Ann Marlowe

IN A COUNTRY WHERE MODERN MEDICINE IS STILL CONSIDERED A CONSPIRATORIAL THREAT TO TRADITION, A QUIETLY HEROIC FEMALE DOCTOR RALLIES FOR WOMEN’S HEALTH—SAVING BABIES AND THEIR MOTHERS ONE CONVERT AT A TIME.

By Ann Marlowe
Photos by Newsha Tavakolian

The calm and cleanliness of Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Sana’a, Yemen, is a surprise when you walk in from the crowded, littered streets. In a country with such high rates of maternal and infant mortality, this might easily be a dreadful place. But a cheerful atmosphere prevails in the white corridors. Maybe it’s the continuity of life inside the hospital with life outside: visiting family members sit patiently on the hallway floors that serve as waiting rooms, while shy children in frayed but elaborate Western dress-up clothes scamper about. Young boys roam the hallways and patient rooms hawking chewing gum and Saudi religious tracts. (more…)

What is it about these poor countries? What savor do they offer us? Is it just the perfume of misery that makes us appreciate our own lives?

By Ann Marlowe

What was that doing here?

Twenty feet in front of me, close to the turquoise sea, a group of Italian men with Cuban girls laughed and bantered. The men were 40-ish but fending off gravity better than most American males, and they didn’t look bad in their bathing trunks. The women were spectacular in their tangas, not an ounce of fat on their 20-year-old bodies. They were ebony. There was an adage around that you heard once you’d been in Cuba a few times, that the Italian men always went for the really black Cubanas. What interested me about this was that in Italy, bourgeois Northern Italians will sneer at Sicily or even Naples as “Africa.” (more…)