Nadia[1] sat by a small open fire, kneading the dough she was about to bake into sheets of thinly layered flat bread for her nine children to eat. The flour, oil, and salt that she had used to form the dough had been delivered to her earlier that week by a local non-profit distributing food in the camp for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) where she and her children live among over 400 other families. Now, the team had returned for a follow-up visit. As they approached, Nadia turned from the dough to her cooking fire and lifted a fold of the brightly colored tie-dyed scarf that covered her head and held it over her nose and mouth. This was not a move to veil her face before the arrival of the team, which included men, but an attempt to screen out the fumes of the burning plastic container that she had used to start her fire.
During that visit, Nadia explained to the team that she and her family have been living in the camp for nearly nine years—having fled a nearby district where over a thousand violent events have caused more than three thousand fatalities since Yemen’s conflict began in 2015. Her husband suffers from a spinal condition that prevents him from working, thus, most mornings, Nadia’s children leave the camp early to go and beg in a local market. On a good day, they return with enough to buy a kilogram of flour. “Sometimes there is nothing at all to eat in our tent, and the children go to sleep hungry,” Nadia told the non-profit team, her eyes watering from the black smoke that rose from her noxious fire. “Then I stay awake next to them and cry as they fall asleep with empty stomachs. The worst days of my life were the days that passed while I watched my children go to bed hungry, and my husband and I were unable to do anything for them. We were not living.”
This year, however, ever since the non-profit began a project to distribute food baskets to the camp in Taiz province for several months, Nadia’s spirits have lifted. “When the food baskets arrived at the camp, it was as if we were born again,” she said. “We have flour, beans, and oil available right in our own tent. My children go to sleep happy, and they wake up happy because they have something to eat. These baskets are not just food supplies, for us, they are life itself.”
However, even with the basic food supplies provided through the project, life is still difficult for the IDPs living in the camp. The owner of the land where they have gathered firewood for years has demanded that they stop, as the trees and shrubs on his land have dwindled under the pressure of the daily needs of hundreds of displaced families. Now, the owner insists that they must pay for what they collect, but most have no money either for firewood or for cooking gas cylinders. When desperation drives them back out to the land to collect firewood anyway, the owner threatens them with weapons. Thus, many, like Nadia, have now turned to using plastic containers as starter fuel for their fires and to stretch whatever bits of wood that they manage to scrounge in fear. Inhaling the toxic smoke from these fires has contributed to conditions including asthma and chronic coughs among the camp residents. Meanwhile, soothing their inflamed throats represents another challenge for the families in the camp, as they have also been attacked while searching for drinking water. Like the landowner, the owner of a well in the vicinity of the camp has forbidden the IDPs from using it because of the shortage of water in the region and the large number of people living in the camp. Having lost access to that well, the IDPs now undertake a journey of six kilometers or more round-trip to collect drinking water. The family members assigned this chore often leave early in the morning on the quest for water and don’t return until after sunset. Mercifully, for the time being, they begin that journey with a full stomach and find something prepared for them to eat when they return home.
Meanwhile, as Nadia and other women like her cook for their families over toxic fires in the highlands of Taiz province, displaced mothers living in Marib have been facing a different challenge as they prepare their children’s daily bread. Of Yemen’s 22 provinces, Marib hosts the largest number of IDPs—sheltering nearly 1.6 million people, who have placed an immense strain on infrastructure and basic services in a province that was once home to just 350,000 people. It is also considered Yemen’s worst-affected province in terms of drought, and in 2025, 73 IDP sites in Marib have been impacted by sandstorms—affecting over 21,000 families.[2] These sandstorms occur between one and five times a year in the desert regions of Marib and Al Jawf, as well as coastal areas of Taiz, Aden, Al Hodeidah, and Hadhramout. During such storms, sand-bearing winds sweep in at speeds that can exceed 50 km/h, damaging tents and the other temporary structures IDPs inhabit, as well as water tanks and sanitation systems. Should families wish to eat in this environment, the women have nowhere else to cook except in the open air, where swirling sand inevitably contaminates the meals they prepare. Furthermore, many of these women are expectant mothers who are cooking for their young children even as they battle conditions including anemia, calcium deficiency, and kidney issues. Some have already survived miscarriages after making too many trips carrying water from distant water sources to their tents. Sandstorms significantly increase these pre-existing risks for Marib’s pregnant IDPs, as noted by the findings of a 2021 review that explained how, along with sand particles, the winds sweep up disease-causing microorganisms and carry them over long distances, resulting in adverse effects on fetal development in the storm’s wake.[3]
According to Unsafe Havens, a report released by Mwatana for Human Rights in February 2025, IDP mothers around Yemen are enduring an ongoing tragedy of displacement in which they are “unable or find it extremely difficult to access even the most basic rights.” According to the report, when they were first displaced, most families “received food assistance, shelter supplies, and cash aid, and they expressed satisfaction with the level of response at that time.” However, in recent years, the aid provided has significantly decreased, and tents and makeshift shelters have deteriorated without replacement—all the while it has become increasingly more difficult to access basic resources like cooking fuel and water.[4] For now, mothers like Nadia will keep burning plastic and cooking through sandstorms to feed their children—and all the while they will be thinking of what they might sacrifice next to feed the hungry fires of displacement that have already consumed so much of their lives.
[1] Name changed to safeguard a vulnerable Yemeni family.
[2] The World Bank, UNHCR, Video: TRT, IOM, UNFPA, UNFPA, IOM, ACAPS, OCHA, UNHCR, Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, Asharq Al-Awsat,
[3] https://www.newarab.com/features/sandstorms-yemen-worsen-health-risks-pregnant-women
[4] https://www.mwatana.org/reports-en/unsafe-havens
Comments +