Photo : Yemeni children in the Markazi camp setting traps for birds. “You will find hundreds of birds of different kinds,” Bashraheel said. "Small with good colors, and big birds.”

The desert plain between the Gulf of Aden and the Mabla Mountains, in northern Djibouti, is a rutted landscape of ochre sand and rocks, dotted with gnarled acacia trees. In summer, it is swept by dust storms with wind speeds as high as forty miles an hour, known as the khamsin, and temperatures can top a hundred and twenty degrees. Here, in a refugee camp called Markazi, near the town of Obock, around a thousand Yemenis, who fled civil war in their country, are housed in a cluster of tents and white huts, surrounded by a chain-link fence. There used to be more than three thousand, but many have left, renting rooms in Djibouti City, if they can afford them, or returning to Yemen, preferring the uncertainty of a war zone to the heat of the camp.

In late May, by the medical tents at the center of Markazi, I spoke to an elderly man wearing a striped shirt and a pink fedora. He was smiling broadly. “I invite you to come and see my museum,” he said to me, in English, introducing himself as Abdillahi Bashraheel. “Walk down there. You will hear the birds singing, and then you will have come to the place.” He was pointing toward the first sector of the camp, which is for refugees from the southern port city of Aden.

The politics in the camp have remained fairly harmonious, Salim Jaafar, the camp manager for the U.N. Refugee Agency, told me, despite the fact that Yemen is a tangled mess of affiliations, tribes, and sects, and the refugees come from around the country. The current conflict began in earnest in the fall of 2014, when the Houthis, an armed rebel movement from the north, captured Sanaa, Yemen’s capital and largest city, in the northwest. Abdo Rabo Mansour Hadi, a caretaker President backed by Saudi Arabia, had overstayed his term of office, and the Houthis pressured him to sign a power-sharing agreement and then to resign. In January of last year, they placed the President under house arrest.

The civil war started in earnest in March, 2015, after Hadi escaped and fled south in a convoy of vehicles. The Houthis swept from their stronghold in Sanaa toward Aden, in the south. Allied with forces in the country’s Army loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, they seized control of the two hundred and sixty miles between the two cities and entered Aden. On March 25th, Hadi reportedly fled in a boat, and a Saudi-led coalition began attacking the Houthis and pounding Yemen with airstrikes. Taking advantage of the lack of central government, an Al Qaeda affiliate took large swaths of territory in Yemen’s east.

For three months in 2015, Hadi and his Saudi backers fought alongside groups like the Al Qaeda affiliate against the Houthis in Aden, and finally pushed them out. (Allegiances in the conflict are constantly shifting, and the coalition later ended up fighting Al Qaeda in some parts of the country.) The city was declared a provisional capital. Residents of Aden who have fled to Djibouti told me of continued power and water shortages, and random spasms of violence. More than ten thousand people are thought to have died in the brutal fighting in Yemen in the past year, almost four thousand of them civilians. About two hundred thousand people have fled the country, and some three million have been internally displaced.

The United States has played a significant role in the conflict, offering logistical support to the Saudis since the beginning of the conflict, and deploying Special Forces to fight the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. In September, the Senate cleared the way for more than a billion dollars worth of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. (According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. provided twenty billion dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia in 2015 alone.) Over the weekend, Saudi airstrikes killed some hundred and forty people at a funeral in Sanaa. Pictures from the scene showed the tail fin of an American-made guided bomb amid the wreckage. Earlier this week, a U.S. destroyer was targeted by missiles from rebel-held territory in Yemen that fell short of their target. On Thursday, the U.S. Navy fired back, destroying three radar facilities the Pentagon said were responsible for the strikes.

Bashraheel has been living in Markazi since he fled the Mualla district of Aden, in April of last year. During that time, he has turned the area where he lives into a refuge from the realities of the camp, collecting objects that he exhibits in a museum of sorts: coins, stones whose shapes he finds pleasing, old bottles, lines of conch shells, the battered stem of a discarded water pipe, pieces of coral. He planted jasmine and drumstick trees. When I was there, he had a hen, a rooster, and sixteen eggs in a wooden crate, which he said would soon hatch.

Objects placed next to each other take on metaphorical weight as he narrates the way around the garden. Pointing to an inverted faucet, he said it represented the craziness of life in Yemen, where people flee their homes without even wearing proper shoes. “They leave their flip-flops and they walk just like mad people. Why? Because the life in my country is exactly almost like this shape,” he said, pointing to the faucet. “Upside down.”

Bashraheel is in his mid-sixties, and was once a road surveyor in Yemen. As a young man, he finished the equivalent of middle school when Aden was still a British colony. After training to be a surveyor, he began working for international companies involved in construction projects throughout Yemen. When his part of Aden became embroiled in the recent conflict, Bashraheel, who does not have a wife or children, fled, with only the clothes he was wearing, on a boat carrying refugees to Djibouti.

When I visited Bashraheel’s museum, I noticed a cage in the corner. He told me that, until a few weeks earlier, he had used it to hold a pair of birds he had trapped. One day in May, he noticed that a third bird was sitting in front of the cage. “Immediately, I removed the net, I took the two birds, I said, ‘I free the both of you for the sake of God,’ ” he told me. That same day, Tom Kelly, the U.S. Ambassador to Djibouti, was coming to inspect Markazi, and wanted to meet him. “I said, ‘How can I greet him? I have no words,’ ” Bashraheel recalled. He trapped two more birds before the Ambassador arrived. “Before he entered my place, I said to him, ‘Greeting you,’ and let the birds fly.” He went on, “We have to be human, we have to love each other, we have to believe in peace.”

The port of Obock, about fifteen minutes from the camp on an auto-rickshaw, is the first point of disembarkation for the refugees. There, a Yemeni man walked the streets of the town, unable to speak. “He lost his whole family in a bombing raid,” my translator, Khaled, whose family is from Obock, told me one morning, pointing him out. “Sometimes he goes naked in the street.” That morning, the man was staggering through the heat along a road where goats picked at trash, wearing a green tank top, emblazoned with a campaign slogan for Djibouti’s President, and sweat-stained shorts.

Khaled told me that the man comes from a village near Dhubab, in the south of Yemen, an area that has been heavily bombed by the Saudi-led coalition and rocketed by the Houthis. His fellow-villagers had taken pity on him, Khaled explained, “because they knew that he had nobody, nothing,” and put him on one of the boats bound for Djibouti. Nobody in Obock knows his name. “Some people call him the solitaire”—the solitary man—“some people make up a name only to communicate with him,” Khaled said. “I feel very sorry for him.”

Djibouti is one of the world’s poorest countries, with few natural resources and a sixty per cent unemployment rate, and the Obock area is one of the poorest areas of Djibouti. Under these circumstances, the U.N. Refugee Agency, N.G.O.s operating in the country, and local authorities have done impressive work: the camp at Markazi is clean and runs fairly smoothly thanks to their efforts. Still, one of the main complaints I heard from residents of the camp was that the food supplied to them—mainly grain and flour—was not adequate. Some refugees work as fishermen, and others grow vegetables, but most struggle to have variety in what they eat.

Ali Hassan Ghaleb Saleh al-Antary, a refugee in the camp, told me he was a lawyer and had worked for Human Rights Watch in Yemen. He pointed out that residents of the camp have difficulty fending off mosquitoes and insects, and they don’t have refrigerators to keep water and medicines cool. He wanted the U.N. to do more for the refugees, and questioned why the Djiboutians had chosen this spot for the camp. Houssein Mahomed Chardi, the project coördinater for refugees at Djibouti’s state refugee organization, which is known by its French acronym, ONARS, told me Obock was selected because of its proximity to Yemen. He also pointed out that other regions already host refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. “The people of Obock already knew the Yemenis better than they knew the people of southern Djibouti,” he said.

Tasneem Abdeshakur came to Markazi in April of last year. She is a widow from Aden, where she worked as a civil engineer. Now she lives in a tent next to Bashraheel, with three of her sons, who are in their twenties. She also has another son, who has remained in Aden with his wife and daughter. Abdeshakur’s family has learned to live in Markazi by planting a garden, and installing solar panels and setting up fans to cool their home.

Abdeshakur showed me her tomato, chili, and onion plants, which a netted roof shields from mosquitoes and the sun. “Here we have Moringa,” she said, pointing to a small tree. “This is like a tea. It’s used for some diseases and stomach pain.” Conventional medicine is hard to come by in the camp, Abdeshakur, who suffers from diabetes, told me. “Sometimes they give me medicines, sometimes they don’t.” she said.

Of Abdeshakur’s three sons in the camp, only one has found work, as a day laborer in Obock. The Djiboutians, she said, “treat us well. But I think they don’t want to get jobs for my sons. We tried, but they refused because they have no French.” Chardi, the Djiboutian official, told me that refugees have the right to work, and to free movement around the country. But the realities are more complex. The police, who are contending with the possibilities of violence spilling over from Yemen’s active war zone, and a low-boil insurgency by the Afar people, in the north, often restrict the movement of refugees.

Abdeshakur said she has dreams at night of returning to Aden, as it was before the war started, when her sons could work and study at university. On weekend afternoons, she recalled, she would stroll around the public gardens and swim in the sea. I asked her whether she might really return. “Aden is still killing each other,” she said. “I don’t want my lose sons between Daesh”—ISIS—“or Al Qaeda.” She worries the city she loved has been destroyed forever.

The common assumption is that many Yemeni refugees in the Horn of Africa are simply waiting for the war to end, and that they will go back to their home country. But many people I met in Djibouti said they were looking to resettle in the United States or in Europe. This was especially true of Adenis like Bashraheel and Abdeshakur, who tend to speak better English than people from the north and to be more pessimistic about the chances for lasting peace in Yemen. When I visited in May, the U.N. staff in Obock told me they had spoken to several people about their wish to resettle, but sentiments in many of the countries they wish to go to will make this a difficult process.

Kelly told me that he could envision Yemenis being resettled in the U.S. from Djibouti, because refugees, mainly Somalis, had been resettled from the other camps in the country. Still, he said, of the Yemeni refugees, “only a very small percentage of refugees in those camps will be resettled in the U.S. or elsewhere.” The rest of the world could learn from Djibouti, Kelly said, adding that its officials deserve “a lot of praise” for their response to the Yemen crisis. “Djibouti is one of the poorest countries in the world,” he continued. “Over the past year, thirty-five thousand evacuees from Yemen have come here. It is roughly equivalent to the U.S. taking in thirteen million refugees. That’s not going to happen. Not in this political climate.”

Nicolas Niarchos is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.