Episode: 66 — "This Is My Story with Libya & Yemen" · Full Episode #66
Date: Season 6
Language: Arabic
Hala is a Yemeni graduate student in journalism, on an Erasmus programme that has moved her between European universities. She is from Aden. She was in Sana'a, the Yemeni capital, when the war began in 2014–15. She holds a MEPI scholarship — the U.S. State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative — which took her to the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Since then she has lived in Doha, Denmark, Hamburg and Amsterdam.
The episode is published under her first name only.
Hala grew up in Aden, the southern Yemeni port city. She moved to Sana'a for study and was there in 2014 and 2015 when the political collapse accelerated into full war: the Houthi takeover of the capital, the Saudi-led intervention, the closure of the airport, the bombings, the displacement. The transition from a normal student life to a wartime evacuation problem happened over weeks.
Sana'a International Airport had been closed for most of the war by mid-2015. Civilian movement out of the country was severely restricted. In the summer of 2015 the airport opened briefly. Hala used the window. She did not have a family member or institution coordinating her evacuation. She organised her own departure — finding the flight, securing the seat, arranging the documents, negotiating the road to the airport — and got out during the narrow opening before the airport closed again.
Her MEPI scholarship took her to the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Her roommate at LAU was Libyan. The roommate's stories — the revolution, the displacement, the fragmented post-2011 state — produced a recognition Hala had not expected. Her phrase: "the Libyan story is my story." The point is not that the two histories are identical. They are not. It is that the structural shape — a country fractured by armed conflict, a population dispersed, a passport that becomes a liability, a generation educated for a state that no longer functions — is shared, and the recognition was instant.
She raised the standing of the Yemeni passport in the contemporary travel hierarchy. Yemeni passport holders face among the most restrictive visa regimes in the world. Her phrase: "Holding a Yemeni passport is one of the ten worst." The observation is reported elsewhere — passport ranking indices consistently place Yemen near the bottom — but inside the episode it functions as the structural fact that organises the rest of her movement: every visa application is a long, expensive process; every transit is conditional; the next destination is never assured.
Hala spoke about survival guilt. She is alive, educated and moving across European cities while friends and family are still in Yemen, where the war has continued and the humanitarian situation has deteriorated. The guilt is a recurring presence in the episode rather than a single confession. It does not stop her from continuing — the studies, the moves, the work — but it accompanies the continuation.
The Erasmus programme has taken her through Denmark, Hamburg and Amsterdam. The map is no longer a destination map but a sequence of academic placements, each one ending on a fixed date. The condition is familiar to graduate students of any nationality, but for someone whose home country is unsafe and whose passport is restrictive, the rolling expiration of each placement is not just an academic event — it is a periodic forcing function for the question of where, geographically, life is going to continue.
"Holding a Yemeni passport is one of the ten worst." (EP 66)