182 Converting Resources to the Cause When we were getting reports from Yemen ourselves, from my cousins in the village, you didn’t feel it. Even though they held an opinion, they didn’t feel part of the revolution. They didn’t live it because they weren’t in the city. Awssan, an organizer in London, emphasized that without family in Sanaʻa, he too felt detached and uninformed about the movement in Change Square. While his colleague Ibrahim could “contact his cousin in Sanaʻa” to get information, Trying to find out what’s happening in Yemen was the most difficult thing. Getting in contact with the right people in Yemen, independents who would give me an idea of what’s happening on the streets, it was [difficult]. Disconnection between insiders and outsiders therefore limited activists’ abilities to serve as broadcasters and representatives or to channel resources to field hospitals and media centers in the encampments. Ahmed Alramadi, who participated in the Change Square movement and was detained and tortured by regime agents before gaining a visa to come to the United States in May 2011, explained to me that this was due to “a lack of connections. The Yemenis abroad had [few] informants or local links inside,” he recalled. Instead, he affirmed that the focus of Yemenis on the outside was on broadcasting, “like protesting in front of the United Nations to get us attention.” Because many of the most active organizers in the diaspora did not possess direct ties to activists on the ground, their roles as Arab Spring supporters were more indirect, and even ambiguous. In light of this chasm, some activists were fearful of misrepresenting the revolution. Ahlam in New York, for example, was extremely concerned about people in Yemen “telling us to back off. I just had thoughts about, like, what is my role as somebody who hasn’t really lived there? I’m privileged, and [do] I have the right to speak on behalf of these people? It was really bothering me.” This self-reflexivity was echoed by activists across the three communities, but Libyans and Syrians were able to assuage this concern by communicating revolutionary demands strictly as instructed by their partners on the ground.5 Furthermore, the only method to get aid into the revolutionary encampments was either for Yemenis to wire funds to individuals on the ground, such as their family members or activists like Atiaf, for in-person delivery to the squares. Yet, useful connections in this regard were sparse at best. 5 Yemeni regime corruption and sabotage also stood in between diaspora members and the contacts they did have on the ground, which remained a significant obstacle to remitting resources. To illustrate, when Safa and her colleagues in London worked to ship a container of aid to Aden in partnership with a local NGO in 2011 (after the revolution’s end), Safa reported that doing so created “a fucking nightmare. In Yemen, they tried every trick to block it, saying that the papers are all wrong. To the last second, this shipment was not going to happen. We had so many people trying to sabotage it.” While getting about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of aid to Yemen was a “beautiful” thing, Safa described the process as perilous because the diaspora remained dependent on corrupt or incompetent Yemeni bureaucrats to allow the aid in. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press