She has visited the country six times since 2016, reporting on the war there between its internationally recognized government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthi militia, a religious and political movement alleged to be receiving military support from Iran.

Recently, Waguih went back again.

She wound her way through both Sunni-dominated government-controlled territories and Shiite-aligned Houthi controlled areas. She arrived in Seiyun, in Yemen’s government-controlled eastern region, on February 25. From Seiyun, she travelled 30 hours by road to Sanaa, Yemen’s traditional capital in the Houthi-controlled north, then to Mocha, where she visited a large camp for internally displaced people, and finally another day’s drive to the government’s entrepot capital, Aden.

Along the way she passed clusters of settlements across Yemen’s mountainous arid terrain, each distinguished by an array of hillside towers, archways, rainbow-colored windows, and earthen walls. Yemen is a landscape of small towns, villages, and a few larger cities, mainly along its coast. Roads across its desert expanses are often unpaved and remote. Waguih travelled in crowded, unreliable mini-buses.

Throughout her journey, she saw the impact of war and the fractured movement of civilians and goods. In much of the country, life carries on—fishermen cast their lines, bookstores sell their tomes, devotees go to mosque. But everything is under threat, anything that still works is fragile. And there are pockets of immense suffering.

Yemen is facing a humanitarian disaster. More than 377,000 deaths are attributed to the conflict, including 150,000 people who died as a direct result of military actions. Yemen’s people are starving. The United Nations is seeking $4.3 billion to stave off hunger and disease for an estimated 23 million people—nearly three-quarters of the population, including 2.2 million acutely malnourished children. Yemen imports nearly all its provisions; Ukraine and Russia supply 40 percent of its wheat. Food prices have risen approximately 150 percent since the invasion of Ukraine, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Despite the staggering scale of the seven-year catastrophe, Western news media describes the conflict (when it describes it at all) as a “forgotten” or an “invisible war,” tropes used to justify Western neglect of complex intrastate or proxy conflicts, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

So deep are divisions between the warring parties that each runs its own fiscal and administrative systems. Waguih had to carry two sets of Yemeni banknotes, or rials. Older and newer bills have different values, exacerbating runaway inflation.

In Yemen, women are rarely seen in public without a full abaya or burqa. The fact that Waguih is a journalist and an outsider afforded her more freedom than most Yemeni women enjoy. Even still, her movements were always negotiated. In Houthi areas evening trips to convenience stores and restaurants were accompanied by a Houthi agent.

Waguih visited Sanaa’s largest orphanage and hospital, a fuel station, a bank, and other businesses and institutions in the city’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed old city to gauge the war’s impact.

“Yemen is a place where it is very difficult to see actual conflict but impossible not to see its effects everywhere,” she said. “You will see, for example, a building that has been destroyed, and you don’t know how long it has been that way. Maybe it was recently. Maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago.”

There was no difference, she said, between the destruction she saw in government-controlled areas and that in Houthi areas. During her previous trips, she said, violence seemed to be localized around particular areas. Now, due to an estimated 25,000 air raids, Yemen’s ruined infrastructure is highly distributed.

And everywhere, Waguih said, from the streets in Sanaa to Yemen’s squalid camps for the internally displaced, she gazed upon the gaunt face of hunger.

There are some developments toward peace. The internationally-recognized government and the Houthis announced a two-month ceasefire in April, to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan. Many hope the truce will allow all sides to consider proposals for a permanent end to the war.

Nations at war are also nations at work, at school, at play, at rest—at all the places that make up daily life. War often occurs in places with vitality enough to sustain many years of degradation. Waguih’s photos show everyday reality in a nation experiencing one of the world’s longest running wars. The conflict may not be visible in every frame but it infuses all of the images.

The post A Fragile Livelihood in Yemen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The story is the oft-related tale of Kaldi the goatherd. As the story goes, after Kaldi watched his flock jump excitedly around after eating berries from a certain bush, the goatherd decided to taste the beans for himself. As one version would have it, after crunching the berries in his mouth, the young man burst into song and poetry—behavior that likely sparked the interest of those around him. Whatever actually transpired, with that taste of berry, Kaldi is said to have plucked the coffee bean from obscurity, after centuries of anonymity. But the legend of Kaldi (which likely recounts events that took place much earlier in history), shrouds the fact that coffee was already a private pleasure for humans several centuries earlier.

Indeed, around 525 C.E., approximately 300 years before the date assigned to our goatherd, coffee plants journeyed out of Ethiopia with the armies of the Axumite Kingdom as they invaded the Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen, where they remained for the next 50 years. As it happened, the locale shared similar climate and geography to their own highlands. So, not surprisingly, members of the invading Akumites soon introduced coffee cultivation there, sowing the seeds of Yemen’s future dominance of the coffee trade.

This act of early colonialism brings an interesting challenge to the place of Kaldi and his friends as the world’s earliest coffee consumers. If the original story involved the chewing of the coffee cherries among those who lived in Ethiopia, it is a Yemeni myth that places the first coffee drinkers in this region of the Arabian Peninsula.

According to local Yemen lore, the first person to drink coffee was actually a priest who was banished to the mountains for unsuitable behavior toward the daughter of the king. Facing sure starvation, the young man supposedly discovered a plant with white flowers and survived by drinking a fluid he extracted from its beans. Having made it through his exile, the priest took the beans with him on a pilgrimage to Mecca, thus serving as the first exporter of one of today’s most important commodities.

To shore up its claim as the home of coffee drinking, Yemen offers up another legend—of a Sufi dervish named Hadji Omar, who was driven by his enemies out of Mocha into the desert where, also to ward off starvation, he tasted berries he found growing on a shrub. Finding them unacceptably bitter, the dervish first roasted them and then tried to soften them with water so they could be eaten more easily. The latter did little to improve their edibility, but the brown liquid that Sufi produced roused him from his lethargy and raised his spirits. When Omar returned to Mocha, his survival was considered a miracle, and the coffee drink he discovered achieved great popularity.

The folklore presented above offers far more than just a series of entertaining stories. It connects the human story to botanical truth. Archaeological evidence demonstrates the ancient coffee plant most likely came from what is today Ethiopia. Other scientific evidence suggests that coffee bean and plants ended up in Yemen in the second decade of the 6th century. In this version of events, Ethiopia and Yemen can each rightly claim a share in the origin story of the pleasures of coffee.

Legends are useful because they allow us to piece together what may have happened after the discovery was made that the beans, while bitter, were not poisonous. If the latter were the case there may well have been a lot of dead goats, and we would all be drinking some other stimulating beverage to get through a long afternoon.

Critically examining the historical forces that shape such legends also force us to reckon with some important contemporary issues—not the least of which is the equity historically denied to growers and harvesters.

The C. Arabica species of coffee that was first consumed in Ethiopia and Yemen remains the most prized, with those grown at higher altitudes still commanding the highest prices on the world market. Yemen, in fact, enjoyed a monopoly on the export of coffee beans that lasted throughout the Medieval and early modern periods, as the country exported the beans to an ever-expanding cadre of devotees across the globe. That only changed in the mid-17th century when, as yet another anecdote has it, a few plants were smuggled out of the Port of Mocha by a Portuguese merchant. With this theft, coffee became part of Europe’s colonial enterprises. And yet, despite the horrors of the conflict that currently ravages Yemen, it is still possible to obtain its coffee—allowing those of us fortunate enough to live in relative safety to support the livelihood of those farmers whose connections to coffee date back centuries.

Easier to acquire today, coffee continues to occupy a prominent place in the economy of Ethiopia, where significant efforts have been introduced to celebrate coffee’s rich past there, as well as ensure its viability well into the future. Since 2008, particular attention has been paid to sustainable practices that ensure a fair market price for the beans, guarantee equity for the small-scale farmers that produce 95 percent of Ethiopia’s agricultural output—of which coffee and sesame seeds are the leading products—and to the teaching of practices that prevent the degradation of the land.

Today, an estimated 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day by people around the world with a sworn love for it. The place of coffee in our daily lives and imaginations, however, is all the richer if we take a moment to appreciate the history of how it got here today. Food and drink, after all, have the power to connect us, across time and distance, to strangers who in another age might have been our friends. Through a combination of curiosity, experimentation, and some distant highlands, hundreds of years ago, this curious bean was first found to be suitable for drinking. Its origin story is a potent brew—and appreciating it makes that first bitter sip of a new coffee drinker today just a bit sweeter.

The post Your Coffee Is Much Older and More Legendary Than It Seems appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That may come as a surprise since whenever the country makes headlines–as it has over the past few weeks–the overwhelming themes are war, violent radicalism, the impending doom of failed statehood and whatever other ominous sounding crisis (water shortages, national drug addiction) can be thrown into the mix.

I find that most Americans assume that the country is seething with anti-American sentiment. Yet, that is far from the truth, and I miss Yemen, my home from 2009 to early 2012. I’m not alone. Most foreigners who have been fortunate enough to experience the warmth, humor, and kindness of Yemeni people miss it too.

I miss waking up in the old city of Sanaa, Yemen’s 3,000 year old capital. I would slowly make my way across uneven stone floors that cooled the soles of my feet and into my mafraj, a square room with blue-patterned low cushions lining its perimeter. I would take a moment to stare out into the narrow alleyway below through a green, blue, and red stained glass window, the kind that decorate nearly every building in Sanaa.

I lived on the top floor of a skinny, four-story, brown brick abode with white gypsum outlining its edges. Many have likened these structures in the old city to gingerbread houses. Out the window, I saw men walking to work, elbows linked, donned in long white robes that hung to their ankles, suit jackets, and a curved dagger secured right at their waistline. There were also the elderly women draped in red and blue intricately patterned blankets overtop their black abayas and carrying puffy loaves of bread in clear plastic bags. They’d chat so quickly in clipped sharp Arabic that I could never understand them—even though I’m comfortable in the language. My ears would then catch the sound of the gas merchant who strolled the neighborhood banging with a wrench on a large cooking gas canister. The harsh dinging warmed me in the same way the sounds of Manhattan must warm someone who’s happy to call that city home.

At about 8 a.m., I would make my way down the incongruent steps of the house and past the doors of apartments where other foreigners lived, and then I’d pull a small metal lever that opened the heavy wooden slab on the ground floor to the outside world. The sun would be strong and the air bone dry at 7,500 feet. I would walk the 10 steps or so to a hole-in-the-wall canteen, a Yemeni bodega, known here as a bagala, and buy a tub of plain yogurt for about 50 American cents that I would mix with Yemeni honey (some of the best in the world!) for breakfast. This was in lieu of the typical Yemeni breakfast of lamb kabob sandwiches or stewed fava beans. The two young guys at the bagala would light up upon our daily meetings.

“Good morning, Laura!” they’d say.

“Good morning! How’s it going?”

“Praise be to God! Did you watch the president’s speech?” Mohamed, the older, would ask, or otherwise comment on the political happenings du jour, which were many, since part of my time living in Sanaa covered the Arab Spring protests of 2011.

“I did. What do you think?” I would ask.

“Everything will be fine, God willing. We want stability for Yemen,” he’d answer. Then another friend whose face I recognized from the neighborhood would rush up, give me a nod, and shove approximately 10 cents at Mohamed so he could bring back piles of pita bread for his family.

I would head back home, comforted to know that if anything ill ever befell me, these friends would have my back, as happened when they cornered a cab driver who was requesting $200 to give me back the phone that I had left in his taxi (I got it back free, thanks to my neighbors). You give Yemenis a smile, and they give you so much more in return, always bending over backwards for guests of their country. It was an unfair transaction that benefited me most of all.

I miss walking through the narrow cobblestone streets of the old city and seeing faces I recognized. We waved hello along the way, and perhaps shared a sentence or two about the day. My mood always brightened when I passed the old men who sipped creamy tea sitting outside one tiny cafe, who wore thick glasses that magnified their eyes, turbans round their heads, and held canes in their hands. They laughed and told jokes to pass their days. They’d seen it all—including war worse than the current one. They knew the ebbs and flows of time.

Despite that one greedy cabbie who tried to keep my phone, one of the things I miss most of all are the discussions with taxi drivers, waiting stalled in traffic due to the post-lunch market rush. Yemenis love to talk—and so do I. They often gave me a handful of soft green qat leaves, the mild narcotic widely consumed in the country. I remember when one driver explained that Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh was like Marie Antoinette. “Let them eat cake!” the driver exclaimed.

A different cab driver once told me he had worked at the Yemeni embassy in Cuba as a driver and missed the rum like you wouldn’t believe. Alcohol is available in Yemen, at Chinese restaurants that double as brothels, or from Ethiopian smugglers who get their bottles on boats from Djibouti. Of course, getting it involves risks—the social shame of being caught with alcohol for an average Yemeni would be damning not only of his reputation, but of his family and his tribe. I took that taxi driver’s number and the next time I left a diplomat’s party in the fancy part of town where sheikhs and foreigners live behind tall walls, I called him to pick me up. I snuck him a beer, which he uncapped with his teeth and drank during our drive back to the old city.

There are things I don’t miss, like the lack of electricity. Or wading through a foot high of muddy, trash-strewn water because the drainage system wasn’t working fast enough for the rainstorm. I certainly don’t miss needing to flee my home in the old city because the war came too close in September 2011, when Yemen’s divided armed forces began to fight one another. I didn’t want to live alone when random artillery fire had fallen nearby. And then there was the gnawing guilt that came with remembering that my suffering was nothing compared to Yemenis who couldn’t afford a generator or the rising prices for basic goods, and who didn’t have another home to which they could flee. But the good always outweighed the bad for me in Yemen, and that’s why I stayed for nearly three years. I left when I realized that reporting during wartime, being so close to explosions, death and violence, had clouded my thoughts so that I was incapable of making safe decisions.

As the country, now leaderless, fractures with little hope of reconciliation, I watch with a breaking heart. Yet, I am confident in this: if the Yemeni government fails to restructure itself into a sustainable organization, and rather continues to mirror a scenario from an apocalyptic future, Yemen will not be a land where every man is for himself. There is a social contract in Yemen more ancient than the one that exists in the United States, and the ties that bind people to one another can step in when the government fails. As an outsider who was fortunate enough to have called Yemen home, I put my hope in that.

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