Photo: A water point installed in collaboration with Unicef, Action Against Hunger Yemen.
Dear reader,
Every time I turn the tap in my kitchen for a clean glass of water or scan the fridge before I go out grocery shopping, it hits me that these everyday acts that I take for granted in Toronto are luxuries millions of people in Yemen can’t afford.
For many in the developed world, Yemen is just another tragically poor country they read about online or watch footage of in the evening news. To me, it’s the homeland, the place where I was born and where most of my family still lives.
The current war has inflicted immeasurable pain on the country’s most vulnerable: the young, the poor, the internally displaced. To hear stories of children dying from malnutrition or preventable diseases in the twenty-first century remains one of the most jarring experiences in my life.
I know that we as Canadians can do more to reduce the suffering and give families access to food and clean water. This is why I support Action Again Hunger in Yemen and invite you to contribute whatever you can spare to its current fundraising campaign to prevent malnutrition and to feed the nearly 8.5 million people on the brink of starvation.
Action Against Hunger is making it possible for children to focus on their education or playtime instead of worrying about finding (or not finding) their next meal.
Please help children in crisis by making an emergency gift.
Sincerely,
Kamal Al-Solaylee
Award-winning author of Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone)
P.S. You can help Action Against Hunger work even more effectively by making a monthly gift. Monthly gifts allow them to implement programs that prevent malnutrition, in addition to treating it. Do so online or by calling them at 1-416-644-1016.
Kamal Al-Solaylee is the author of Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction and winner of the Toronto Book Award, and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), a Governor General Literary Awards finalist and winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He was previously a theatre critic at the Globe and Mail and over the past two decades has written on books, the performing arts, and politics for The Walrus, Toronto Star, Literary Review of Canada, Quill & Quire, Elle Canada, Canadian Notes & Queries and Maclean’s. Al-Solaylee is an associate professor of Journalism at Ryerson University.