Ramadhan Food Parcels in Yemen — April 2017

My name is Hani Abdulkader Uqba. I am Ilham's cousin from Sana'a, Yemen, and I have lived here my whole life. I am a geologist and have worked for the ministry of oil and minerals for the last 13 years.

When the war in Yemen started, Ilham contacted me about helping orphans whose parent or parents had died during the conflict. I first met Moataz (7) and his sister Balsam (8) when the Sheik in Barish Village in the Hamdan district told me they were in urgent need — their father had died. Once meeting them, I discovered there was another child in the household called Islam (a 6-year-old girl). After checking on them, we committed to helping the children with monthly support. Since then, Ilham and I have worked on a variety of projects together, and in this post I want to share our 2017 Ramadhan Food Parcel project.

In April, since the war had become so bad and people were dying from bombs and poverty, Yahya Foundation's volunteers began discussing how we could help during Ramadhan. After considering many ideas, we decided to distribute food parcels to feed 50 families. We made a list of what we wanted to buy, and I then researched local prices.

To raise funds, we formed teams of volunteers around the world — in the UK, Kenya, Kuwait and Canada — and encouraged each other in a friendly competition to see who could raise the most. Alhamdulillah, we raised more money than we anticipated, enough to provide 225 families with food parcels.

On the 7th of May we began distributing the food parcels to families that local Sheiks had identified. We had a team of helpers, and a friend of mine lent us his pick-up truck to transport the parcels to all the families.

The most memorable thing I can recall was how happy the children were to receive the food. Two young girls were singing and dancing, saying, "Oh, we have food, we have food." You have to imagine — these are people who would go to sleep not knowing what they would have for breakfast the next morning. I am very proud to have been able to help them; this may be the best thing I have done in my life.

In the end, we raised over $15,000, which allowed us to provide food to 1,173 people. In my next blog post, I will talk about how we also provided iftar every day for families during Ramadhan.