This year, families celebrate being alive and healthy as poverty, unemployment dampen spirits in war-torn Yemen.
Fawaz Fara rummaged through piles of clothes at a market in Sanaa as his wife Asma’a and six children watched. He stopped and told the vendor he could not afford anything, then led his family away.
“One [of my girls] asked me to buy toys for her. Another cried and asked why I don’t buy anything,” said Fara, 35. “I told them I couldn’t even afford clothes. How can I afford toys?”
This is the first year he can not buy new outfits for each to wear on Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Fara had earned a good living as a security guard at a park in central Saudi Arabia for the past nine years.
He was sending enough money back to Asma’a in Yemen to support the whole family, and she could afford to splurge on expensive clothes for the children to wear on Eid.
They had enjoyed a high standard of living in a country where the average person lived on $4.50 per day before the war started in 2015. That amount plummeted to $1.80 per day a year later.
Since March 2015, a Saudi-UAE-led coalition, supporting the Yemeni government, has been at war with the Houthi rebels.
The four-year-conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed the Arab world’s poorest country to the brink of famine.
People with financial means used to sing joyously during Eid as they ate sweets, decked out in fancy new clothes.
This year, they are celebrating being alive and healthy, joining humbler expressions of gratitude familiar to Yemen’s poor.
The transition is frustrating for Fara, who was deported from Saudi Arabia after talking politics with two men in Mecca last Ramadan.
He was arrested, he said, after he commented that the Saudi government has supported the Houthis as Iran has.
It cost him his visa. Now he lives with Asma’a, who is nine months’ pregnant, and their children in a rented home in the Old City of Sanaa, having joined the ranks of Yemen’s more than 60 percent unemployed.
