Jaywick, on the Essex coast east of London, has a totemic reputation in the United Kingdom.

The media has been known to paint the people there as lazy drug addicts, socially irresponsible and to blame for their own problems.

But the briefest visit tells an entirely different story, and it’s one which cuts to the heart of why the United Nations’ poverty and human rights specialist Philip Alston decided to visit – and one which speaks volumes of how the political class in the UK has failed many of the country’s poorest.

One resident, who’s lived in this small town of 5,000, said in days gone by it was described as Costa del Jaywick – a thriving working class holiday resort which people from London would go to.

There were holiday camps, amusement arcades, work at least during the summer months to sustain the place.

But when the holiday camps closed down, Jaywick became isolated. The railway line linking it to the bigger town of Clacton, up the coast, closed. Now there is only a sporadic bus service.

One of the biggest problems is that there is no supermarket, so if you’re out of work and don’t have transport then getting food isn’t easy.

Until three years ago many of the roads in the town weren’t even paved – they were bumpy tracks an ambulance couldn’t drive down. It’s one of the most extreme examples of British decline you can find.

So Jaywick became a trap people couldn’t escape from. No work led to drugs and alcohol problems. There are people on motorised scooters all over the place with long-term health problems.

Jaywick is ill. Many of the homes aren’t properly insulated either, which doesn’t help.

When the UN’s poverty rapporteur attended a public meeting in the town, he heard a litany of complaints from people about how their benefits are being cut, that they’re classed as fit to work when they are disabled, how the government’s new Universal Credit scheme – supposedly designed to simplify the whole payments system – is leading to them being without any money for weeks on end.

It’s become a common theme in the UK: people simply running out of money completely, and having to choose between turning the electricity on or having something to eat.

These things matter to the UN for two main reasons. The first is the straight fact that in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, the wealth gap is among the widest.

The second is that under the UN rules the UK signed up to, the country has an obligation to improve the quality and human rights of poor people. The concern is that the UK is failing that obligation.

It’s also worth pointing out that this part of England voted heavily to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum.

People in Essex believed that in doing so, politicians only a hundred kilometres away in London would understand their frustrations about inequality and would use the proceeds of leaving the EU to improve their lives.

There’s no sign whatsoever that is on any political agenda.

Far from being lazy good-for-nothings, the people of Jaywick are some of the friendliest, proudest souls you could hope to meet. They want what they used to have – a sense of community and something to live for.

That the UN came to their town, that someone is listening to them, has been a source of no little excitement. Whether anything will come of it is another question altogether.

At least 149 Yemenis, including seven civilians, have been killed in the past 24 hours as forces loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi close in on areas held by Houthi rebels in the strategic port city of Hodeidah.

Medics in hospitals across the city – which is the main gateway for imports and relief supplies into Yemen – said on Monday that 110 Houthi fighters and 32 pro-government soldiers had been killed in overnight fighting.

Sources at the Al-Alfi military hospital, seized by the Houthis during their 2014 takeover of the city, said charred body parts had been delivered there overnight.

Meanwhile, a military official in Hodeidah told the AFP news agency that seven civilians had died in clashes without giving further details.

Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow, reporting from neighbouring Djibouti, said fighting was raging in eastern and southern areas of Hodeidah city.

“Some of the fighting is on the streets of residential areas, something that is causing concern about the safety and welfare of the people still holed up in the city,” Adow said.

“There are people stuck there who could not find ways of leaving because of the blocked roads and many checkpoints set up by Houthi fighters,” he added.

The renewed fighting comes as a new round of peace talks to end the war, which has killed more than 56,000 people according to a recent estimate, was pushed back to late December after it was scheduled to take place in Sweden in November.

‘Catastrophic’ situation

Bessma Momani, a professor of political science at Canada’s University of Waterloo said the Saudi-UAE military alliance was trying to take control of Hodeidah ahead of the summit.

“I think that’s the strategy overall, but of course it comes at an enormous cost for civilians,” Momani told Al Jazeera.

“It’s important to point out, 80 percent of all food come through Hodeidah – it is food scarcity and famine that we should be worried about because this is the cost that will be paid by the average civilian for the retaking of Hodeidah.”

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the destruction of the vital Yemeni port of Hodeidah could trigger a “catastrophic” situation.

“If the port at Hodeidah is destroyed, that could create an absolutely catastrophic situation,” Guterres told France Info radio during a trip to Paris.

Hodeidah, a large city on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, is the latest battleground between Houthi rebels and the Saudi-UAE alliance which has been fighting for control over the country for the past three and a half years.

Since November 1, there have been more than 200 air attacks reported in the city, with the AFP news agency reporting nearly 600 deaths.

Aid agencies have long warned that fighting in Hodeidah risks escalating the country’s dire humanitarian crisis.

‘Enormous cost for civilians’

Momani added that, following the killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, elements within the US may press for sanctions on weapons sales to the kingdom.

“Now that we have seen the Democrats take over the House of Representatives, one part of the legislature, we are going to see a lot of ugly facts against this war – logistics, intelligence, training – you name it.”

“We have to find a way to solve this because really the Yemeni people have suffered far too much,” she said.

The conflict in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, began when the government slashed fuel subsidies in the summer of 2014, prompting angry protests and forcing thousands onto the capital’s streets.

The Houthis seized the opportunity and marched south from their stronghold of Saada province to Sanaa, where they toppled President Hadi’s government.

Concerned by the rise of the Houthis, a US-backed Saudi-UAE military coalition intervened in 2015 with a massive air campaign aimed at reinstalling Hadi’s government.

Since then, data collected by Al Jazeera and the Yemen Data Project has found that more than 18,000 air attacks have been carried out in Yemen, with almost one-third of all bombing missions striking non-military sites.

Weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals, as well as water and electricity plants, have been targeted, killing and wounding thousands.

I really want to do this story justice.

It is a mantra I adhered to long before I became a journalist; my parents travelled great distances to build a life together and I’ve always wanted to pull my weight in that happy ending.

It is also the mantra I carried with me this summer as I left my home in Qatar for the 10,000km journey to Alaska, as I boarded the nine-seater plane at the tiny air taxi office in Anchorage and as we flew over a snowy mountain range and rolling tundra.

I was returning to Iliamna, my mother’s remote Alaskan village, which lies on the waters of the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. My mother is an Alaska Native – a member of the Dena’ina ethnic-language group.

My father is a Qatari. Every summer, my parents, sister and I would return to Iliamna to visit family and help with the salmon run – assisting with catching, smoking, brining and canning the salmon that is so central to the community’s subsistence lifestyle.

I was working on a film about the pressures facing this community – a community I feel both a part of and removed from. Despite knowing many people there since childhood, I was worried that people wouldn’t want to talk on camera. I knew I would feel apologetic and hurt if they didn’t, despite trying to reason with myself. For me it wasn’t about securing or losing an interview; it was about confirming or rejecting that I had a place in the story.

Telling a personal story can be scary because you are admitting that you don’t know everything about your own language, culture and family. You have to ask hard questions. Were you ignorant about something because you didn’t care enough to learn it? Were you too embarrassed to ask? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between apathy and shame; you are either motionless from lack of care or paralysed by too much of it.

Despite knowing many people there since childhood, I was worried that people wouldn’t want to talk on camera … For me it wasn’t about securing or losing an interview; it was about confirming or rejecting that I had a place in the story.

Amira Abujbara, journalist

Despite months of planning and phone calls back and forth, it was only as we sat down for our first interview – with an elder in his house on a small cliff overlooking Lake Iliamna – that I truly believed the film was going to happen and that people would actually talk to us.

The interview began as most would in the coming days: quietly. His wife fidgeted nervously outside the camera frame. I assumed a casual slouch on the sofa, more to calm my own nerves than his. He was a distant relative and our paths hadn’t crossed before because we both lived outside the village.

Like most people in the community, he was a good storyteller and his cadence gave the world rhythm. He offered me another thread that tied me to this place and I marvelled. Then the door burst open – a team of neighbours had come to mow his lawn – our interview would have to resume another day.

There were logistical challenges to filming in Iliamna; time works differently in a community where the sun sets at midnight and daily activities are dictated by the weather.

It is hard to track down interviews somewhere where there are few roads and people can be anywhere from “over the road” to “somewhere upriver”. We were also visiting during the busiest time of the year when residents are balancing jobs with the labour-intensive process of catching and storing salmon for the year.

On a personal level, I was worried that I would get it wrong; that I would ask the wrong questions, at the wrong time or in the wrong way. I feel this way about any story I work on – I think being self-critical is essential for any journalist – but when you are of mixed heritage you feel indebted to a community for giving all of itself to you when you feel like you only ever give half of yourself to it.

So when an opportunity like this one comes along, you want to do everything possible to get it right.

‘Media has rarely served Native communities well’

I assume most TV crews that pass through the Iliamna Lake area shoot nature documentaries or focus on the controversial Pebble mining deposit nearby – or are trying to track down the mythological Iliamna Lake Monster. So, I really wanted this story to be about the community and for the community.

With this came the added pressure of history. Media has rarely served Native communities well, and this has fostered a distrust towards journalists.

This distrust wasn’t overt in Iliamna – I think that was partly because of my family’s connection to the community but also because it serves as a regional hub and is in relatively close proximity – a 50-minute flight – to the city of Anchorage.

There were some exceptions; one family friend yelled me and the rest of the crew out of his workshop before we could open our mouths. He later told me that there were no hard feelings but that TV crews always twisted words. I couldn’t disagree.

I suspect distrust is even greater in those indigenous communities that subsist off of marine mammals. They were deeply impacted by animal welfare campaigns attacking whaling and seal hunting in the 1970s and the cultural and economic devastation of those campaigns – from food shortages to sky-high suicide rates – still run deep.

I had previously reached out to a Native organisation in the Bering Strait region, which is located in northwest Alaska and largely made up of whaling and seal-hunting communities, and was met with defensive anger.

The representative questioned my background, my company and my motives. After some discussion, she explained that they wanted to keep their way of life to themselves because people so often misunderstand it.

She was gracious, considering what she knew was at stake; Native people have long been misrepresented and penalised for a way of life that is portrayed as primaeval, cruel or embarrassing – rather than as something deeply felt and timeless in its adaptability.

She reminded me of an incident last year in which a 16-year-old boy from Gambell, a small Siberian Yup’ik community located on St Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, faced online hate – including death threats – after striking a whale to help feed his community.

The hundreds of messages he received came after a prominent environmental activist shared an article about him in a disparaging social media post.

I think the issue is a fundamental one. Journalists have rarely done justice to indigenous communities because the language of journalism has rarely done justice to indigenous peoples.

Indigenous people know that their representation has failed before they’ve even begun speaking, because the medium through which they are represented – a hard, sharp language rooted in ideas rather than feeling – has rarely granted them territory.

Journalists have rarely done justice to indigenous communities because the language of journalism has rarely done justice to indigenous peoples.

Amira Abujbara, journalist

The language that media uses today does not heed silence and self-interpretation. It does not respect the power of conjured stories. It does not favour the collective over the individual. And this does not fit with indigenous perspectives.

But we have much to learn from those perspectives. In my experience, Native culture does not flinch. It does not try to separate itself from its surroundings because that makes no sense when you rely on your surroundings to support your family and feel like yourself.

It is rooted in an attitude that says “this is the way it is”, not “this is what I need it to be”. It has the ability to innovate out of necessity, not greed. It offers a different kind of normal and we as consumers, creators and polluters are in dire need of a new normal.

Straddling two worlds

This was my first film project, and collaborating with director Ciara Lacy and her team was exciting for me because suddenly we could speak with sound and images.

In writing, tone can be a blind spot; how a person says or feels something isn’t always self-evident in a direct quote, and you often have to work at making it feel right by drawing out the silent spaces of a conversation. But with film, you can say nothing and a scene will speak for itself. It is so powerful.

I found comfort and solidarity working with Ciara and composer Kayla Briet, who are also mixed-heritage indigenous women. Their work teaches me more about celebrating the roots I have, no matter how big or small, and owning them as part of my identity.

I wonder if it is being of mixed heritage that makes me feel more connected to my Alaskan community, because the perspectives of indigenous people today are inevitably those of mixed heritages; after colonisation we were all straddling two worlds, all putting effort into learning our own cultures and languages – and often feeling guilty about it.

But I think this is where we find a lot of strength – and where everyone can find strength. When we move between worlds, we are positioned to tell new stories. And when we tell new stories, we invent new ways of telling them.

Finding a new language can be a difficult and unsupported task, but it means we can then approach stories with the nuance of our lived experiences. And out of that, we find new truth.

About 200 people gathered in Istanbul to honour the memory of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, demanding justice over the killing.   

Supporters met on Sunday to talk and watch videos of eulogies for the Washington Post contributor, who was killed on October 2 inside Istanbul’s Saudi consulate, where he went to handle paperwork for his upcoming marriage. His fiancee was among the participants of the memorial.

Turan Kislakci, head of the Turkish-Arab Media Association (TAM), to which Khashoggi belonged, called for justice to be done “so that these barbaric tyrants can never do the same thing again”.

Yemeni human rights activist Tawakkol Karman, who won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her participation in the Arab Spring uprisings, said the killing was reminiscent of crimes committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

Saudi Arabia has changed its narrative about the murder several times amid international outcry and intensifying scepticism over its account.

After insisting for more than two weeks that Khashoggi had left the consulate, it then admitted the journalist had died in a fistfight inside the building. Later, Riyadh conceded Khashoggi was killed in a premeditated murder, but that the murder was an unplanned “rogue operation”.

Erdogan’s accusations

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused the “highest levels” of the Saudi government of ordering the hit, while some officials have pointed the finger at the crown prince – a charge Riyadh denies.

Erdogan said on Saturday that Turkey shared recordings related to the killing of Khashoggi with Saudi Arabia, the United States, Germany, France and Britain.

The Turkish leader discussed the issue with US President Donald Trump during a dinner marking the end of the first world war in Paris, according to White House officials.

Sources told Al Jazeera on Saturday that Turkish police ended the search for Khashoggi’s body, but that the criminal investigation into the 59-year-old’s murder would continue.

Al Jazeera also learned through sources that traces of acid were found at the Saudi consul-general’s residence in Istanbul, where the body was believed to be disposed of with the use of chemicals. The residence is at walking distance from the Saudi consulate.