I arrived in Yemen yesterday with  contradictory mental ideas of the country. It’s the place where Noah’s Ark was launched and Osama bin Landen’s father was born. It is a country where Westerners are kidnapped by tribesmen but rarely harmed, where suicide bombers struck the USS Cole, where young women dance and chew qat with their friends. Inhabited almost forever, Yemen is in many ways, the birthplace of all our lives. The sons of Noah knew it as the land of milk and honey, Gilgamesh came here to search for the secret of eternal life, wise men gathered frankincense and myrrh from its mountains and, most famously, a woman known simply as Sheba said Yemen was her home.

I am writing from my hotel in the port city of Aden, situated right on the ocean – where I was lucky enough to take a swim in this afternoon and cool off from the 100 degree heat. I hit the ground running this morning and caught a flight from Sana’a (the capital) at 5 am. By 7 am I was stepping over open sewage lines and getting myself lost in an extremely poor and marginalized Somali shantytown.

I have come to Yemen to report on many things, but the over arching, and pressing, story is food security. As the global food crisis left the general news cycle a year ago, the reality of food shortages and alarming malnutrition rates have not left – they have gotten worse. I hope to shed light back on this urgent issue and potentially get the media spotlight back on this topic.

So today was spent in a school feeding program for the 50,000 plus community and I was able to spend a lot of my day in maternity clinics. I was thinking today that this must have been at leased the 25^th or more maternity clinics I have visited in 6 countries over the last year, and every one of them I wish Lindsey could be with me. Over 40 pregnant women waiting to be seen, over worked staff, zero air conditioning… I’m able to empathize much more with Lindsey being pregnant. Time and again, the need for clinicians in the maternity world, especially in these already beat down, marginalized communities in the world are greatly needed.

Tomorrow I will be driving a few hours away to the Somali refugee camps where they are receiving on average 4 boats full of people from Somalia a day.

Vaccinations - seconds before the shot.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Observations, Photojournalism, The Middle East, Travel, Yemen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.