Road Trip Yemen

I teamed up with Abigail Hauslohner on a road trip from Sana'a, Yemen's capital, to Aden and back last November. She shot and produced this lovely video report for TIME.com: Road Tripping in Yemen.

I wouldn't say that a road trip through a failed state is ever something that would have occurred to me, but I am glad it occurred to Abby. I feel fortunate to have been part of such an eye-opening experience.


Yemen is without doubt a troubled place. As Abby reported, lawlessness, a water shortage, a conflict with Houthi rebels in the north and clashes with separatists in the South continue to destabilize the Arabian Peninsula's poorest state, making it fertile ground for extreme Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups. Yemen is an intensely tribal place, and the central government doesn't seem to control much outside the capital.

Not many independent reports come out of Yemen, and this was a chance to see a deeper, more human side to a place at the heart of so much turmoil.


We started out traveling by bus from the Old City in Sana'a.


Because of attacks on buses carrying Western tourists, we had to get special permission from the tourist police to travel by public transport outside the capital.


A village seen from the window. Nearly every woman I saw in Yemen was completely covered in public.


A young bus passenger peeks over her seat at me and Abby, the two foreigners, the only women not covering their faces with niqab, the face veil.


A qat market, seen from the bus window. One of the first things I learned about Yemen is that everyone chews qat (pronounced "gaht" in the Yemeni dialect), a leafy plant that contains a mild narcotic. Afternoons are for sitting, chewing qat, and discussing life. Business shuts down by 2 p.m. and men and women are chewing by 4, if not earlier.


The bulging cheek, filled with qat, is a common sight all over Yemen. The narcotic in the leaves gives one a mild buzz.


Men chew qat in public, sometimes in stalls lining the streets like this one in Sana'a, or in the mafrage of the house. A mafrage is a room with cushions lining the walls, often on the top floor of the house, where everybody sits and hangs out. Women chew qat too, but men and women don't generally hang out together.

Moving on...


I was stunned by the scenery as we traveled south toward the city of Taizz. We stopped overnight in these mountains in a village called Al Qaeda. (Really! But not that Al Qaeda. "Al Qaeda" means "the base" in Arabic.) We were invited to a wedding by a fellow bus passenger, but because of Yemen's intensely conservative culture toward women, it was unfortunately impossible for me to photograph it. Read Abby's story about the experience here: A Wedding in the Town of Al Qaeda. Totally other-worldly experience, and we were the honored guests.


A relative of the bride, Bandar, drove us from Al Qaeda to Taizz, where he often does business in the qat trade. Notice the casette tapes stacked under the console and to the right of the steering wheel, fantastic Yemeni music.


Bandar takes a cigarette break in Taizz, a city sprawling beneath the mountains.


The ultimate host, Bandar wanted us to see a bit of Taizz before we departed for Aden. He started our tour by taking us to a huge hotel on the side of the mountain, where families sat outside and took in the view of the city. I tried (and semi-succeeded) to make friends with the women with my minimal Arabic.


From there, we visited Cairo castle, a refurbished fort on the side of the mountain in Taizz.


A view of Taizz from the castle.


Finally, Bandar wanted us to experience camels in a whole new way...


...by drinking milk fresh from the beast! That's Yussef, 13, taking a swig. I didn't try it, but Abby did, brave soul that she is. She declared it "salty and warm."

Ew.


From Taizz we covered our faces and hopped in a shared taxi that would take us to Aden. Road trips are an excellent time to chew qat.


To chew, just tear up the leaves and stick them in your cheek, where they will stay for the next several hours.


The shared taxi stand in Taizz.


And we're off to Aden!


An improvised shelter and a girl, seemingly in the middle of nowhere along the road. According to UNICEF, around 50 percent of Yemeni children suffer from malnutrition.


A mosque and rugged mountains.


Guys sitting, chewing qat and watching traffic pass.


Abby and I shared the front seat with the driver.


The shared taxi driver, on the outskirts of Aden.


This is Aden, a city built on a giant crater.


A fisherman at dusk near the Fish Market. Yemen's fishing industry is suffering from piracy and overfishing.


Fishermen fixing a boat. The fishermen sometimes stay out on their boats for days at a time, fixing their meals and sleeping at sea.


Aden Harbor visitors' center, near where the U.S.S. Cole was bombed a decade ago. Aden was once a thriving center of trade and therefore more open to different social and cultural attitudes. It seemed slightly less conservative than the rest of Yemen.


Families board boats for a tour of the harbor.


Baskin Robbin's, Aden.


Men kicked a soccer ball around on a beach just outside the city.


Unlike some of the beaches I'd been to in Aden, women actually went into the water here, abaya and all.


We asked our friendly driver if he knew where we could find a henna artist. And that's how we ended up in the home of one of his relatives' being hennaed by three teenaged girls.


The girls decided to take us to Aden's amusement park, Seera Fun World. It was just one example of the generosity and hospitality we experienced in Yemen.


Most of the people at the park seemed to be women. University and secondary school students were out for the Eid al-Adha holiday, so the park was especially packed.




It was fun to watch everyone having a good time.


I got motion sick on this ride.


Taking these last images and our new friendships with us, we returned to Sana'a.

Bedouin gun runners

Sometimes not identifying people is a precondition for me being allowed to photograph them.

Such was the case with a group of Bedouin arms smugglers in the Sinai peninsula.

I actually was tagging along with Abigail Hauslohner, TIME's stringer in Cairo. She wrote about Bedouins who smuggle goods and humans across Egypt's borders with Gaza and Israel. To read her two stories, click here ("Egypt's New Challenge: Sinai's Restive Bedouins") and here ("North Sinai: Security Challenges and Ethnic Tensions").


It's always pretty challenging to photograph people who can't actually be photographed.


One of the smugglers cleans his Glock pistol. The Glock was overwhelmingly the chosen sidearm for the smugglers we hung out with.


One of the smugglers' wives.


Me trying to be creative with the whole I-have-photograph-you-but-can't-photograph-you thing.


The Egyptian National soccer team pulled out a win over Algeria, and, in a show of their power, the smugglers rode through the village of Sheikh Ziyad, leading the parade of honking vehicles.


One of the smugglers got a bit carried away and fired his weapon into the air.


We did a lot of driving around the desert aimlessly. We kept hoping they'd show us an arms shipment or take us to a group of Somalis in a safe house, waiting to be smuggled across the border.


But, they didn't. Instead we saw an Israeli border post in the middle of the Sinai desert.


Then the smugglers took us to see one of the poor Bedouin families living in the middle of nowhere. This woman's father was lying behind her and too ill to stand.




Here we are again, whisked away to the desert to visit more Bedouin families.


Quite beautiful out in the desert.




Sabeha. She doesn't know how old she is, but thinks she's 50 or 60.


A sandstorm colored the air the next day.


It really does feel like the end of the earth.

Hospital on the edge

This post contains graphic images.

Above, toddlers slept two or three to a bed in the children's intensive care unit at Mirwais Hospital, Kandahar.

I spent some time at southern Afghanistan's biggest public hospital working on another development story for National Public Radio. Read and listen to Soraya Nelson's NPR report here. The story was part of an end-of-the-year, in-depth series on the direction Afghanistan is going as a whole.

As security has deteriorated in Kandahar, many international NGO's have pulled their staff from the area or shut down their regional offices, cutting off the flow of money and people in a region where they are badly needed.


Despite the worsening security situation, development continues at Mirwais Hosptial, where the International Committe of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducts training and assists the local staff. ICRC is one of the few humanitarian NGOs with a foreign staff living and working in Kandahar.

Mirwais is a vital health treatment center, the only public hospital serving five southern provinces. If they are able, wounded and sick people travel from Helmand, Zabul, Uruzgan, Paktyka and throughout Kandahar province to reach this group of buildings near the edge of town.


Above, children's ICU.

The hospital has six departments: surgical, infectious diseases, pediatric, ophthalmology, obstetrics/gynecology, and emergency/intensive care. Two-thirds of patients come to the emergency department and around 50 percent of all clients are trauma patients. (That's a lot.)

By documenting daily life inside, I wanted to give an idea of what life is like outside the hospital walls--why development is both difficult and so very needed. Mirwais Hospital is in the middle of a war zone where Afghans are kidnapped and injured by bombs, and the violence makes development work dangerous. But poverty and under-development create a desperate need for clean water, health care, roads, electricity and sanitation.


Mirwais has a tiny neo-natal intensive care unit, with three or four incubators. Above, ICRC nurse Kristina Alho of Jyvaskyla, Finland, prepared an underweight baby girl to see her mother.

Infant mortality and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world. In rural Afghanistan, women sometimes start having children at a very young age, don't have access to birth control and are often the last to receive health care. It's a lethal combination for mothers and babies.


Accompanied by two female hospital staff members, Nurse Alho carried the baby girl through hallways to see her mother in the women's intensive care unit. Alho was on a six-month ICRC contract to work at Mirwais.


The preemie baby was delivered by Caesarian section and had been unable to breast feed, and the family had no money for milk. Convinced that the baby's weight and overall health would improve dramatically if the mother, Jana, could just get her milk to come, Nurse Alho tried to help.


But the milk wouldn't come.


Jana looked despondently at her baby girl, shortly before offering the child to NPR correspondent Soraya Nelson, my colleague.


A dimly-lit hallway on a women's floor.


Shakofa, 2, recovered from burns to her chest and feet in a children's burn unit. Many Afghans use open fires, propane or oil for cooking and heating.


The fires sometimes cause severe burns, especially over the winter. Above, 18-year-old Abdul Rahim, of Shawali Kot District, Kandahar Province, tried to rest in the men's burn unit. Two months earlier, Rahim was standing too close to a fire in his home when his clothing caught fire.


A toddler played on the floor next to Abdul Rahim.


A man was wheeled into the emergency department.


Regular people, civilians, get caught in the crossfire of Afghanistan's conflict and end up at Mirwais after being wounded in kidnappings, roadside bombs, by landmines and air attacks.

Above, Mohammad Nassim, 35, lay bruised and groaning in bed. Nassim and another man, 28-year-old Sher Mohammad, were kidnapped by Taliban from a municipal water wheel construction site where they were working, in Takhtapoul District. They said they were blindfolded and tortured for four days, before being released to warn others against working with the government.


Sher Mohammad's bruised back.


I was standing near the entrance to the hospital one morning when something unexpected happened. A truck carrying the dead bodies of two Afghan border policemen arrived.

And that's how I found myself in the hospital morgue.

The day before, Ahmad Shei, 25, and Hamidullah, 22, were in an unarmored truck carrying material to a checkpoint in Zabul Province. A roadside bomb detonated near their vehicle. Ahmad Shei and Hamidullah were killed; four other border policemen were injured and taken to Kandahar Air Field to receive medical treatment at the foreign military hospital. The two dead were taken to the morgue at Mirwais Hospital before being transported to their home provinces in the North for burial.

The second man from the left facing the camera, helping to lift the body of Ahmad Shei, is Atullah, 20. His brother was Hamidullah, the other dead policeman. Atullah told me he and his brother were from northern Baghlan province, and their parents had died much earlier. Their other siblings were working in Iran, and for quite some time, it had been just the two of them.


Minutes later Atullah wept outside the morgue while his brother's body was washed and prepared for burial. He had just lost his best friend, brother, parent and comrade. I shot a couple of frames and then sat quietly next to him for a few minutes. I told him that I have a big brother too.

I couldn't help wondering how these two guys from way up north had found themselves in Zabul of all places. Had they been serving their country? Earning a paycheck? Keeping each other safe?


Imam Gul, 25, stood next to the body of Hamidullah, while the body was washed inside the morgue.

I don't know why they let me in. Maybe they wanted their sacrifice to be recorded. Maybe they didn't know what to do with the random foreign woman with a camera. Maybe they were too tired and shocked to care.


Imam Gul and Amanadin watched while a white shroud was pulled over their fellow policeman Hamidullah's body.

This picture is still hard for me to look at. The look on Amanadin's face mirrors my own shock.

I feel like most editors would think a photograph of a dead man with his legs blown off was unnecessarily graphic and would turn people off in a bad way. I guess this is the only place I feel like I can share this image and how it felt to be there, taking it.

Because this is the cold, hard truth.