Eqbal Dauqan was excited. She had just completed her postdoctoral fellowship and was leading the new therapeutic nutrition department she’d lobbied to create at Yemen’s Al-Saeed University. Then the bombs started dropping.
“Everything was damaged, our university, our home. My family had to move to a rental apartment outside the center of the city, where people were fighting and killing each other,” says Dauqan, 37, a biochemist from Ta‘izz. The city, near the Red Sea in the country’s south, was known as Yemen’s cultural capital. Before the armed conflict between rival military factions in Yemen broke out in March 2015, Dauqan had been a lecturer and head of the university’s laboratory medicine and therapeutic nutrition departments, where she and her students researched the effects of natural antioxidants on health.
“Our university had to close down due to the attacks, and I stayed home for 10 months with no salary, hardly any internet access, and often no electricity to charge my laptop or mobile phone,” says Dauqan. After months of idleness and fear, Dauqan got a fellowship as a visiting scholar at University Kebangsaan Malaysia, where she had done her postgraduate studies. But another hurdle remained: getting out of Yemen.
“Our airport in Ta‘izz was closed due to the fighting. There’s another airport, in Sana’a, but it’s 15 hours away by car, and the road is very dangerous,” Dauqan says. During a brief window of opportunity, however, Dauqan was able to leave via Sana’a.
Current conflicts raging around the world have created the highest numbers of displaced people ever tallied by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the agency that tracks and advocates for displaced populations. More than 20 million people have had to leave their home countries; about 40 million more are displaced within their borders. Among them are thousands of scientists and researchers, many fleeing with little more than a USB flash drive or the password to a Dropbox account containing what they could salvage of their life’s work.
