No Happy Eid in Yemen

 YemenExtra

People in the Yemeni cities celebrated their third Muslim Eid holiday under Saudi air strikes, bombs, killing as well as siege that imposed in their country since 2015, Cholera as well.

If you asked any Yemeni what they wanted this Eid they would all have told you the same thing: ‘All we ask for is peace.’

Instead, what should have been a happy holiday of families and friends exchanging gifts, gathering for feasts, and children indulging in sweets, was something far more sombre.

An eight were killed, one of them a woman and four were injured when Saudi air strikes target a house in Serwah directorate, middle Yemen, on the afternoon On the first day of Eid al-Fitr.

Normally people decorate their houses for Eid and get dressed in new or clean clothes, like children in Gulf States, but many of the children I spoke to this year hadn’t dressed up at all as a result of siege and salaries.

One popular part of Eid in Yemen is when girls decorate their hands with khethab or hena’a – a black liquid applied to form intricate designs to the skin. To do this properly takes hours, but they enjoy gathering with other girls and making themselves look beautiful for Eid the next day, but you cannot see it any more.

But for too many children this will be their last Eid, during the very first days of the holiday I saw a photograph of a Yemeni girl who had been killed in an airstrike or because of cholera.

She was about 11-years-old. Her hands had been decorated with hena’a in preparation for Eid celebrations. On this holiday her family’s home should have been full of laughter and joy. Instead there was only rubble, tears, and anger.

A new thing in this Year is the Cholera, the number of Yemenis infected with cholera is expected to rise to more than 300,000 by the end of August, the United Nations children’s agency says, and that what makes something far more sombre.