“You just don’t get it,” one young man told me as I stepped over a pile of trash to enter 19-year-old Mohammed’s single room in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. “People die in their homes here all the time.” 

That was 10 years ago, and the young man, a Somali refugee, was frustrated because I was concerned with a single dying boy while the entire refugee community was barely surviving.  

It was before the uprising in Yemen, before the war, before the humanitarian crisis and before the coronavirus pandemic. It was back when things were not as bad. 

Now, there is almost no help left for refugees, and families say they would rather risk exposure to the coronavirus than starvation. 

“If my mother stays home, she cannot feed us,” says Aayah Mohammed Osman, a teenage Somali refugee in Sanaa. “But if she goes to work [as a house cleaner], she also may bring home the virus.” 

There are roughly 280,000 refugees from Africa living in Yemen. Most are from Somalia. And while many of them intended to transit through Yemen to Saudi Arabia or other wealthy countries, many also planned on staying. 

Yemen is one of the world’s poorest countries, embroiled in a brutal war and plagued with acute malnutrition and diseases like cholera, malaria and dengue fever.  

The number of refugees arriving on Yemen’s shores has dropped by about 80 percent since the pandemic began, but people are still coming and aid organizations say international resources to support them have dwindled to almost nothing.  

“It says a lot about the state of the world, when people feel that Yemen is better than their own situation at home,” UNHCR representative in Yemen Jean-Nicolas Beuze said from his office in Sanaa.