Hunger and Shame

Yemenat

Ahmed Saif Hashed

In our days, we lived with hunger, grappling with our fates, able to snatch life from the claws of death by hunger. Today, however, a people dies every day, besieged by all sorts of filth, mafias, and waste. Death is both absurd and lavish in a world ravaged by tyrants, the gluttonous, and the trivial. It is a world complicit in our destruction through a war that has become grotesquely savage, with hellish shepherds who refuse to halt it or lay down their burdens. A cruel siege tightens with both hands, pressing with all its might on the mouths of those who have escaped death or remain alive. This war has become profitable, drowning its perpetrators in wealth and abundance as they convert our blood, hunger, famines, and immense tragedies into bank accounts.

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I have often been hungry, wrestling with want, need, and deprivation. I suffered from emaciation, weakness, and the exhausting hardship that wears down both body and soul. I lived through long years of malnutrition, “anemia,” thyroid issues, painful swellings in my feet, as well as amoebic and giardial infections, and bouts of fever that would seize me from time to time.

When the fever struck, my body would revel in the warmth, enjoying the sun’s rays for longer, wishing for the heat to intensify. Yet, as soon as I felt its grip loosen, I discovered that the fever surged and intensified, growing stronger against my frail and weakened body. The “sun of the dead,” as we call it in our village, bidding us farewell with its reddening and fading light as it withers toward sunset, reminded me of my deteriorating health and my departed sisters, Noor and Samiyah.

During my time in the middle school at “Tor Al-Baha’a,” the prescribed