This is a great article on Yemen. Each paragraph touches upon a part of Yemeni history you could talk about for hours – social classes, political revolutions, prospects for development, etc.
The people highlighted in the article live just down the street from me. Apparently we live in very similar houses, me in the “frat house” of the college I work for, ten of us enjoying private bathrooms and a big kitchen, they, hundreds in the same space, sleeping head to toe.
My friend Matt called their job a Sisyphean task; the Greek king was punished to push a boulder up a hill, watch it roll down again, and repeat this task for all of eternity. He was punished for violating the laws of hospitality when he killed travelers and quests.
I see these men and veiled women every day, standing out like sore thumbs in their orange jump suits, pushing dirt and dust into little piles before using their hands to throw it into huge re-used rice bags. Trucks come by periodically, the men in jumpsuits dump the rubbish into the trucks. Instead of the usual horns I hear, these trucks emit what sounds like the ice-cream trucks back home, a carefree and silly melody sped up 4x the speed and blaring across the streets. Maybe for this ignored class, the blaring alarm different from the rest is a tool to get just a little bit of notice.
Without garbage cans or any other garbage pickup service, these men in jumpsuits are caught in a never-ending system. They pick up trash off the street. Everyone else just drops their trash wherever they want. Sometimes I hold on to my trash, but then realize there’s no other place to put it but the street. If I brought it home, it would go into a bag that would then be thrown onto the street.
When students leave our institute, they inevitably leave behind some of the things they brought from home. We donate these goods to the cleaning ladies of our center or we leave a box at the home of these “servants”.
I’m thinking of what else we could do for them. If the majority of Yemen is content to keep them marginalized and stuck in a lower class, what can I, an impermanent resident of this country, do to alleviate what I see as an injustice?
Right now I can’t think of anything except for saying hello. Maybe if I stop and converse with them for five minutes, I can make them feel less shitty, less forgotten, less invisible. I once read from the source that one of the worst parts of being homeless in the States is that everyone pretends they cannot see you. Confronted with those less fortuante, people feel guilty for what they have, and even guiltier that they just keep walking. I can’t really give these ’servants’ any money, but I can give them a smile and a little of my time, and maybe that’ll be worth something.
See the articleSee the pictures
SANA, Yemen — By day, they sweep the streets of the Old City, ragged, dark-skinned men in orange jump suits. By night, they retreat to fetid slums on the edge of town.
They are known as “Al Akhdam” — the servants. Set apart by their African features, they form a kind of hereditary caste at the very bottom of Yemen’ s social ladder.
Degrading myths pursue them: they eat their own dead, and their women are all prostitutes. Worst of all, they are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam. “We are ready to work, but people say we are good for nothing but servants; they will not accept us,” said Ali Izzil Muhammad Obaid, a 20-year-old man who lives in a filthy Akhdam shantytown on the edge of this capital. “So we have no hope.” In fact, the Akhdam — who prefer to be known as “Al Muhamasheen,” or the marginalized ones — may have been in this southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula for as long as anyone, and their ethnic origins are unclear. Their debased status is a remnant of Yemen’ s old social hierarchy, which collapsed after the 1962 revolution struck down the thousand-year-old Imamate.
But where Yemen’s other hereditary social classes, the sayyids and the judges and the sheiks, and even the lower orders like butchers and ironworkers, slowly dissolved, the Akhdam retained their separate position. There are more than a million of them among Yemen’ s fast-growing population of 22 million, concentrated in segregated slums in the major cities.
“All the doors are closed to us except sweeping streets and begging,” Mr. Obaid said. “We are surviving, but we are not living.” The Akhdam have not been offered the kind of affirmative action programs India’s government has used to improve the lot of the Dalits, or untouchables, there. In part, that is because Yemen never had a formal caste system like India’ s.
As a result, the Akhdam have languished at the margins of society, suffering a persistent discrimination that flouts the egalitarian maxims of the Yemeni state. Even the recent waves of immigrants from Ethiopia and Somalia, many of them desperately poor, have fared better than the Akhdam, and do not share their stigma. The Akhdam who work as street sweepers, for instance, are rarely granted contracts even after decades of work, despite the fact that all Yemeni civil servants are supposed to be granted contracts after six months, said Suha Bashren, a relief official with Oxfam here. They receive no benefits, and almost no time off. “If any supervisor wants to dismiss them, they can do that,” said Ali Abdullah Saeed Hawdal, who started working as a street sweeper in 1968. “The supervisors use violence against them with no fear of penalties. They treat them as people with no rights.” The living conditions of the Akhdam are appalling, even by the standards of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world. In one Akhdam shantytown on the edge of Sana, more than 7,000 people live crammed into a stinking warren of low concrete blocks next to a mountain of trash. Young children, many of them barefoot, run through narrow, muddy lanes full of human waste and garbage. A young woman named Nouria Abdullah stood outside the tiny cubicle — perhaps 6 feet by 8 feet, with a ceiling too low to allow her to stand up — where she lives with her husband and six children. Inside, a thin plastic sheet covered a dirt floor. A small plastic mirror hung on the wall, and a single filthy pillow lay in the corner.
Nearby, a single latrine, in a room approximately 3 feet by 3 feet, serves about 50 people. The residents must carry water in plastic jugs from a tank on the edge of the slum, supplied by a charity group. Wearing a brown dress, with a rag tied around her head, Ms. Abdullah said she and her family brought in no more than 1,000 Yemeni riyals a week, about $5. She begs for change, while her husband, Muhammad, gathers metal and electrical components from trash heaps and sells them. Like most people in the shantytown, they have no documents, and they do not know how old they are. “We are living like animals,” Ms. Abdullah said. “We cook and sleep and live in the same room. We need other shelters.” When the winter rains come, the houses are flooded, she said. On the cold days in winter, the family burns trash to stay warm. Richard Bramble, a British doctor who works in a charity-sponsored clinic inside the shantytown, said half of the deaths there over the past year were of children under the age of 5, and one-quarter were in the first month of life. The death rates from preventable disease are even worse than the nationwide average in Yemen, where overall infant mortality is already an appalling one in nine, and maternal mortality is one in 10. Most of the women among the Akhdam start having children in their early teens, residents said. Part of the problem, many members of the community say, is that most of the Akhdam have internalized their low status and do not try to better themselves, find real jobs or seek an education. Much of their meager income goes to buying qat, the plant whose leaves many Yemenis chew for its mildly narcotic effects. “They do not even push their children to become soldiers,” said Muhammad Abdu Ali, the director of the medical clinic in the shantytown and one of the Akhdam. “They have given up on changing their situation.” In the past two years, members of the Akhdam have begun to organize, creating a political front to lobby the government and seek development aid from charity groups. Earlier this month, hundreds of Akhdam demonstrated in the city of Taiz to protest their mistreatment, and afterward a government supervisor accused of stealing money from Akhdam street sweepers was fired. But efforts to help the Akhdam have sometimes backfired. International donors have mostly preferred to work through Yemeni mediators, who have often misused or stolen the money intended for the Akhdam, said Rashad al-Khader, a Yemeni lawyer who has been representing the Akhdam for seven years. The Yemeni government has occasionally built shelters for the Akhdam, but has not provided them documents for those shelters or the land, Mr. Khader said. And it has done little to help them improve their access to health care and education, despite a series of election-year promises to the community, according to Akhdam leaders. The government does, however, seem embarrassed by the plight of the Akhdam, Mr. Khader said. When the new national political front was formed a few months ago, government officials insisted that its proposed name be changed — removing the term “the marginalized ones” in favor of “those in extreme poverty.” The popular notion that the Akhdam are descendants of Ethiopian oppressors appears to be a myth, said Hamud al-Awdi, a professor of sociology at Sana University. Most of them have roots in villages in Red Sea coastal plain of Yemen, and many of them may have African origins, he added. Little else about them is clear, despite a number of academic studies. Some Akhdam have found ways to improve their station. Mr. Hawdal, after working as a street sweeper for 20 years, became a supervisor, and now lives in central Sana with his wife and five children in two rooms that are relatively clean, a world away from the slums at the city’ s edge.
As he leaned on a cushion chewing qat, with a television chattering in the background, Mr. Hawdal pointed proudly to a plaque on the wall commemorating his long service as a sweeper. He has sent all of his children to school, unlike most of the Akhdam, and one of them made it as far as ninth grade. But Mr. Hawdal acknowledged sadly that all of his children had since dropped out. He was running out of money, he said. But that was not the only reason. “They had no hope of doing anything except street sweeping,” he said.
Languishing at the Bottom of Yemen’s Ladder
April 29, 2008 at 11:36 am
Excellent, really good read, thankyou for sharing