Poverty, which plagues many families in this country, is the main reason for the emergence of car cleaners in the streets of our cities. After all, the average daily per capita income in Yemen is less than ONE US DOLLAR. Even that suffers from a skewed distribution. For the 40% most poor of our society, the average daily income is less than FIVE CENTS. 
That leads people to find various odd jobs to make ends meet. It is not only adults, but children and even infants help out meet family needs. 
Thus, it is mostly children who work as car cleaners. Despite differences in their backgrounds, there are many common factors, as we report below. 

First, Family Circumstances: 
Most families, comprising between six to nine members, suffer from poverty. This is in spite of the fact that their fathers or breadwinners are still alive and do the same or different work by with very low income that does not meet the minimum family requirements. Those children also suffer from chiding by other remote family members who do nothing to help them. 

Second, School Conditions: 
Some of car cleaners continue their schooling and are able to cope with both studies and work. They go to school in the morning then spend the rest of the day and evening cleaning cars. However, others left school due to inability to meet more expenses either because their father was dead or invalid. They wish to continue their studies but could not due to worsening economic conditions. 

Third, Providing Income: 
Most of them provide the only source of income for their families. They either spend it on their family or save it until the end of the month then transfer the lot to their family's place of residence. 

Fourth, Rates: 
They clean between three to five cars daily at prices that differ according to the customer and type of service. For example, wiping windows only would cost 20 rials, while cleaning windows and the car's body would cost 50 rials. Cleaning the car using soap would cost 100 rials. Their incomes vary from 150 to 500 rials per day. 

Answers by a number of those cleaners revealed that their poor families were behind their invlvement in that type of work. They expressed readiness to do any kind of work just to provide a source of income for their impoverished families. 
When asked about the nature of accidents that may occur to him, one of them Waseem Abdulsalam Al-Humaidy, 11, said that customers' non-payment, heat of the sun and cold nights were the main difficulties facing him. 
He said that he has been in that profession for two years and before that he used to have a bathroom scale (asking people to weigh themselves in return for five or ten rials), but that did not provide enough money. 

Waseem said that a car once ran over his right foot and another threw him on his back. He works in two shifts: six hours in the morning and five hours in the evening which makes him feel totally exhausted. However, he does not think of quitting the job because he helps his father meet the living expenses and because he did not find any other job. He said that he brings water condensed from steam emited by a nearby laundry or buys some. 
Hiyam Ali Al-Haimi, 14, left school at the preparatory stage and resorted to cleaning cars to cater for her eight-member family. Her father is incapable of working while her elder brother is working in a leather factory with a low salary. 

Hiyam's younger brother works with her. She started this work only a year ago and before that she begged for money but later she found that cleaning cars was more profitable than begging in the streets. 
Asked about her schooling, Hiyam said that her work is a necessity and she could not cope with both. She elaborated that schooling needs expenses that nobody could provide and that she covers a main portion of her family's needs. 

The little kid wishes to work as a cleaner in any institution to enable her continue her schooling and at the same time continue to supply her family with necessary funds. 
Hiyam works seven hours a day in front of Ford Showroom, and in Ramadan she works from 4 pm to 4 am and buys her food from a nearby restaurant. On one occasion, she refused a free meal from that restaurant. She enjoys a strong character and has the upper hand over her fellow cleaners. 
Hiyam said that sometimes she feels dizzy and tired from continuous work under the heat of the sun and complains that a number of drivers tease her. She refuses the idea of marriage charging that men are not faithful. 

Another kid, Salman Ahmad Qayed has been working in that profession for only two months. His father is dead and he is the breadwinner of a seven-member family. The 15-year-old boy studies in the sixth grade in the morning and cleans cars in the afternoons. 
His family lives in Makbana, a village in Taiz province, with one of his brothers while the other is a student in Taiz and the rest are females. 

He worked for one week in a restaurant in Taiz before he was sacked at the pretext of incompetency. His mother advised him to work in cleaning cars to cover up their needs after his uncle seized his father's money. 
Salman saves what he earns and sends it to his mother every month. He secures water from a nearby pump and works for seven hours under the sun heat which left him with severe headache. 

Salman, who sleeps in a shop along with comrades of the same profession, had been victim of a number of accidents as a result of his work in the streets. 
Another lad, Faisal Mohammed Nasser Al-Shameery, 16, studies at the elementary stage and works with his father in the same profession. The rest of the family live in Shameer with the exception of his elder brother, who is an employee with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and another one who works as a caretaker in a Sanaa building. 
Faisal started that line of work four years ago, at his father's advice, when he was only 12 years old and had no work. He gives his father all what he earns and he secures water from a nearby pump. 

He is always liable to sun strokes and needs a lot of water to drink but he scarcely gets hit by cars. 
Finally, those poor fellows are forced to pursue that line of work, in spite of its difficulty, due to their enormous hardships that came about as a result of the country's dwindling economic situation and the escalating wave of soaring prices. 

By Habib Al Noman 

 

I am the foreign wife of a Yemeni, and have been living in this country for many years. We as foreigners being married to Yemenis see life here quite differently from foreigners like diplomats or development workers. They are always under the protection of their organizations or their employer, who provide them with nice houses and gardens. 

At the beginning of my life in Yemen, my husband and I lived in Rawdha, when it was still beautiful. It was a green village with gardens of grape-vines and pomegranate trees walled by handmade mud walls. There were cisterns with clear water, and many blooming mimosa trees. All the houses were made of mud. No ugly cement bricks or corrugated iron sheets destroyed the harmony of the landscape of green plantations, beige mud-brick architecture with simple white ornaments and the green of the distant mountains. 

Then we moved from Rawdha to Sanaa, from the cozy mud tower to a simple stone "villa" as they are called. It was a shock to be surrounded by a gray cement brick-wall and to have dry dirt instead of a garden. With a lot of effort, I turned the small area around the house into a blossoming oasis. From seeds, I grew a huge passion-fruit vine which covered the entrance and protected us from nosy people looking into our house from higher buildings. 
Yet one day without any warning the landlord sent workers to dig up my garden, because he wanted to put pillars around the house to support a second floor. This he decided to build without giving us notice, or without lowering the rent. 

From one day to another, my quiet life was over. I had to keep the curtains closed all day. Outside, workers dug ditches. I could reach my entrance only by balancing over wooden planks. I often had to carry heavy shopping bags, much to the enjoyment of gloating workmen, who just stood and watched me. 

Since my collection of plants slowly disappeared under the heels of the workers, I started to dig up some of them and give them to my friends. Immediately, the landlord showed up. His family was always watching me from behind the curtains of their house next door to report to my husband any "indecent behavior." He claimed the plants to be his property and forbade me to dig them out. I exploded and screamed at him. As a response I only got laughter, being a foreigner and a woman, I was completely helpless. 

A Yemeni woman usually has some protection in her house. It is considered shameful that any male outside the close family sees her face, calls her by her name, etc. However, many people seem to think this does not apply to a foreign woman. She can be approached, seen, insulted and as in my case, accused. 
The above mentioned landlord accused me of having damaged a wall, of being an alcoholic, etc. On the other hand, it happened many times that the same landlord's son rang our bell drunk, because his father (a qadhi) did not want to let him sleep in his house, so he wanted to sleep in our garden. 

After the roof was eventually opened to make way for the staircase to the next floor, we moved out of that house. This time we were lucky to find a nice mud-brick house, but it had no garden. It did not matter because I had sworn never to plant anything anymore in a landlord's garden. Instead I enjoyed a nice view into the tops of pepper trees from our windows. I had saved some plants from my former garden and started with them a roof terrace. 
The landlord of this house posed a different problem. He was quite old, and while workers were fixing the outer fa�ade of the house (no great disturbance), he demanded to come in to watch them. He pretended to be so feeble that he had to be helped up the staircase, just in order to be able to touch me. He also asked me to kiss his ring. I really wondered how strange Yemenis can be! 

Finally came the time to move into our own house. It was an old one, which we bought from a senior official. This was another disaster because the former owner regretted the sale afterwards. In his anger, he dismantled everything possible, including a water pump, faucets, electric sockets, even a big tree from the garden which for sure has not survived being transplanted. But I did not mind. 

Finally I had my own garden and started to work right away on the devastated piece of land. After a short time, the surrounding ugly walls were covered with shrubs and vines. The berries of a big lantana Camara bush attracted many small birds. A Yemeni lily, collected once from a wadi, finally blossomed, an apricot tree in the middle of the garden grew big enough to sit under its shade. 
I thought that now finally I could enjoy my own garden. However, it turned out that the neighbor next door claimed that part of our land was his, after we had already lived there for a few years! First he tried to destabilize our wall by digging halls underneath it. 
Finally when nobody was at home he tore down the whole wall which separates his land from ours, destroying all the plants growing alongside it. There ensued shooting in the air, screaming aggression. In our house slept soldiers. 

Over the broken down wall, one could see the relatives of the neighbor sitting in a car watching us all the time. Any attempt to rebuild it was hindered with metal bars. The timing was perfect, because my husband is out of the country. I am walking on top of rubble, a hardened heap of cement and rock-splinters to water the remains of my garden under the eyes of a guard with a machine gun and wait for this problem to be solved. 
I have the distinct feeling that some Yemenis love to destroy other people's property - in my case my gardens. Behavior of this kind is rather childish. If this kind of attitude towards foreigners and their property continues, who will ever want to invest anything in this country. 

By: Mrs. Andrea Sabri, 
A German resident in Yemen.