Nahla Saleh Hammoud is displaced from Hodeidah governorate

Funding:
Year: 2019
Targeted Areas

Where is my husband?

Fate has thrown us to this unfavorable circumstance. We were contented in our small house in Al-Hudaydah when war erupted. Missiles were whooshing over our house and shells were crackling in the neighborhood.
My husband went out to bring us sustenance. I was scared and I told him not to go but he said “we need to get something to eat.” He went out despite the shelling, but he didn’t come back. The night has fallen and I was still waiting for my husband to come back. I gave my children tea and bread to eat, there was nothing else to give them. By crack of dawn the war scaled up and bombs were getting closer to us. I was unable to decide whether I wait for my husband or run for our lives.
“We have to flee!” one of my neighbors shouted and they took me and my children with them. We moved to a relatively safer place where I searched for my husband in vain. It’s a full-scale war now. No place is safe, no one is safe. We fled to Sana’a.
Where is my husband? Where will we stay? Those two questions kept echoing in my head all the way to Sanaa. I have spent all my money and by now. We were more like living-dead—disoriented and lost.
I looked at the pale faces of my children and I felt a piercing pain in my heart. I had to work to sustain and provide for my children. I am illiterate, and I have no chance to get a decent job, so I turn my face up towards the sky and beseeched Allah to help me. I knew I will not be lost.
I found a job as a housemaid. I work hard from morning to 4 pm and then hurry back to my awaiting children whom I locked in a shanty house where we live now. I fed and washed them, they were weak and scared, but somehow resilient. Still thinking of my husband. Is he alive? I hope he is. As I am engulfed in my thoughts I heard someone knocking on the door. There I saw kind and cheerful young people from the Humanitarian Forum offering to register me in urgent food assistance and preventive bags program. I am very thankful to the donor and the implementer of this program. They have helped a lot in relieving my sufferings albeit temporarily.