in cairo, no more yemeni protest tent

Yemeni protesters have put a temporary end to their sit-in outside the Arab League building in Cairo, after violence flared up again in the vicinity last week-end.

After the Yemeni sit-in tent was destroyed during Cairo's November uprising, a few protesters had nevertheless remained on the edge of Tahrir Square outside the Arab League building, with a few photos and a large Yemeni flag. Even after Ali Abdullah Saleh signed the Gulf Cooperation Council initiative agreeing to hand over power in Yemen, they remained to protest the part of the deal that ensured his immunity from prosecution. To keep warm at night, they pitched a tent on the pavement and wrapped themselves in heavy blankets. (See photo below taken on November 28, on the first day of Egypt's parliamentary elections.) Peaceful protesters Wael, Ahmed, and Adel were usually there to say hello.

Last Friday, violence re-erupted between Egyptian protesters and the security forces after a protester from the sit-in in front of the cabinet was brutally beaten in the night of December 15 to 16. Redhwan, one of the Yemeni sit-in organisers and a medic student in second year at Cairo University, donned a white coat and helped Egyptian volunteer doctors on the edge of Tahrir Square to tend to the wounded from the front line in Qasr el-Eini street. "It's good practice," he said, with a smile.

The next day, on December 17, the Yemeni tent was burnt down, along with the Syrian flag on the other side of the Arab League gate, the new much larger Bahraini tent next to the closest Metro exit, and all the remaining Egyptian protester tents on the other side of Tahrir. The photo below was taken on December 18. It was as if the tent, first erected on October 24 after Redhwan's friend died tortured at the hands of the police in Taiz, had never existed.

homemade fertiliser and strawberries

I first met engineer-turned-filmmaker Abdulkhaleq Alwan in 2010. In a country where groundwater is depleting fast, this young engineer, then 27, had made water issues fun for a mostly uneducated public.

As head of the awareness department at the capital's branch of the National Water Resources Authority, he talked to farmers about dwindling water resources, the ills of illegal well drilling, and the benefits of modern irrigation. He had turned himself into a filmmaker, directing spots in which he cast the farmers themselves to spread awareness about good practices in irrigation. He had printed poems by the farmers, and commissioned cartoons.

And then protests and political turmoil hit Yemen. When I wrote to him in May 2011, he and his colleagues hadn't been paid for months. None of the budget for 2011 had been received, and all programs, including colourful public information films, were on hold. Clashes on the road from Sana'a to Marib had meant no diesel for the capital’s water pumps and no water in the network for days. Instead, inhabitants were buying water from private trucks, not unusual in Sana'a, but at much higher prices than before the uprisings.

Now Alwan is studying for a masters in Intergrated Water Resource Management in Germany and Jordan, and hopes to return to Yemen for his thesis next autumn, if the situation permits. I caught up with him on Wednesday at a water utilities conference in Sharm el-Sheikh. At the end of the first day, he was most impressed by Mathias Stief’s talk on making a profit out of treating wastewater in Germany.

In Yemen, like Jordan and Egypt, water utilities are struggling to recover the costs of treating sewage to reuse its water in irrigation, he explained, but in Hamburg, they actually make money out of it! "They sell the sludge. They produce biogas. They sell the heat!" he says, laughing. Yes, a similar system would be possible in Yemen, but only after considerable investment in infrastructure and staff training.

Would it be difficult to convince Yemeni farmers to use the sludge on their fields? Not at all! says Alwan. At the Sana'a treatment plant, barely has sludge been laid out to dry that farmers turn up to buy it. “You can hold an auction!” he says. It's much cheaper than industrial fertiliser, and rich in potassium, phosphates, and nitrogen. Besides, Yemenis are used to sewage-issued fertiliser.

In many villages, including Alwan's outside of the capital Sana'a when he was growing up, each house made its own fertiliser from its small sewage pit. After cooking, ash from the fire would be thrown into it, to prevent bad odours and to start the fertiliser-making process. One or two years later, a mixture that looked like black soil would be extracted from the back of the house and used on the fields, until the end of the 1980s in Alwan's village, and probably until today in remote areas.

Alwan's family used to grow corn, tomatoes and potatoes, but switched to qat and strawberries when water started to become scarce. Wait, strawberries? “It’s a cash crop,” he says. Soon all the other farmers in the area where following suit.

Alwan talks to school children about good water management. Photo courtesy of NWRA