SANAA: Unable to find work, Ahmed Farea has sold everything including his wife’s gold to feed and house two young daughters in one small room. Elsewhere in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, widow Mona Muhammad has work but struggles to buy anything more nutritious than rice for her four children amid high prices.
And in a nearby hospital, severely malnourished children receive lifesaving nutritional drinks. Yemenis are exhausting their coping mechanisms, and children are starving, amid the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. On Monday the United Nations hopes to raise $3.85 billion at a virtual pledging event to avert what the UN aid chief has said would be a large-scale “man-made” famine, the worst the world will have seen for decades.
“I want the war to stop so we can go back to how we were ... We could buy what we wanted and could feed our children,” said Muhammad.
Yemen was a poor country with a child malnutrition problem even before the six-year war disrupted imports, inflated the currency, displaced people, collapsed government services and destroyed incomes. Then Covid-19 hammered remittances from abroad that many families relied on.
“Since the war and the blockade started, and work stopped, I can’t buy anything anymore. Where am I supposed to get it from?” said Farea, who wheels his barrow daily to collect water in cans from a neighbourhood tank provided for poor people. — Reuters
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