she wanted us silent, and when we did quiet down, she would smash in and start a new conversation. Whenever she wanted to address the class as a whole, she always started or ended the sentence with "Students," which utterly creeped me out. I felt like I was back in preschool. She ranted on our bad habits, and then let us out of class ten minutes early. It was bizarre. During the time between when we finished our work and the time we were dismissed, my classmates discussed (of all things) how they were all related to each other. Not through the imagination or some other kooky mess, but in all actuality. Ghassan and Abraham only today discovered that they were either second cousins, first cousins, nephew/uncle, or great uncle. The really creepy thing was that Sami, (a Somalian) was the one who knew all the relations. He managed to give Abe and Ghassan a quarter hour discourse on how they were related to each other that was very confusing, hence the multiple relations, with out repeating himself once. I knew that Yemenis often intermarried, especially amongst the higher levels of the government for diplomatic reasons, but I had no idea that they were that bad. At any rate, I spent a quarter of an hour listening to this mess that went something like this:

Sami: So his mother's mother's brother was the old president, who married your father's uncle's mother in law.

Abe: No, you just said that he married his mother's mother' great grand niece

Sami: No, that was the old Shiekh. This is the old President.

Ghassan: Yeah, the Arriani one, before Ali Abdula Saleh.

Abe: Oh. So that would make you my...

Sami: Here, let me draw you a family tree.

At any rate, this went on for a while, and about four family trees were drawn, none of which helped anything, if not hindered, leaving them with several different possible relations. For all I know, it might be all of them, or at least some whacked out combination. The scarry thing was that Sami knew the entire thing. He dismantled Yemeni government, business, and something else by houses, and then proved several other things by other references in the school, such as Hassim is Tarek's uncle, who are Ghassan's cousins who is distantly related to Kanan, who is the president's grandson, etc. The way he could carry on was simply terrifying.