A We left a contract of war in Yemen in a place we never imagined. Our biggest fears were exams, work and wedding parties. Today, we live with the weight of the constant fear. You wake up to the sound of explosions or silence of sadness, leave your home not certain if you will return, look at your child and wonder about the type of future that awaits him.
However, life continues. We carry our losses, our broken hearts, our sadness, and continue. Ten years of war, ten years of mourning, to learn to survive with a block in our hearts.
I remember my childhood: radio wood, cigarette glow. I see my grandfather Abu Bakr sitting on a small dirt hill, calling, “Come, let me teach you the alphabet.”
I jumped and embraced me, turned off his cigarette and stopped the radio. I precede it to the house and opens the door to reveal the aunt Aisha, my second mother. Rice, fish, and tomato sauce served me. Even when I was big enough to eat on my own, fed me with her hands. “Do you like, my dear?” She was asking, her voice is a thunderbolt for my soul. Years later, she sat next to her again, but her eyes, once full of love, was napable by Alzheimer’s, her hands are thin and weak.
The grandfather had already left this world, and lost his sight after a failed surgery. He once asked me, “Do you know how to make tea?” “Even if I don’t, I will make it for you,” I answered. That was our last conversation. Aunt Aisha survived memory loss, but not cholera. Fight Yemen. The disease took it as if it had taken thousands. She died not because of fate, but because war turned into a death penalty.
Then there is a hosame, my brother. His death remains with me. We tried hard on the night before, but the roads were closed. We could not bring him the oxygen he needed. I was there, watching, helpless. I saw redness in his cheeks fading. The scatter he spent the previous day, went. His soul was leaving his body, and I could not stop him.
My mother carried him all night. The tin quietly cried, while his last breath was slipped. She did not shout, did not cry, she detained him, as if she could keep it for a little longer. He is chasing me. I wonder if there was more I could do. The roads were closed, the hospital out of reach, and I had to sit and watch death take it.
Loss in Yemen everywhere. He follows people like Hayat, a woman who has more pain than any person. She has a Bachelor’s degree, she has dreams. She gave birth to the rain after running for her life from the bombing. She no longer sees herself as a woman. She told me that she forgot what she feels to wear perfumes and look at the mirror, because there are beyond suffering.
Her son, Hossam – the same name of my brother – suffered from a severe head injury. She had nothing. There is no money, no way to contact his father, no one resorted to. I lost consciousness several times of fatigue, hunger and despair. Then the people around her, people who had nothing themselves, began to throw scraps from paper on her lap. You did not understand. Then I realized that the paper was all the money they enjoyed in their pockets. Give her everything in their power so that she can take her son to Al -Madinah Hospital. The poorest of the poor saved her child.
When I think about places that were not touched by war, I think about the streets where people have not heard a bomb or have pain in watching a person who loves them taking his last breath. Where families are not hungry day after day, as supermarkets are filled with options. I realize how much Yemen in the world is missing. We are not just a war, headlines, or suffering.
We are culture, beauty and love. Yemen, where suffering is limited, but generosity is limitless. Where people who have nothing will give them because they know what it means to have less.
Nada Al -Saqqaf is a writer and artist working in Yemen for Oxfam