“Mommy when is the Eid?” eight-year-old Amal[1] asked on June 17th. “The holiday when some of our neighbors kill a goat? Isn’t it soon?”
Amal was too young to remember the last time her own family sacrificed a goat for Eid Al Adha.[2] She was just three when her father died in 2018, and since then her mother Renna has been struggling to provide three meals a day for Amal and her sister Maha. They’ve only eaten meat for the Eid when a neighbor offers them a small portion.
“Yes, it’s soon sweetheart,” said Renna, a knot forming in the pit of her stomach as she handed each of her girls a single piece of freshly baked bread that would be all they ate for dinner. “The Eid is about 10 days away. I think the new moon was today.”[3]
“I wish we could have liver on Eid morning—like you used to make!” exclaimed Maha. At 10, Maha still had vague memories of what Eid was like when her father was still alive, including the dish of diced onions, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, and fragrant spices that her mother had always prepared for breakfast with the liver of the freshly sacrificed goat. Most of all, though, Maha remembered how her father had always bought her a fancy new dress for the holiday.
“When are we going to buy our Eid dresses?” Maha asked her mother, expectantly, as she tore off a piece of bread and dipped it into her glass of hot, sweet tea. “I saw Shayma’s new dress yesterday when her father brought it from the market—it’s turquoise and so elegant!”
“Praise God Shayma’s father could afford to buy her such a dress,” said Renna. “God is generous.”
Renna was having only tea for dinner since their supply of flour was running low—but the growing knot in her stomach was not from hunger. Each day that brought the Eid closer felt like a thousand days to Renna, and they were filled with Maha gushing over the new dresses that were appearing in her friends’ homes in preparation for the holiday. Long after her daughters went to sleep that night, Renna lay awake trying to think of some way to get them new dresses in time for the Eid. It would be okay if they didn’t have meat—who would notice? But without new dresses the girls would be ashamed to see their friends and painfully aware that they were fatherless and of little worth to those with means in the world. However, buying two new dresses from the market would cost around 50,000 YER, or around $40 USD. After supporting her children as a widow for five years through a war and humanitarian crisis, there were no sacrifices left that Renna could make to come up with that kind of money.
After a week of sleepless nights, Renna set about washing the girls’ best dresses. They were well worn and faded—but at least they would be clean for the Eid that was now just three days away. Her tears were mixing with the wash water as she prepared herself for the sadness her daughters were soon to feel, when there was a knock at her door. She had barely collected herself by the time she opened it to find a young man standing there with two little bags containing brightly colored dresses. “What’s this?” she gasped.
“These are from the orphans[4] clothing project,” he said, handing her the bags. “They are for your daughters. Have a blessed Eid.”
The knot in Renna’s stomach evaporated, and she felt like she was floating as she accepted the two bags in disbelief and said, “God bless you for your kindness. Thank you for remembering my daughters. They will be happy as though their father was alive to celebrate with us.”
Since 2018, a Yemeni non-profit has been supporting a local initiative that provides new clothes to fatherless children in a rural area of Taiz province for Eid Al Adha. The team buys fabric and group of 10 women works together for a month as volunteers sewing new dresses according to the designs of a local woman. Many women on the team learned to sew through a project that the non-profit supported in the area several years ago. This year the initiative reached 300 children like Maha and Amal. The joy and solidarity that this initiative inspires each year has been a bright spot for the rural community, as celebrating the Eid has increasingly become a hardship in the nation’s protracted crisis.
Many animals in Yemen were spared their sacrificial fate at Eid Al Adha this year as observance began on the evening of June 27th—a sign of deepening desperation for most families. According to Xinhua News Agency, residents of Sana’a say the price of livestock is five or six times more than it was before the start of Yemen’s war in 2015, while millions have lost their jobs over the same period and the economy lies in ruins. Livestock traders who used to sell 100 sheep for Eid Al-Adha now consider themselves fortunate if they manage to sell 10.[5] Similar conditions were reported in Aden[6]–where the beleaguered economy dipped to new lows in the weeks following the Eid. Arab News described the protests that began on July 12th in Aden and Mukalla, where demonstrators blocked key roads and set tires on fire as the Yemeni riyal fell 15 percent to 1,500 per dollar—down from 1,300 in May. Some exchange firms and shops closed their doors in response to the currency’s depreciation, while prices for essential items including flour, sugar, and cooking oil rose by 20 percent.[7] Meanwhile, Middle East Eye (MEE) explained that the currency crash comes in the midst of Aden’s scorching summer, where temperatures can reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), but residents can only rely on six hours of electricity a day. “The hot weather is killing us, our homes are almost empty of basic necessities, and prices are rising every day—why wouldn’t we protest?” one Aden resident told MEE, explaining how the shared suffering is uniting the city’s citizens. “The protests have brought together supporters of different political parties. They chant against the authorities in Aden and demand electricity and a better life.”
The riyal is facing this latest round of devaluation in Yemen’s south largely because the Internationally Recognized Government (IRG) has stopped exporting oil ever since their northern rivals—the Houthis—attacked the nation’s oil ports in late 2022. Before the outbreak of war between the two parties, oil production in Yemen accounted for 70 percent of the country’s general budget resources—but no oil has been exported since the Houthi attacks last year. An economic expert who has worked in Yemeni banks told MEE that, “If Yemen does not resume exporting oil, the coming months will be worse.”[8]
Thus, with Eid Al Adha past, Yemenis like Renna and her children are being committed to new days of sacrifice by the nation’s power brokers who have mostly gained legitimacy through battle or other coercive means and are not seen as representing the communities in which they are based. As international forces and Yemeni elites continue to grasp for scraps of the nation’s social fabric, the interventions of grassroots initiatives and non-profits on behalf of vulnerable men, women, and children remain the best hope of repairing the seams of solidarity that have long contributed to the resilience of the Yemeni people.
[1] Names are changed due to the household’s vulnerable status.
[2] Eid Al Adha or the Feast of Sacrifice is the largest of two main holidays celebrated in Islam. It honors the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, as an act of obedience to God’s command. However, before Abraham could sacrifice his son, God provided him with a lamb to sacrifice in his son’s place. In commemoration of this intervention, animals are ritually sacrificed on the holiday. Part of their meat is consumed by the family that offers the animal, while the rest of the meat is distributed to the poor and needy. In Yemen, giving each child in the household a new set of clothes is a central tradition on Eid Al Adha.
[3] Eid Al Adha occurs on the 10th day of Dhu Al-Hijja—the 12th and final month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The start of any lunar month varies based on the observation of the new moon by local religious authorities, so the exact day of celebration varies by locality.
[4] The Arabic word for orphan means without a father—children may be considered orphans when their mother is still living.
[5] https://english.news.cn/20230628/1369c8d8ba564f0f8cd5d88e9cda029b/c.html
[6] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230626-economic-warfare-yemenis-struggle-despite-ease-in-fighting
[7] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2336856/middle-east
[8] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/yemen-aden-anger-temperatures-power-outages
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