NO HOME IN ABYAN, NO HOME IN ADEN
The faaSuuliya, as usual, was mud on my tongue, and the bread I shoveled it off the pan with was not crispy the way they make it at the little joint I go to almost every day in Sana'a. But the red tea was just right, and I was getting my breakfast fill as the young, tired looking guy in purple ma3wūz, the fine cloth skirt wrapped around the waist which men wear in areas on both sides of the Red Sea, brought me a second pan of bubbling hot faaSuuliya. I continued scribbling questions into my little journal, ones I hoped to pose to IDPs (Internally Displaced People) from Abyan, the far southern province just to the right of the city of Aden on any map of Yemen. I had no idea what their situation was, how many of them there were, but I'd spoken to the high-energy Laura Kasinof, reporting for the NY Times, on the phone yesterday, she said there were new IDPs fleeing the renewed fighting between the Yemeni military and al Qaeda in Abyan, and that they were easy to find, so damn it, I was going to see them.
Dropping some Yemeni Ryal on the counter of the well-ventilated little joint and grabbing a toothpick from the tray, I just gave it a try: "3afwan shebēb, ta3rifū wein fi lēji'īn min Abyan?" (Pardon guys, do you all know where there are refugees from Abyan?). They scratched their heads for a moment as though I had just asked them where I could buy a pack of smokes, and then recommended I go to a particular school down the road. "You sure?" I asked. "Yea yea, everybody knows this," they replied.
Out I went across the broad parking lot in front of the little restaurant, which sat in a building that looked like any tumble-down strip mall on the edge of a small Midwestern city. In other words, it was a dull, soulless-feeling place, perpetually filled with Somalis, mostly young men black as arctic night who sat around and waited for a car to wash for the price of pennies, and a few beautiful women who guided their children around as they begged for money from anyone who would give it. I stuck my hand out on the street, a van came to a rolling halt, I pulled myself up, and we rode towards krītr, the center of old Aden, built in the crater of a collapsed volcano, which gives onto the sea.
..........
It took some riding back and forth between schools, marching through the red dust of courtyards with friendly soldiers at my side, asking where, if they did in fact exist, could I find recently arrived refugees from Jaar, a city in Abyan province under Al Qaeda control. I battled the humidity, and the growing weight of the seaside sun, and finally made it to a provincial military post right next to my hotel. The big guy with beret and sweat pouring off his pale brow, the chief, told me I needed armed guys to escort me to the refugee camp. Told me to wait a while he had a meeting. I stood around under a terrace, took pictures of submissive Somali men washing army trucks, which I was promptly ordered to erase, and chatted a bit with tired guys in skirts, sporting Kalishnakovs. An hour or so passed, the chief finally emerged from his meeting, and I found I didn't need escorts at all.
..........
The bus raced along a causeway throughout one of the many sea inlets perforating this city like potholes, then through a quarter called Skeikh Uthman, filled with industrial space and shattered apartments, half-buildings everywhere, bleached bone white by the sun and fine dust. BOOM. "Hey young guy! This is it. This is the school," yelled the driver.
I loped from the bus' sliding door, and skipped up to the gate. An old black woman, face uncovered and draped in maroon cloth, seemed undisturbed by my presence--wisely calm, in fact. Two men in conversation, also looking like they'd been plucked straight from the depths of Ethiopia, responded reverently when I greeted them gravely: "esselēmu 3aleikum." "wa 3aleikum selēm." I told the guys, and the old wise-woman, my mission in my stammering Arabic which I strain to conform to the rhythms of Yemeni speech, and they guided me by the hand to the dirt courtyard within.
A small man, composed, and also of the color that suggests the highlands of Ethiopia, half wrapped in a ma3wūz, approached me like a statesman. I told him I was here to speak to people who'd fled from Jaar, from the recently ratcheted-up bombing campaign of the American-backed Yemeni military. He affirmed, slowly, that all the people crammed into rooms in the school-turned-shelter behind him were from Jaar. I was so psyched to have found my target, I never thought through what he uttered then: "Yes, we're all from Jaar. We fled last summer during the military's offensive." Looking back, I wince a bit thinking that I was looking for IDPs from Jaar, at the behest of Laura Kasinof of the NY Times, because they'd arrived the most recently. Thought I could write a news piece. But they'd also arrived in waves over the last 9 or 10 months. These people were those who had arrived long ago, not recently. Not news, sadly.
I stood around talking to the little man, whose speech, though controlled, often evaded my comprehension, under the high metal roof, like a plane hangar, that gave shade to a slice of the courtyard. Young men, and the old woman who seemed curious now, built upon around me as coral does over a rock foundation while I spoke with the little man . Another man sauntered up, body moving more with passion and nervous thought, darker still in color and squinting eyes like a leopard's.
The man with the leopard eyes, named Abdulqadir, lead me into the yawning opening to the school-shelter behind the dirt courtyard and the strange hangar-roof above the courtyard. In we went, the crowd which had formed around me having dispersed minutes before. Through the wide passage, into the courtyard of the school, and sights which excited my eye and made my heart swell and soften. Children running at me like soldiers in a charge, many of them dark brown like burned grassland, some olive in color, all of them smiling, some with little bullet holes in the teeth formed by the lethal too-much-flouride gun. Women walked around in heavy covering, but brightly colored and flowing, unlike the black khimmār covering that has become the fashion for many urban Yemeni women. The women, many of whom were lightly colored, carried bright green ħenna designs on their faces. A beautiful sight.
I don't know what made these people have such dark, Ethiopic features other than the fact large pockets of the southern coast must have been settled by people from the Horn of Africa. Whether in the time of Ethiopian empire rule over the rich lands of Yemen in millennia past, or from more recent migrations of aħbēsh (people from ħebesh, or Abyssinia, the fertile highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea), I don't know. But it was clear they are not from the akhdēm ("servants") class, black Yemenis of distant Ethiopian origin, who live in devastating poverty, and have virtually no rights in Yemen, and who never mix with non-black Yemenis.
They did not come from crushing poverty, though this is what they find in the camps here in Aden and elsewhere in Yemen's south. They tell me that Jaar, their town, is fertile, and one can easily find a livelihood in agriculture. They lived well in their town before the crisis, they say. And they mix. White and black Abyani children playing and bleeding in and out of crowds of white and brown Abyani women attest to this. All of the light-colored women were linked in marriages, or some other relation, to the black members of the group.
I stepped through the open courtyard of the school, and towels and dirty laundry hung from the railing of the second floor. A light-skinned man with epic rock-star hair in ma3wūz brought me up the stairs to the upper level. With an excited outrage, as though happy to show off the deplorable conditions they lived in, he spat at me hasty Arabic in his rough native accent, motioning hurriedly for me to enter one of the little classrooms now bedrooms. I stepped in, confronted with bunks that looked too small for human occupation crammed together in the middle of the room. A tiny child layer on the bare floor, sleeping. When I went to photograph the baby, a mass of little kids rushed to stand in the frame of the photo, with flat smiles. It's nice to be in a country where most (men, at least) like to have their picture taken, but it gets maddeningly old and pointless seeming when people call out to you, beseech you, to take their picture, make some boring pose, and then walk away without caring to see the photo, satisfied that their image has been recorded.
The Abyanis kept the rooms in nice order, but 15-20 humans were not meant to inhabit 20x20 foot classrooms. The man with rock-star hair spoke to me with incredulity, condemning the NGOs and local Adeni government for forcing them into such humiliating conditions. The man rushed me into another room, where a shirtless guy lay under a blanket against the wall, his arm over his face, blocking out the sun. My rock-star friend told me the guy on the floor was sick, waiting for treatment. I went to the other side of the bunks, trying to snap pictures that conveyed the miniature conditions they lead their lives in. A few young Abyani women stood against the wall, smooth-skinned and black and beautiful. They pulled bright fabric over their faces when the shutter flapped.
Back downstairs, I went out to the back of the building where women cooked a single small fish over a throw-together grill made of tires and old tin. They tried to make poses that looked natural, as I captured the poverty with my eyes and camera.
Somewhere along the line, I reconnected with the leopard-eyed Abdulqadir. He took me to an ancient-looking outbuilding of the school, all cube-ish and grey concrete. He tapped the clingy metal door, and yelled a greeting (or warning) to the ghosts inside. Enter. A dim room, vast and open and naked, windows mostly covered, divided only by a small partition of laundry hanging on wires. In the far corner behind it, a woman built of cloth folds crouches by a little stove, preparing some of the inadequate and irregular supply of rice and flour that UNHCR and other org's provide them, looking over her shoulder at the pale intruder with a face that says, "Alright, but I'm busy now." I step under clothes lines, around stacks of foodstuffs, and greet the two women. A coffee-skinned man with smāTa (light scarf/head-wrap) with big belly saunters up, and talks lighting Arabic about his deplorable conditions. Deplorable indeed, though I wonder how he and his family got this whole building to themselves. He has about nine children, he said, and the two quiet women behind him are both his wives.
The faaSuuliya, as usual, was mud on my tongue, and the bread I shoveled it off the pan with was not crispy the way they make it at the little joint I go to almost every day in Sana'a. But the red tea was just right, and I was getting my breakfast fill as the young, tired looking guy in purple ma3wūz, the fine cloth skirt wrapped around the waist which men wear in areas on both sides of the Red Sea, brought me a second pan of bubbling hot faaSuuliya. I continued scribbling questions into my little journal, ones I hoped to pose to IDPs (Internally Displaced People) from Abyan, the far southern province just to the right of the city of Aden on any map of Yemen. I had no idea what their situation was, how many of them there were, but I'd spoken to the high-energy Laura Kasinof, reporting for the NY Times, on the phone yesterday, she said there were new IDPs fleeing the renewed fighting between the Yemeni military and al Qaeda in Abyan, and that they were easy to find, so damn it, I was going to see them.
Dropping some Yemeni Ryal on the counter of the well-ventilated little joint and grabbing a toothpick from the tray, I just gave it a try: "3afwan shebēb, ta3rifū wein fi lēji'īn min Abyan?" (Pardon guys, do you all know where there are refugees from Abyan?). They scratched their heads for a moment as though I had just asked them where I could buy a pack of smokes, and then recommended I go to a particular school down the road. "You sure?" I asked. "Yea yea, everybody knows this," they replied.
Out I went across the broad parking lot in front of the little restaurant, which sat in a building that looked like any tumble-down strip mall on the edge of a small Midwestern city. In other words, it was a dull, soulless-feeling place, perpetually filled with Somalis, mostly young men black as arctic night who sat around and waited for a car to wash for the price of pennies, and a few beautiful women who guided their children around as they begged for money from anyone who would give it. I stuck my hand out on the street, a van came to a rolling halt, I pulled myself up, and we rode towards krītr, the center of old Aden, built in the crater of a collapsed volcano, which gives onto the sea.
..........
It took some riding back and forth between schools, marching through the red dust of courtyards with friendly soldiers at my side, asking where, if they did in fact exist, could I find recently arrived refugees from Jaar, a city in Abyan province under Al Qaeda control. I battled the humidity, and the growing weight of the seaside sun, and finally made it to a provincial military post right next to my hotel. The big guy with beret and sweat pouring off his pale brow, the chief, told me I needed armed guys to escort me to the refugee camp. Told me to wait a while he had a meeting. I stood around under a terrace, took pictures of submissive Somali men washing army trucks, which I was promptly ordered to erase, and chatted a bit with tired guys in skirts, sporting Kalishnakovs. An hour or so passed, the chief finally emerged from his meeting, and I found I didn't need escorts at all.
..........
The bus raced along a causeway throughout one of the many sea inlets perforating this city like potholes, then through a quarter called Skeikh Uthman, filled with industrial space and shattered apartments, half-buildings everywhere, bleached bone white by the sun and fine dust. BOOM. "Hey young guy! This is it. This is the school," yelled the driver.
I loped from the bus' sliding door, and skipped up to the gate. An old black woman, face uncovered and draped in maroon cloth, seemed undisturbed by my presence--wisely calm, in fact. Two men in conversation, also looking like they'd been plucked straight from the depths of Ethiopia, responded reverently when I greeted them gravely: "esselēmu 3aleikum." "wa 3aleikum selēm." I told the guys, and the old wise-woman, my mission in my stammering Arabic which I strain to conform to the rhythms of Yemeni speech, and they guided me by the hand to the dirt courtyard within.
A small man, composed, and also of the color that suggests the highlands of Ethiopia, half wrapped in a ma3wūz, approached me like a statesman. I told him I was here to speak to people who'd fled from Jaar, from the recently ratcheted-up bombing campaign of the American-backed Yemeni military. He affirmed, slowly, that all the people crammed into rooms in the school-turned-shelter behind him were from Jaar. I was so psyched to have found my target, I never thought through what he uttered then: "Yes, we're all from Jaar. We fled last summer during the military's offensive." Looking back, I wince a bit thinking that I was looking for IDPs from Jaar, at the behest of Laura Kasinof of the NY Times, because they'd arrived the most recently. Thought I could write a news piece. But they'd also arrived in waves over the last 9 or 10 months. These people were those who had arrived long ago, not recently. Not news, sadly.
I stood around talking to the little man, whose speech, though controlled, often evaded my comprehension, under the high metal roof, like a plane hangar, that gave shade to a slice of the courtyard. Young men, and the old woman who seemed curious now, built upon around me as coral does over a rock foundation while I spoke with the little man . Another man sauntered up, body moving more with passion and nervous thought, darker still in color and squinting eyes like a leopard's.
The man with the leopard eyes, named Abdulqadir, lead me into the yawning opening to the school-shelter behind the dirt courtyard and the strange hangar-roof above the courtyard. In we went, the crowd which had formed around me having dispersed minutes before. Through the wide passage, into the courtyard of the school, and sights which excited my eye and made my heart swell and soften. Children running at me like soldiers in a charge, many of them dark brown like burned grassland, some olive in color, all of them smiling, some with little bullet holes in the teeth formed by the lethal too-much-flouride gun. Women walked around in heavy covering, but brightly colored and flowing, unlike the black khimmār covering that has become the fashion for many urban Yemeni women. The women, many of whom were lightly colored, carried bright green ħenna designs on their faces. A beautiful sight.
I don't know what made these people have such dark, Ethiopic features other than the fact large pockets of the southern coast must have been settled by people from the Horn of Africa. Whether in the time of Ethiopian empire rule over the rich lands of Yemen in millennia past, or from more recent migrations of aħbēsh (people from ħebesh, or Abyssinia, the fertile highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea), I don't know. But it was clear they are not from the akhdēm ("servants") class, black Yemenis of distant Ethiopian origin, who live in devastating poverty, and have virtually no rights in Yemen, and who never mix with non-black Yemenis.
They did not come from crushing poverty, though this is what they find in the camps here in Aden and elsewhere in Yemen's south. They tell me that Jaar, their town, is fertile, and one can easily find a livelihood in agriculture. They lived well in their town before the crisis, they say. And they mix. White and black Abyani children playing and bleeding in and out of crowds of white and brown Abyani women attest to this. All of the light-colored women were linked in marriages, or some other relation, to the black members of the group.
I stepped through the open courtyard of the school, and towels and dirty laundry hung from the railing of the second floor. A light-skinned man with epic rock-star hair in ma3wūz brought me up the stairs to the upper level. With an excited outrage, as though happy to show off the deplorable conditions they lived in, he spat at me hasty Arabic in his rough native accent, motioning hurriedly for me to enter one of the little classrooms now bedrooms. I stepped in, confronted with bunks that looked too small for human occupation crammed together in the middle of the room. A tiny child layer on the bare floor, sleeping. When I went to photograph the baby, a mass of little kids rushed to stand in the frame of the photo, with flat smiles. It's nice to be in a country where most (men, at least) like to have their picture taken, but it gets maddeningly old and pointless seeming when people call out to you, beseech you, to take their picture, make some boring pose, and then walk away without caring to see the photo, satisfied that their image has been recorded.
Back downstairs, I went out to the back of the building where women cooked a single small fish over a throw-together grill made of tires and old tin. They tried to make poses that looked natural, as I captured the poverty with my eyes and camera.
The sun continued to cook there little refuge for these limbo people, and my energy bled from my steadily like water might from a boiling teapot with a hole in the bottom. I ended my hours with my one-day Abyan friends with fast, frustration-and-spittle filled interview with Abdelqadir. As his leopard-eyes squinted and he painted pictures of bombs and bullets of the Yemeni army finding a home in his hometown, where Al Qaeda had settled in, I asked him if he thought of returning to Jaar. Selim, a tubby friend of his, jumped in between us before he could respond, shouting: “If there was security and stability, we would return even to a camp.”
