Yemeni boy tackles fuel shortage with home made stove

Описание: (22 Jun 2015) LEAD IN:
A 12-year old boy in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, has found a solution to coping with an urgent fuel shortage.
The materials he uses for his alternative burners are cheap and easily found.
STORY-LINE:
Saleh Hamza's family was having trouble finding cooking gas, like many people living in Yemen's embattled capital Sanaa.
This prompted the industrious 12-year old to learn to make an alternative stove for his family, using materials found around the house.
Hamza, who is in his third year of preparatory school and living with his family of seven in a small house in the middle of Sanaa, can build a stove quickly and for very little cost.
It's a simple construction using just an empty vegetable oil tin, plastic piping, sawdust and clay.
He sees the alternative stove as an act of defiance against the continuing fighting between rival factions and air strikes from a Saudi-led coalition.
"The aggression will not defeat us, and we will not break, even with the blockade,'" he says. "With God's permission, God willing, we will produce and invent new things, even if there is tyrannical aggression, even if they besiege us, with these simple items of sawdust and clay and two plastic tubes and a vegetable oil can, things that don't cost anything."
Hamza's neighbours like Um Ali are enthusiastically embracing his idea.
He's made the stoves for many of the people living in his neighbourhood.
"We found out that there's someone who makes this thing that we can use instead of gas," says Um Ali "We can use it in the house for cooking, to make tea, to make ordinary food, without needing the old oven or using firewood."
Yemenis are facing a severe shortage of household gas as fighting and air strikes continue across the country.
Tankers have difficulty getting through and roads leading to major cities are blocked.
A litre of petrol costs up to five times more than it did at the start of the crisis, according to the World Food Programme.
The shortage is particularly acute inside major cities.
In the countryside people are able to use firewood as an alternative heating source.
Yemen's conflict pits the Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, and their allies against an array of forces, including southern separatists, local and tribal militias, Sunni Islamic militants and loyalists of exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
A Saudi-led coalition began launching air strikes against the Houthis and their allies on March 26, shortly after Hadi fled a rebel advance on the south.
More than 21 million people, or about 80 percent of Yemen's population, now require humanitarian assistance, according to the spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, Stephane Dujarric.
He says nearly half the country's population does not have access to enough affordable and nutritious food, a 15 percent increase since the beginning of the crisis, and millions of people lack clean water and basic sanitation.

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