“Many women are unable to overcome the crisis imposed by the situation in the country because they lack the minimum skills.” Haifa Ali

The mother’s tears were flowing as she complained to Haifa, the school principal, her financial situation, which had deteriorated after the war forcing her to take her son out of school. Haifa offered her work to help her family but the mother told her she had neither a certificate nor the skills needed to do any job. Haifa admitted the woman’s son as one of 25 students studying free of charge in her school. After this, she decided to open literacy and handicraft classes to help housewives acquire skills that would help them in their careers.

Haifa grew up in a conservative family in which girls do not usually complete their education. But her aunt stood with her during all stages of her education until she graduated from the university’s department of sociology and began working as a social worker. Through her work she witnessed difficult cases in the community that she was not familiar with, and these experiences helped bring her closer to the suffering of others.

Years later, she decided to establish a private school, which continued to work until the war started, when the salaries of the staff were stopped and many of the parents withdrew their children from school.

Haifa decided to use the evening period to open free classes at her school and to hold courses in literacy, sewing, engraving, recycling, handicrafts, secretarial skills, antiques and making gifts. She hired volunteer instructors, and others, whose wages were paid from donations.

“I hope Yemeni women get their rights fairly.” Fatima Fakhir

Fatima the school principal listened quietly to the teacher who spoke to her with sadness and emotion as she held back her tears. She was the ninth teacher to leave teaching due to the suspension of salaries because of the war in Yemen.

“Forgive me, but I cannot continue without pay,” the teacher said shyly. “You know the cost of transportation, and the difficult financial situation after our salaries were cut off. The grocer refused to lend me the bus fare today.”

“It’s ok,” said Fatima, “I appreciate your position well. If only I could do something, but this is war.”

“I know that well,” replied the teacher. “You’re always with us, but I can’t continue.”

At the beginning of the war Fatima’s school was transformed into a camp for displaced people. As a result, teaching stopped for months. She made an effort and pursued the responsible authorities to bring her students back to their classrooms and transfer the displaced to their camps.

Fatima runs a school in Bani al-Harith, far from the centre of the capital Sana’a, where 2000 girl students study, including least 400 displaced and orphaned girls whose interruption of their education will add new suffering to their lives in this seemingly endless crisis.

Fatima ran her first school in the mid-1980s and resisted discrimination against Yemeni female teachers in favour of Arab female teachers from neighbouring countries. She remembers when a parent paid a taxi fare for an Egyptian female teacher and ignored her Yemeni counterpart sitting next to her. “You are from the country,” he explained. From that day Fatima decided to support the daughters of her country to gain confidence and appreciation, and to give them the opportunity to prove their competence.

Today, she sees their dreams fall down like the leaves of trees being cut off. Fatima decided to find a solution to the teachers’ salary crisis. She contacted some traders and businessmen to request whatever they can offer to help teachers to continue working. She began looking for resources to bring teachers back to school. One merchant donated some food baskets to teachers each month; another businessman offered a monthly amount of money to cover the cost of transport; another offered a monthly amount to cover basic salaries of some teachers; a pharmacist offered to provide them with medicine.

Fatima looked happily out of the window of her office, at the students who were playing in the school yard after school had resumed. But she noticed some poor girl students sitting on the edge of the yard, looking sadly at others. She approached one of them and asked her why she wasn’t playing with the others. “I’m hungry,” the girl said. This shocked Fatima, and she went about looking for some food to feed these hungry students. With her extensive relationships, distinctive style and determination to achieve her goal, Fatima convinced other donors to serve breakfast free of charge for school students, teachers and janitors.

Some weeks later, one morning with a happy smile Fatima watched the students as they performed the morning greeting and continued with their education.

“It hurts me to see the piling up of corpses in hospital morgues. I must do something to restore their dignity.” Suad Al Maghraby

Suad adjusts the lens of the camera. The lighting is good, but she does not ask the person lying down before her to smile, because he can’t – he is dead.

While working at the Ministry of Interior at the beginning of her career, Suad was tasked with uncovering bodies, photographing and collecting information about them, reporting their cases, and then posting adverts about them in the national newspapers in order for their relatives to identify their bodies before permits could be issued to allow them to be buried.

Suad had been working in criminal investigation for twenty-seven years and had been tormented over the years by the scenes of so many bodies stacked in morgues. So she worked, with exceptional diligence, to get bodies buried, even if this meant working outside official working hours. She provided information on unidentified bodies, obtained permits and sorted out burial costs.

Some cases required a full year to obtain permits and to follow the procedures, such as getting forensic reports, prosecution permits and other necessary papers, publication of adverts in newspapers, and awaiting for the appearance of relatives of the dead. All this took a long time, but Suad worked patiently.

When the war broke out in 2015, the situation deteriorated because power outages affected the cold chambers. The economic collapse led some to leave the bodies of their relatives for months because they could not afford the costs of burial, or because hospitals, where patients had died, refused to hand over their bodies before they were reimbursed for the treatment costs which the families couldn’t afford. So Suad had to get funds from donors to release the corpses.

Suad was not looking for money only, but also sometimes for graves from donors. For example, years ago, a benefactor donated half a cemetery in which Christians could be buried, when all graveyards refused to bury them for religious reasons. She also stood with the residents of a neighbourhood in the face of some parties who tried to annex a cemetery to their property. She paid, from her income, the cost of fencing the cemetery to protect it.

One body Suad had to take a photo of was the body of a young child found dumped in a street garbage bin. These children do not get buried easily, because investigations last long, leaving them in morgues for long periods of time. During the war, hospitals became overwhelmed with bodies. Three bodies were piled on each morgue cabinet or bed. Suad pondered the fate of the poor child – where would they ditch his little body?

She held the camera, adjusted the lens, made sure the lighting was right, smiled tenderly, and took – for the child with closed eyes – his last shot.

“I hope Yemeni women will get justice, independence and non-discrimination.” Buthaina Al-Qirshi

Buthaina worked as a broadcaster and human rights activist concerned with women and children. After graduating, she lived alone in Sana’a city. Buthaina remembers her mother’s call at the time – she was blamed for staying alone, a blame reflecting the objections of the male members of her family. But she asked her family to trust her.

Buthaina smiles as she remembers the phase in her life when she was discovering the world, discovering herself, and living as an independent woman to prove to herself and to others that women are strong and can rely on themselves in the face of difficult circumstances.

After graduating, Buthaina worked in media as a children’s programme presenter. Through her work she became aware of the issues of abused children and gender-based violence. She attended training courses on children’s issues and became familiar with cases of early marriage and dropout from schools. The idea of defending their rights began to take a more coherent form in the course of her life.

Buthaina got married and moved to the city centre, but she continued to visit her home on the outskirts of Sana’a. She used to spend a few days each week at this house, trying to make friends with local women. At first, they did not accept the presence of a strange woman from the city, but she kept inviting them to her home to listen to their stories.

During one of these women’s gatherings, the doorbell rang. A woman came in with her child and revealed that she had been stabbed in the waist – both she and her child had been subjected to violence by her husband. Buthaina listened to her story with astonishment, and sought to deal with her problem through the judicial system. She contacted to her friends and activists in the field of women’s rights, with whom she had established good relationships while working in the media. In the end they managed to save the woman and her child from their ordeal.

This incident was a turning point in Buthaina’s life. She decided to start helping women to solve their legal problems, but she did not receive the cooperation of the competent authorities. They always asked her: “In what capacity are you making this complaint?”

She established a civil society organisation that would enable her to defend women and children officially. She dedicated her house, which she had built herself, to this cause as a headquarters from which she worked to help women and children affected by violence.

She opened the rooms of her house to her foundation as classrooms for teaching literacy, sewing, embroidery and computer instruction; helping girls and women to learn crafts and skills that would help them start their own small businesses – more than 600 women have benefited from these training courses. She also worked legally to help those women affected by the war, and stood with them through their various issues.

Buthaina noticed the high rate of girls’ drop out from school at early ages so she hired a group of girls to work in her institution in exchange for paying for their studies. One of its employees completed her dental studies with the support of the foundation and is now a successful dentist employed by the biggest hospitals.

One day a woman entered Buthaina’s office and asked her to accompany her to reclaim the bodies of her sons who had been killed in armed clashes. Buthaina’s foundation was the only humanitarian organisation that had remained open after the closure of most institutions and organisations because of the battles and armed clashes in the area.

Buthaina accompanied her until they were surrounded by fighters who did not allow women to enter their area. So the two women used their words to make peace temporarily, so that they could bury the dead and end the fighting in this area. The two women stood shoulder to shoulder with only their words , facing the guns which were pointed at them. They negotiated until the men allowed the mothers and wives of the dead to enter the area to bring out the bodies of their dead loved ones.

Buthaina had been a well-known Yemeni broadcaster. She no longer holds the microphone, but she still uses her voice – to fight for the rights of women and children.

“There will be no comprehensive peace if there is no peace at the community level.” Sumaya Al Hossam

The poor old woman welcomed Sumaya with a piece of dry bread – Sumaya knew that the woman did not have anything else. Sumaya was visiting this remote village as a social worker for the Social Fund of Development. The old woman looked at her with an embarrassed smile as Sumaya put the piece of bread in her mouth and chewed it despite its hardness, then smiled back gratefully at the only woman who had this as her only daily food.

Sumaya heard stories of women in these isolated villages, and decided to do something to save them, and to help them, to improve their living conditions, determined to stand by them as they faced violence, persecution and denial of their rights.

Sumaya was born and lived in Hajjah province. She studied law in Sana’a, despite the traditions of her conservative family, who objected to her moving to student housing far from her village. But she managed, in her distinctive style, which later on helped her to become a lawyer, to convince them to give her this chance, which would enable her to defend the rights of children and women, and to work to achieve the justice she dreamt of.

After graduating from university Sumaya joined training courses in the field of human rights and peace making. She worked as a researcher and consultant with the Social Fund for Development, visiting remote areas to help women there, and to communicate their issues and problems to those responsible. Sumaya wanted to use more effective ways to convey women’s voice, so she ran for parliamentary elections for membership of the House of Representatives in her constituency. She was first woman to engage in such an encounter in the conservative province of Hajjah. However, the events of 2011 stopped the elections.

Sumaya joined the National Dialogue Conference in 2014 and began to think about extending the limits of her ambition to achieve peace in Yemen. But the 2015 war stopped the National Dialogue, so she decided to fight her battle directly from her platform, without waiting for an official post to help her out.

There had been battles of vengeance between two tribes in the province of Hajjah since 2002, with many parties attempting to intermediate between them for fifteen years, to no avail. Many people had been killed or wounded.

Sumaya believed that ending this small war would solve many similar issues, and could perhaps be a first step to ending the war that had taken hold of her country. So she decided to contribute to efforts the end it. She learnt the detailed history of these battles in full; she got in touch with specialists from the Ministry of Justice to become familiar the legal aspects of these issues; she talked to local people in the region to know what was happening; she learnt the stories of the victims who were killed from both sides because of revenge, and counter revenge.

Sumaya got in touch with former mediators between the parties to the conflict and contacted 50 people from both sides. She then began to open the lines of communication between them, invoking the desire of all to achieve peace.

In 2015 Sumaya began to send phone messages to 100 people from the two conflicting tribes. The messages, from this woman they did not know, continued for nine months, calling for peace. She contacted politicians and national decision makers and put the issue on the negotiating table, once again.

One year and two months later, after the start of her reconciliation efforts, the warriors of the two sides shook hands. In 2016, after fourteen years of fighting, peace was restored between the two tribes, with both parties deciding to put their weapon away.

Sumaya is currently working on programmes that engage women in peacemaking processes as intermediaries. Not merely a defender of rights by raising awareness, she believes in women’s ability to make peace because of human perception, in which she believes women are superior to men.