No garlic, no onion... apple

The minibus stopped for me to get on. The driver didn’t turn to me to check: Where are you going? His left hand was on the steering wheel while he was holding up a stack of papers with his right hand. I didn’t investigate what I missed from his conversation with the passengers. He handed me one of his papers to discover that he had gotten into a serious problem because of the bus itself. I thought his opponent was the traffic police, but the driver praised the traffic police, the local authorities, the traffic police, and everything in the liberated city. When I read Al-Masawi’s name on the paper, I knew that the bus owner’s opponent was the Houthis.

I asked the driver about the details I had missed, and he explained that his story began when he was fed up with traffic, the deterioration of the currency, and the thieves. He decided to leave the city, where the liberated areas are, to the other part of it, where the Houthi militia controls them: “I said I would go work in Al-Hawban.” The first sign of blessing that appeared to him was when the bus owner received an old passenger heading from the city to Al-Hawban. The passenger was on a medical visit to the city and was carrying with him a gift for his grandchildren: three small boxes of Iranian apples. The passenger was comfortable, as if he had returned from a royal hospital in Jordan or the largest doctor in Egypt, not from Al-Thawra Hospital, which was suffering from a diesel shortage. The old passenger said to the bus owner seriously: Life in the city is better... medicine and apples.

Bus owner: But you have a healthy riyal.

The old passenger sarcastically: Thank God.. I'm fine, but not in a good mood.

He entered the courtyard where the bus was, wearing his empty shirt, and there the owner of the ground asked him for 10 thousand for the days the bus had been parked inside the courtyard. The bus owner shouted and took off his shirt: Kill me, kill me.. The others intervened and helped him, but the Houthi gunman standing at the door of the courtyard stopped him: Guard duty.

While you are in the city, you will find a cheerful driver who will tell you about “the blessing we have… Well, apples and mischief… Any swindler or soldier who doesn’t have a bike gets out for free, and the traffic police issue tickets as they please… We are blessed.” This is the bus owner who tried working in Al-Hawban and came back having borrowed his son’s wife’s gold, before passing the first Houthi checkpoint.