The Man Going Back
This April, my Yemeni-American friend, Mokhtar, and I rented a car in Djibouti City and drove four hours to Obock, a tiny whitewashed village on the Gulf of Aden. When the Saudis began dropping bombs on Yemen, ostensibly to slow or to punish the Houthi takeover of the country, thousands of Yemenis had crossed the sea and found their way to Obock, a godforsaken town on the coast. We got there, and it was 124 degrees Fahrenheit.
When the war began, UNHCR had set up a refugee camp on a bluff outside Obock. By the time my friend and I arrived—a year and change after the bombing had started—the tents remained, but for the most part the only people left were poor Djiboutians who had taken up residence. Twice a day, red sandstorms took over the camp, rendering everything opaque and sending its inhabitants into the darkness of their canvas dwellings.
Mokhtar and I wandered around Obock and met a young man who had nowhere to go. He emerged from one of the buildings wearing a Hollister
