Adil’s Essay

BOOM! — 4 a.m. on a school night I’m woken by a loud blast. It’s not the water heater or the dog or even an earthquake. It’s the sound of Arab Spring in Sanaa, Yemen, as thousands of protesters storm the government building just a stone’s throw from my bedroom window. The protracted siege is violent and bloody — the military fires back with heavy weaponry — but the protestors prevail, and my family spends the next 12 hours huddled in our basement, fearing the unknown. At only seven years old, I’ve just lost all sense of stability and normalcy in the world, and my life — and the lives of many others — will never be the same.

Revolutions sound good, and often they are — decidedly so — but there’s frequently devastating collateral damage that can last for years, decades, or even lifetimes. In the case of Yemen, a violent civil war continues to rage on 12 years after that initial blast on my young psyche. There is no peace, prosperity or resolution. There is only more bloodshed, poverty, corruption and chaos. Not long ago, the United Nations called the situation in Yemen “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” — a dubious honor if ever there was one.

For the last 7 years of my life, I’ve been a political refugee living in Cairo, Egypt. I was fortunate to escape the daily horrors of my homeland, to attend school more-or-less regularly, and to contemplate a future. But many others from my community and my own family have not been so lucky. When I was still living in Yemen, my older cousin was kidnapped by insurgents and held for ransom. For two panic-stricken months, his father — my uncle — holed up in our home, desperately trying to figure out what to do. Then suddenly, inexplicably, my cousin was released unharmed. While the outcome was miraculous, it only deepened my sense that life in the Middle East is excruciatingly arbitrary. If you leave the house on any given day, there’s a good chance you might never return home. Compare this to the worries you have in other countries.

Haunted by the ongoing atrocities in my homeland, I returned to Yemen for an extended visit when I was 13 to help out in whatever small ways I could. I volunteered for an internationally-recognized non-profit, Food4Humanity, to build water wells in remote drought-ridden villages. I was too small for physical labor, but fairly sharp in math and well-organized, so they assigned me logistical responsibilities: I was put in charge of detailing orders, shipments, supplies and deliveries… all at just 13. Then three years later at 16, I returned with a humanitarian project of my own, called WaterForPeople, to build solar-power water systems in areas affected by the ongoing drought and water-borne diseases. To date, my project has raised over $6,000 from private sources in Egypt, and construction has already begun.

My plan for the future is to study International Relations at a leading U.S. university, and then to combine my formal education with firsthand experience to develop humanitarian aid programs for the Middle East. As a civilian who has lived through the chaos, and as a student who has studied the region extensively, I know that there are no easy answers: politically, culturally or economically. But that volatile corner of the globe is in my blood, and in my dreams, and the safety and stability of the region affects people all over the world, so who better to try than someone like me?