Xezala struggles for life away from her home

Xezala Al Tormi is one of the thousands of people forcibly displaced from their town Tawergha. She lives in the Benghazi city of Libya as a migrant and makes a living by baking tandoor bread.

ÎBTÎSAM AXFÎR

Benghazi- Around 46,000 people were forcibly evacuated from the Tawargha town of Libya in 2011 in a day. More than 2,500 families settled in the seven camps built for them in Benghazi. After a year of displacement, these families didn’t have any income to survive. For this reason, the displaced women of Tawergha began to sell handicrafts, desserts, and tandoor bread to make a living.

68-year-old Xezala Al-Tormi is one of the forcibly displaced people from Tawargha. She now lives in a stable and makes a living by baking tandoor bread and selling them. “A year after being forcibly displaced from Tawargha, I began to make date dessert and then bake tandoor bread because the people of Benghazi buy tandoor bread more. I bake 20 or 30 pieces of tandoor bread a day,” she told us.

Xezala Al-Tormi bakes bread according to the order she receives. “I begin to bake bread at 6 am because the morning is cooler. During Ramadan, we begin to bake at 10 am. And then we sell the bread to shops.”

Economic crisis affects them

Xezala Al-Tormi complains about the lack of food staples due to the ongoing economic crisis in the country. “The ongoing crisis also affects our work. We buy a sack of flour for 120 dinars. We buy a baking breadboard for 80 dinars. We buy sugar, olive oil, and yeast to bake bread. We buy many things to bake bread but earn a small amount of money.”

Xezala Al-Tormi told us how tandoor bread is delicious;

“The bread baked in mud tandoors is very delicious. But we cannot buy a mud tandoor because it is very expensive. For this reason, we bake bread in big metal cans used for collecting water in winter.

She lives in a stable

After nine years of her forcibly displacement, Xezala Al-Tormi went to Tawargha and she saw her destroyed house. “Everything in my house was stolen. If the government doesn’t renew the houses, we cannot return,” said Xezala Al-Tormi, who struggles for life in a stable in Benghazi.