A Homemade Museum in a Refugee Camp

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2018

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tens of thousands of refugees from the civil war in Yemen have fled across the narrow Mandeb Strait to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. Nicolas Niarchos reported for The New Yorker from Djibouti, where Yemeni refugees cross paths with Ethiopians escaping a devastating drought. In one camp, he met a man whom aid workers described as a kind of Peter Pan. Abdillahi Bashraheel was once a road surveyor in Yemen, and lost everything in the war. From the camp, he walks miles in the desert each day to pick up broken toys, electronics, wood, stone, and other bits and bobs. He arranges these objects in his tent to create what he calls his museum—a place of beauty and respite under desperate circumstances. Plus, Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate says that “green space has fed the inner silence that I think most writers are seeking.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
0:09.0	And I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.
0:13.0	There's this sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next.
0:20.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:28.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:32.3	Nicholas Nyarkos is a contributor to the New Yorker, and he has the challenging beat of reporting
0:37.1	on a war that,
0:37.7	frankly, many Americans don't even know we're involved in. The war in Yemen is both a civil
0:43.3	war and a regional war with more powerful neighbors, Iran and Saudi Arabia involved. At the
0:49.6	same time, the United States is supporting and enabling the Saudi's air war. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled Yemen, and many are in Djibouti in Eastern Africa.
1:00.0	Nick Nyarkos visited one of the refugee camps there in 2016.
1:04.0	It's 50.
1:05.0	Okay, 50.
1:06.0	So should we go one like that and one of the other ones over there?
1:10.0	The camp in Djibouti was hot and dusty
1:12.2	and people were miserable. But Nick met a man there who had a unique way of coping with
1:17.4	tragedy and finding beauty wherever he could. So it's in the middle of the desert. You arrive at the
1:26.4	camp. It's incredibly, incredibly hot.
1:31.2	When you walk out of an air-conditioned room into this heat, you feel like you're going to be physically sick.
1:36.9	But you don't really smell anything because it's so hot.
1:41.6	All your senses are overwhelmed by the heat and everybody's looking for shade.
	...

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