the walk to unity

Mohammad, 45, walked to Sana'a from Abyan with his family in his early twenties.

Yemen was still divided at the time, so to enter North Yemen from the socialist South Yemen of the time, of which the Abyan governorate was then a part, they had to walk across the mountains for several days.

“There was a war in the south,” he says, because some of the southern governorates opposed their new president’s push to open up towards the west. They tried to kill him, he explains, and war broke out.

He points towards a small bottle of mineral water, “Even this we didn’t have,” he says. “We had nothing from outside. Everything came from the Soviet Union.”

Today Mohammad lives in Sana'a, the capital of a united Yemen since 1991.

He works as a taxi driver after his job as a policeman, he says, because he refuses to take bribes to finish people's paperwork faster. He rents the car from a friend and works as much as he needs to to support his four children.

“Each one is first in school,” he says proudly.