Hope for SA woman to escape Yemen

Cape Town-150812. Shocking revelations of the abuse of a Cape Town woman suffering after being abducted by her husband to a remote part of Yemen has prompted a desperate plea for help by her parents, powerless to put a stop to the beatings and threats to their daughter’s life. But 40 year-old Masnoena Al-Taheri says there’s no escape for her and that her parents, Yusuf and Fatima Adams (in pic), of Portlands in Mitchells Plain, say they get sporadic text messages from her begging for help. But they feel equally powerless after trying - and failing - to get any help locally.Masnoena met her Yemeni husband Saleh Al-Taheri while he was working in Cape Town. The couple married after just a few months and now have two children. Pic : Jason Boud. Reporter: Fatima Schroeder

Cape Town-150812. Shocking revelations of the abuse of a Cape Town woman suffering after being abducted by her husband to a remote part of Yemen has prompted a desperate plea for help by her parents, powerless to put a stop to the beatings and threats to their daughter’s life. But 40 year-old Masnoena Al-Taheri says there’s no escape for her and that her parents, Yusuf and Fatima Adams (in pic), of Portlands in Mitchells Plain, say they get sporadic text messages from her begging for help. But they feel equally powerless after trying - and failing - to get any help locally.Masnoena met her Yemeni husband Saleh Al-Taheri while he was working in Cape Town. The couple married after just a few months and now have two children. Pic : Jason Boud. Reporter: Fatima Schroeder

Published Aug 16, 2015

Share

 

She does not bear the slightest resemblance to the woman they said goodbye to 12 years ago.

But the head-and-shoulders picture that parents Fatima and Yusuf Adams now have of their daughter Masnoena gives them hope she will return home and escape her life of hell with her abusive husband in a rural part of war-torn Yemen.

Local authorities have been assisting in her return to Cape Town after an article appeared in the Weekend Argus two years ago.

 

Using a description Masnoena gave them of her whereabouts and the co-ordinates on her cellphone, a local detective and his team managed to trace her.

They made arrangements for a South African man working in Riyadh to travel to Yemen to take photographs of Masnoena so that she could obtain a new passport, enabling her to leave the country once the war subsides.

It is a copy of this passport photograph that has reignited hope in Masnoena’s parents that they will soon be reunited with their daughter.

“For now, all we can do is pray,” they said. It is the first time they have seen what Masnoena looks like since she left Cape Town in 2003 for Yemen.

Compared to the glowing, plump Masnoena that left Cape Town, the photo shows a haggard and hollow-cheeked woman with dark circles under her eyes.

Her parents only recently received the picture, thanks to the assistance of senior local police detectives and South Africans who read her story in Weekend Argus in 2013.

Ironically, the sad image is also the only glimmer of hope they have that they will ever see their daughter again.

This week, on the eve of her 41st birthday, Masnoena spoke to Weekend Argus from Yemen and said her ordeal had taken its toll on her body. “I live in fear… I wish I could get out,” she said.

But she has never lost hope.

“I am very patient,” she said, adding that she constantly hopes her prayers will be answered.

“If you come to this country for one day you will die,” she said.

Her situation has improved since her husband found a job transporting petrol and spends most of his time on the road.

“He hasn’t hit me for a year now because he hasn’t been home,” she said. But she said she continued to live in fear, especially because she did not have family to protect her.

Masnoena met Saleh Al-Taheri in 2001 and a few months later she introduced him to her parents and sought their blessing to marry him. It didn’t sit well with her father – more so when he discovered that Al-Taheri had a civil union with Masnoena two or three months before Islamic nuptials.

From the outset, Al-Taheri prevented Masnoena from seeing her family and his relationship with her siblings also grew tense.

Then, in 2003, the Yemeni asked Fatima if Masnoena could stay with them for two weeks while he made plans for them to go to Mecca for Hadj. At that stage, Masnoena’s eldest son was already a year old. Little did they know that Al-Taheri had no intention of taking his wife to Mecca.

Instead, she ended up in Yemen, where she lived in a shack and later gave birth to their second son.

It was there that Masnoena was beaten severely by the man she once loved.

The children were also taught to abuse her and at times helped their father beat her.

She was only allowed to eat on a Friday and wasn’t allowed to leave the house.

Masnoena also discovered that she was his fourth wife and that he had a daughter.

People in Yemen told her that he had physically abused all of his wives.

He allowed Masnoena to contact her parents from a cellphone, but had to be careful about what she told them because he was always in earshot.

There were times when she managed to tell them about the beatings and beg for them to rescue her. She could only give them a description of where she was because she didn’t know her precise location.

But her parents were helpless and, even though they beseeched local organisations and Muslim clerics to assist them, their pleas fell on deaf ears.

“We only wanted assistance,” Adams said.

But now a local detective is helping them.

“For now, all we can do is pray,” they said.

Sunday Independent

Related Topics: