dressed up for eid

It's the first day of Eid Al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan. Children play on the cobbled paths of Sana'a's old city. Girls wear princess dresses or bright outfits with matching handbags, while boys in shiny new suits run around with sunglasses and plastic guns.

The boy photographed above with two toy guns said that when he grew up, he wanted to be a businessman.

taxi drivers in the rain

With a lopsided smile, Naswan Masoud Al-Farza’i, 31, tells of how, during the heavy rain last May, he lost his source of income for his family.

It happened in the Saila, a paved road built in the natural course of rainwater that divides the Yemeni capital Sana’a from south to north. In Arabic, ‘saila’ literally means stream, and when it rains heavily, it soon becomes apparent why the road is called this.

It was late afternoon on a Wednesday when Al-Farza’i first drove down into the depression of the Saila. In the back of his white cab he had one Yemeni passenger.

“When we entered the Saila, there was no rain,” starts the father of two.

But then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, water was everywhere. His customer screamed, opened the door, and ran. Al-Farza’i debated what to do until the water was up to his chest. He tried to open his door, but the pressure of the water on the outside was too strong. His seatbelt was still on. He undid it, and tried again in vain. So he wound down his window and squeezed himself out of the taxi and onto the roof. As he stood on the top of the car, he looked up. The rain was pouring down.

Perched on the top of the 3-meter high wall of the Saila near Qubbat Al-Mahdi, he watched the spectacle in the water below.

“I saw cars come up behind my car, slide over the top of it, and continue on down [the river],” he tells the Yemen Times. He pauses, and holds up a hand to his cheek to convey how overwhelmed he was. The water, he says, was seeping up over the side wall of the Saila and into the adjacent residential areas. As he was cold and wet and he couldn’t see his car anymore, he went home.

When the taxi driver returned later that night, the level of the brown water in the Saila had dropped and the taxi’s luminescent roof sign poked out of the water. He breathed a sigh of relief as the car had not moved.

“The municipality came and towed the car out of the Saila and onto the side, but then they left it. There was no compensation, nothing,” he says.

Today, Al-Firza’i has cleaned his car and says that he has fixed the engine as much as he can. He is putting the car up for sale. In total, he says, he has lost USD 2,000 in the event. His number plate floated away.

They should set up a warning system, he says. If they also build good drains, then the water would be channeled through them and would not flood the road.

“The floodwater doesn’t come from Sana’a,” he said. “It comes from up in the mountains.”

Al-Farza’i asks for compensation, but says that if he manages to buy a new car, he will work again as a taxi driver.

“It’s my livelihood,” he says.

As published in the Yemen Times

yemenis go latino this world cup

It’s 10 pm. Behind the Great Mosque, in the back alleys of the old city of Sana’a, all is dark. But at the foot of a tall house in ruins, a make-shift cafe has sprung up. Cheers resound from inside. Behind the iron door, on mismatching carpets and improvised elbow rests, men of all ages are watching football.

Tonight, in South Africa’s World Cup 2010, Denmark is playing Cameroon.

Mohammad Faraj, 28, says that he built the cafe - a concrete block wall, iron door and colorful tarpaulin sheets for the roof - for his friends to see the Spanish League games and then the World Cup. Entry is YR 100, so that someone can clean it in the morning.

So who are all the men inside rooting for this evening? “Cameroon!” comes the resounding answer. “Definitely not Denmark!” The 2006 Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammad that caused such controversy in the Muslim world are still fresh in these men’s minds.

“It was a while ago, but then they repeated the insult,” said Saleh Ghuthaim, 35, the owner of the ruins on which the cafe popped up.

Instead Ghuthaim and his son Hussein, 13, who plays football at the Al-Wahda Club in Sana’a, hope that Spain or Argentina will win the world title.

Of course, says Ghuthaim, they are supporting Algeria as the only Middle Eastern team in the international tournament, but for them “there is really no hope.”

To read the whole article as published in the Yemen Times, click here.

running the water home

'i can't go home without five of these'

I hear noise behind me as I walk up the road. Akram, 10, appears at my side. He is handsome in a pair of dark blue combat trousers and a grubby tucked-in khaki shirt. He frowns and pouts, and lifts pinched fingers to his mouth in the universal gesture that means "food." He keeps up the pace next to me and repeats the charade until I stop.

"What do you want?" I ask, slowly opening my bag. "Money for lunch?" Recognition flashes through his face. In a perfectly normal voice, he says, "However much you want."

With a little more in his pocket, he overtakes me and continues proudly up the road. He makes no effort to escape me. We pass a restaurant and he pauses, but then carries on. "Where are you going?" I ask.

"Aaaall the way up Hadda Street," he says, waving towards its end a good 4 km away.

He holds up a YR 100 note, less than USD 0.50. "Every day, my mother wants me to come home with five of these." He says his father died and he is an only child. His mother does not work, so she depends on him to pay the rent.

He works in the afternoon until sunset. "But I can't go home without five of these. It's my mother. It would be shameful. And it takes a while, because people give me YR 10, YR 10, YR 10…"

I leave him to cross the road. He walks up to a parked car and speaks to the driver. Up the street comes hurtling a black 4WD, weaving dangerously between the heavy lunch-time traffic. As it passes, packed with young men, some leer out the window. "Hello!" they shout.

Akram says that in the morning he stays at home. Sometimes he watches television.

just add boiling water

A cardboard tray for eggs propped against his stomach, Mithaq, 9, calls into a small shop on the side of the souq's main path. "I have one egg left, do you want it?" he asks the men having kebabs for breakfast inside. The men politely decline.

Walking around the souq selling boiled eggs to passers-by, Mithaq is one of many Yemenis in the capital's old souq who have improvised easy street food to earn a living and support their families.

The recipe? Just add boiling water.

"One egg is YR30," the 9-year-old tells the Yemen Times. "I buy the tray for YR 500 and make YR 900."

With his single white egg, still to be peeled and dipped into salt and hot spices by his next customer, he soon disappears down the path.

At the souq's next cobbled intersection, Moath, 20, and his brother Mohammad, 18, own a corn-on-the-cob operation on wheels.

They say that they have been boiling sweet corn in their vamped-up wheelbarrow for the last two years. The set-up is nothing new, they say. A gas cylinder perched on the wheelbarrow’s handles feeds a small stove in its center, which keeps a giant saucepan warm.

On a good day, the brothers make about YR 1,000 (less than USD 5) selling the sweet-scented corn to passers-by. Fridays are busy, but during the Eid holidays they return to their village in the Ibb governorate and do not sell.

But water does not necessarily have to be boiling for Sana'a street snacks.

Just inside the Bab Al-Yemen gate to the old city, a man who appears to be in his thirties stands with his wheelbarrow of deep green cucumbers, wet and glistening in the sun. Each cucumber is sold individually for YR 20 or YR 30.

"Cucumbers with salt, cucumbers with salt," he calls to the morning crowd.

For each customer, he expertly slices the cucumber open in the shape of a cross, so that the vegetable gapes open like a square four-petaled flower. Into its center, he shakes salt from a water-bottle-come-salt-shaker.

His customers walk away crunching, until nothing is left but the stalk.

As published in the Yemen Times

off to work