"Dude, is anything going on at MSF House tonight?"

We roll up to the compound and hop out of the taxi. Danni’s been here before and speaks to the guard. He opens a large metal door and we step through the gate and into an open-air concrete garage. Through the inner yard we walk, between the security wall and the main house. To the right is a well-lit green area. Grass, finally. The faint sounds of bass pumped from the basement windows.

Up an outside staircase, through a door, past some English-speaking Arabs and down into the basement, we enter a confusing world of strobe lights and bad Euro-dance music (is that an oxymoron?).

You’ve been to Rugby House, you’ve been to Hockey House, you’ve even been to Lax House, but you truly have not lived until you’ve partied at MSF House. Mediciens Sans Frontiers House that is.

Ok I lied. It wasn’t that epic of a party. I gotta say though, living it up with a bunch of aid workers and expat diplomats inside their western is an experience not to be missed. Not because the party was particularly fun but because the experience was so surreal. There we were in the middle of one of the most traditional societies in the Arab world, buried inside a compound drinking and dancing and socializing. All kinds of normally ambitious and no-nonsense people were represented: people from Doctors without Borders (MSF), minor embassy workers, aid workers from the German equivalent of USAID, random businessmen just passing through Yemen. And then there were the Yemenis that like to hang around such people.

It was eerily reminiscent of a lame college party. Everything from the bare basement to the awkward/awesome dancing (depending on your point of view). The crowd was mostly young people in their twenties, while one or two old people, probably in their sixties, walked about dazed in the background.

I learned from one businessman that Yemen is screwing up big-time by not doing more to cultivate and market its coffee industry. Both Yemen and Ethiopia lay claim to the disputed title of “The World’s First Coffee Grower” (It’s been determined that the coffee plant likely originated in Ethiopia, while the oldest recorded mention of coffee comes from Yemen). But coffee is too expensive for the small-time Yemeni grower to get to the international market, so instead he grows qat, which is only marketable within Yemen.

I learned that Germany’s foreign policy towards Yemen is heavily focused on development, which is why just about every NGO worker here seems to be German. Is this strategy a product of free-thinking and determined focus on Yemen in the long run or does it result from Germany’s reluctance to be perceived as too strong militarily, even after all these years since World War II? I don’t know.

I also learned that the party doesn’t start until you kick the Yemeni trying to prove he knows what’s hot in the Euro techno scene off the DJ table and throw on some Kanye West and Lady Gaga.

It was quite a night. Maybe not the wildest party you’ve ever been to, but definitely an incredible and surreal experience in the context of normal life here in Sana’a. If you ever find yourself in a country with a strong foreign aid presence, definitely see if there’s anything going down at MSF House.