yemen in our hearts

"Oh Lord, protect our Yemen," says this poster. The little boy is part of a government campaign to encourage Yemenis in Sana'a to be more patriotic. At the capital's main intersections, peddlers sell small Yemeni flags and flag-themed tissue boxes with the word "unity" printed all over them.

The tissue boxes, produced by "Shen Zhen for trading" and made in a "united Yemen," are inscribed with catchy phrases in love of the nation. "May every day come, and the nation be in a thousand well-beings," one says. "Complete trust," goes another. "In our unity is our pride," says a third. Only "Perfumed ... soft ... strong..." leaves the tissue user a little perplexed. The tissues definitely have no scent.

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.