Hamid counted the items in the food basket that had just been delivered to his home. Flour, rice, oil, salt, beans, soap, detergent, and sanitary pads for his wife and daughters. He exhaled slowly in gratitude. Although Hamid knew all eight items would run out within a month, he was still thankful for a few weeks to breathe easier in the daily grind of providing for the basic needs of a six-member household. In fact, it seemed like the first time in years that Hamid had anything to count besides his losses—which had begun in 2015. Near the start of Yemen’s protracted conflict Hamid was struck by a stray bullet when he got caught up in a street skirmish near his home in Taiz. Although he was thankful that the bullet didn’t kill him, it did leave him with a permanent disability that prevented him from continuing to teach in the local school where he’d worked ever since he graduated from university. Soon the school had closed anyway when it was taken over by an armed group. That left Hamid’s house right on the frontlines of the battle for Taiz, and soon much of it was destroyed in the shelling. His home was so damaged that looters assumed the family had either been killed or fled, and their possessions began disappearing at night while they slept. Finally, Hamid decided it was time to flee and he told his family to take only what they could carry.
Since the day they left Taiz, Hamid’s family has been counted among the millions of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Yemen without any livelihood. They lived for a while in Sana’a without electricity or water until they were able to move into an unfinished home that had no windows or doors. Then came the bitterest loss of all. Their new neighborhood was targeted by airstrikes that claimed the life of Hamid’s oldest son, who had just turned 20. As Hamid watched his wife beat her breast in sorrow after they buried their first-born child, he wondered how they would go on. Still, even as her body shook with sobs, his wife had said, “At least we’ve only lost one child—many of our neighbors have lost several.”
Hamid, his wife, and his four remaining children moved to live with relatives in the western part of Sana’a where it was calmer, but that did little to bring the grieving father peace. Hamid had gone into debt to bury his son, so his four remaining children dropped out of school, and he could no longer afford the medication he and his wife needed for their chronic illnesses. As their hardships grew, Hamid’s grief gave way to a grey numbness. He barely noticed the gnawing in his stomach when he and his wife skipped meals so their children could eat. Days, weeks, and months blurred together until the beginning of 2023 when a volunteer from a local non-profit learned about Hamid’s case by chance and offered him a few blankets. “I know it’s not much,” the volunteer told him. “I’ll see if I can get you registered for a food basket at Ramadan, too.”
Hamid’s children were delighted by the blankets. Sana’a’s cold winters had not been easy on them since they were used to the temperate climate of Taiz. Then when the volunteer returned a few months later with a food basket just before Ramadan, Hamid felt his own spirits lift for the first time since his son’s death. Receiving those eight basic items just in time for the holy month motivated Hamid to set about registering his children for school again and going out to pharmacies to look for the medicines he and his wife needed.
Today, four months later, Hamid’s family has yet to receive another food basket. Although a delegation from Saudi Arabia traveled to Sana’a during Ramadan to continue direct negotiations with the Houthis in view of reaching a permanent peace deal, the Saudi delegation left on April 13th without announcing any progress. Since then, tensions have been re-escalating across the country and it’s clear that Yemenis like Hamid cannot count on bilateral talks between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis to resolve the nation’s multi-lateral conflict and provide the stability that would allow families to recover and prosper. Instead, vulnerable Yemeni families are counting on local non-profits and their international partners to deliver the food and hope they need to rise from the ashes of war and rebuild their lives and communities in the face of tremendous odds. Yet global aid for Yemen continues to decline. As a result, food insecurity is projected to worsen in Yemen over the second half of 2023, leaving 20 percent more people facing high acute food insecurity by December. When Yemeni lives are discounted by a preoccupied world, these are some of the results:
- Families reduce the quantity and quality of the food they consume.
- Unable to afford cooking gas, families use waste plastics as cooking fuel at great risk to their health and the environment.
- Yemeni children experience the nightmarish effects of terminal starvation.
- Girls drop out of school and are forced into early marriage or begging in the streets.
- Extremist groups step in to provide essential services, winning popular support and new recruits.
In contrast, when Yemenis like Hamid and his family are reached with aid, each item they receive serves as a reminder that despite all they have lost—their lives still count amidst the competing narratives of crises around the world.
1 Name changed to protect the identity of a vulnerable Yemeni family.
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgbdwqMAvF8
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-jN_Vqo1o
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j381YgFrKnk&t=8s
6 https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/after-eight-years-war-yemen-brink-economic-collapse-oxfam
7 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/yemen-children-starving-war-us-aid-sadoski/index.html
8 https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/al-qaeda-in-the-arabian-peninsula/
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