Reporting from Mukalla, Yemen — Holding her baby above her head, Rihanna Mohammed tumbled out of a boat in rough seas and swam to the Yemeni shore.
"It is a wicked, wicked journey," said the refugee from Somalia, her feet wrinkled and yellowed, her face speckled white with sand. "Waves were crashing over us the whole way. We were terrified."
But she was lucky. Mohammed, her 1-year-old daughter and 48 others made it alive, fleeing the war and poverty of their native land for the uncertainties of a new one. Thousands make the journey every week in fleets of battered fishing boats sailed by smugglers.
Most of those crossing will end up in refugee camps or fan out across the cities and villages of Yemen. Others will disappear into rugged tribal lands to join the ranks of an affiliate of Al Qaeda or enlist with a band of Shiite Muslim rebels -- the Houthi -- fighting a civil war with government troops in the north.
The poorest country in the Arab world, Yemen can barely accommodate its own, much less the dispossessed from other lands.
"Right now, we are torn," said Ali Muthana Hassan, Yemen's deputy foreign minister. "We have many problems of our own in Yemen -- we have war, Al Qaeda, our own citizens do not have jobs. But we have a moral obligation to accept them. And right now, we don't have a choice. Next year, more will come. Many more will come."
But many of them never make it to shore, and on those days, Atek Saleh watches the desperate drown.
He and six other men in the Mayfa Hagar region of Yemen's southern desert, the Hadhramaut, make up the coastal patrol. It's an arm of the Yemeni charity Society for Humanitarian Solidarity, and its main job is driving along the coast in SUVs at dawn to collect the most recent African refugees who've made the two-day passage across the Gulf of Aden.
"Some of them could swim, but others were crushed when the boat went over," said Saleh, recalling a recent morning when a vessel capsized. "There was an old woman whose leg was caught by a rock. She was alive -- we could hear her screaming -- but we couldn't get to her in time. She screamed and screamed, and then she drowned."
He gazed into the water. "Even in my sleep," he said, "I still hear her screaming."
Last year, more than 74,000 Somali and Ethiopian refugees arrived on Yemen's beaches along the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. That's 50% more than in 2008, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. With no end in sight to either the war in Somalia or the five-year drought in Ethiopia, their numbers are expected to rise this year.
