“It is very difficult to prepare for the future without knowing what is going to happen to you and when.”
Farah is a 35-year-old woman from Aden, Yemen. “Aden,” the name of a port city near the southern tip of Yemen, literally means “paradise.” For Farah, who spent her childhood and early years as a young woman in Aden, the city represented nothing less than a paradise compared to her difficult life as a refugee in Jordan. We met Farah for the last time in 2020. She was pregnant with her fourth child. A young and pleasant woman with a strong Yemeni accent, she had tremendous responsibilities for her age–fleeing her home, living in a new country, caring for three children, and the endless challenges of life in protracted displacement.
Coming from a middle-class background, Farah considered her life back in Yemen to be “comfortable.” Her family owned a house and a grocery store. After finishing high school in Aden, she decided to study journalism at the University of Aden. She had to stop after five months due to instability in the country though. She then married Hani, a Yemeni of Somali origins who used to work with her father at the grocery store and moved to Abyan with him.
In 2011, the political situation in Yemen started to deteriorate further, and Farah began to feel unsafe. At the same time, she got into a disagreement with her maternal family who refused to accept her marriage with Hani due to his Somali origins. Later in 2013, when Al-Qaeda intervened in Abyan, she decided to return to Aden. Once back in Aden, however, she encountered an uprising of the Secessionists Southerners* against the central government. Nowhere was safe.
Farah’s father encouraged her to flee to Jordan. At the time, Yemenis did not need a visa to enter. Farah used her savings and sold some gold from her wedding to pay for the airplane tickets, which cost around 250,000 Yemeni Riyals (~$1000/700 JOD) per ticket. Her father helped her to cover the rest.
Arrival in Jordan
Farah and Hani, together with their two children, arrived in Jordan in 2013. For the first month, they lived with Hani’s Somali friend at a house in central Amman. They managed to meet their basic needs with the savings they brought with them—around $500 (~350 JOD). At this time, Farah was already three months pregnant with their third child.
After one month, they moved in with another Somali friend where they rented a room. The young men living in the neighborhood encouraged Hani to find work in a factory in Sahab, an industrial town at the outskirts of Amman that is well-known among the Yemeni community. But Hani did not find work there and came back to Amman. He continued without work for four months. They lived off their savings and Farah sold some more of the gold from her wedding.
After five months of living in Amman, Farah and her husband decided to move to another house in the same neighborhood to live on their own. “It is true that my husband is Somali, but we were both raised like Yemenis. My husband always lived in Yemen. I also wanted privacy.” Hani used to go out every day with the young men and find odd jobs that paid him three to five dinars a day (~$4–$7). They struggled to pay the rent of 100 JOD and meet other basic needs and were barely surviving for that year. They spent all the savings they had brought from Yemen. Their son was born in 2014 and they received a small assistance disbursement of 100 JOD from UNHCR. Now with a newborn and two more children, however, their long-term expenses increased.
In 2015, Farah got news that her maternal uncles, who were still upset about her marriage with Hani, were coming to Jordan to look for her. She feared reprisal from her uncles and returned to Aden with her daughter and two sons to protect them. Farah again sold some of her gold jewelry to pay for the round-trip air tickets. When her uncles learned that she had returned to Yemen, they quickly decided to follow her back.
A full-blown war had started in Yemen. Farah was staying at her husband’s house until bombings in the area made the house uninhabitable. Farah hastily decided to join her father in Abyan who encouraged her to leave Yemen again. This time, she had to travel by road to Oman because the Aden airport was closed and then flew to Jordan through Qatar. She received financial help from a Yemeni businessman who also helped her get the visa.
Settling in or just surviving?
She arrived again in Jordan in late 2015. Farah and Hani had already registered with UNHCR in 2013, just two weeks after their arrival to Jordan, after suggestions from their Somali friends. But their case was complicated by the fact that Farah had returned to Yemen. As a result, their interview for refugee status determination was delayed until 2020, after spending more than six years in Jordan.
Like Farah, many Yemenis face difficulties in obtaining refugee status, either because they have returned to Yemen at some point during their stay in Jordan or because UNHCR considers the cities they come from to be “geopolitically stable” areas in Yemen.
While Farah was in Yemen, Hani had found work in the factories in Sahab. After Farah returned to Jordan, they moved into an apartment in central Amman. Step-by-step they started building their life in Jordan. As Farah’s daughter entered school, she started to meet new people, especially women. Most of the people she knew are Somalis, as she said, “When a Yemeni woman marries a Somali, then most of the people she knows will be Somalis. I do not know many Yemeni people in Jordan.”
Through her growing social network, she found information about assistance, charities, and training opportunities. As she became familiar with her neighborhood, she established networks with her Jordanian neighbors, especially the shopkeepers, who allowed her to buy basic household needs on credit. This has been a key coping strategy to ensure there is food on the table through times when Hani could find work.
In 2017, Hani found a stable job as a cook in a snack shop at a commercial street close to their house. He worked without a permit for a salary of 175 JOD (~$250) per month. Hani is very good at cooking Yemeni cuisine, but without a work permit, his pay was reduced. Hani’s salary only covered the family’s rent expense, and Farah had to borrow from several grocery shops in her neighborhood to meet the daily needs of her family. She had accumulated debts of 340 JOD (~$480) and paid off part of these when she received 270 JOD (~$380) in winter assistance from UNHCR.
Hani finally left his job because the owner kept withholding some of his already reduced salary. He had also been plagued with worry about being arrested by the Jordanian police for working without a permit. If the police deported Hani back to Yemen, he would have to leave his wife and children and would personally be in great danger from Farah’s maternal family.
Drowning in debt
Farah and Hani had no reliable financial support networks in Jordan. Without income, they continued to sell Farah’s gold jewelry, assets that held emotional value for her. They depended heavily on borrowing from neighborhood grocery stores. They could sometimes borrow small amounts from their Somali friends, those who received monthly assistance or had stable jobs. Occasionally, Farah’s parents in Yemen and her sister in Canada sent her some money, especially for medical emergencies. Farah suffers from malnutrition and stayed at the hospital once for two weeks. As a Yemeni, the high medical fees caused a substantial setback.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, Farah and Hani’s financial situation worsened. Hani struggled to find stable work as a cook as restaurants closed due to financial losses. Their debt multiplied quickly. In October 2020, they owed nearly 540 JOD (~$740) to the landlord for house rent. They had another 216 JOD (~$305) outstanding to different shops for electricity, water, and phone bills. This is in addition to the 405 JOD (~$572) of debts that they had before the COVID-19 crisis. This meant a total of around 1200 JOD (~$1,600) owed.
Their current financial situation makes loan repayment seem impossible. This causes a lot of psychological pressure for Farah. “I am sad to have so much debt. I am always worried, and I do not sleep well. Whenever I am in the street passing by the shop, I feel worried, even when the shop owner does not say anything.”
Looking forward
Life in Jordan has been debilitating. Hani wants to leave Jordan to go to a country where he can find a good job and take care of their children. Farah believed staying in Jordan would only be an option if they were able to get residency permits and take advantage of educational opportunities for their children. They can no longer live in constant fear of being detained or arrested by the police while earning a living to support themselves.
Farah was not clear about the pathways she could pursue to build a better future. She said that they could travel to Egypt or Malaysia as other Yemenis had done but they do not have the money and fear that they will be deported to Yemen where their lives would be in danger. So, they are waiting for resettlement through UNHCR but are limited by the lack of information they receive. “It is very difficult to prepare for the future without knowing what is going to happen to you and when,” she said.
As they wait, Farah really hopes that they start receiving monthly cash assistance to help meet basic needs. She also wants to work and support Hani. She has been trying her best to build her skills. She already completed a diploma in English. She took a cooking course, but it has not led her to find any work. She took an informal sewing course from a Jordanian tailor along with her Somali friend, but they could not continue practicing at home as they did not have a sewing machine. She wants to train as a make-up artist or in repairing electronics—anything that helps her earn an income.