The roughly 200-mile passage to Yemen from port cities and fishing villages in Somalia and the shorter voyage from Djibouti are treacherous. For two days, refugees are crammed shoulder to shoulder in creaking boats -- nothing more than 30-foot wooden dinghies.
Along the way, they face high winds, deadly storms, pirates and possible detention by the Yemeni coast guard or international anti-piracy patrols. Many are women and children. Some are raped, beaten or thrown overboard by smugglers wary of being caught if they deliver their human cargo too close to shore. Untold numbers disappear at sea.
When the coastal patrol finds the bodies of refugees, it transports them to one of three UNHCR-run cemeteries in southern Yemen, which buried more than 315 last year. Ahmed Haj, who helps run Al Hamra, the UNHCR cemetery in Mayfa Hagar, said they had buried 81 people since it opened in September.
"Not everyone gets their own grave," he said, pacing a graveyard the size of a football field a few hundred feet from the shore. Each grave was marked by a blue number on a white post pounded into the ground. The sour smell of decomposing flesh hung in the air.
"They think they are coming to paradise, and this is their destination," Saleh said. "They come from one thing to a worse thing. It is hell."
Faahiye Abdul, who was on a boat that had arrived that morning, said she had known how dangerous the journey would be. "But what was I supposed to do?" she said. "Every day in Somalia, I fight for my life. If you go outside, you die. So what if I die coming here? I will die anyway."
To get her baby across the sea, Mohammed, like most of her fellow Somali passengers, spent a year working, selling vegetables on street corners to earn the $120 smuggler's fee. Others begged or sold their homes, their land, their clothes. Some sold themselves.
If you ask what it is they are running from, they shrug, part stoicism, part resignation.
"Troubles," they say. "Troubles."
And if you ask again, they will tell you that their mothers were killed in front of them, that their daughters and sons were dead, that their families were starving, that everyone in their neighborhood was dead. That there was so much blood in the street you couldn't walk in a straight line.
