Endless Thread - Keeping the Lights on at a Video Game Cafe in Southern Yemen

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Mo lives in Aden, an ancient city in southern Yemen. Built on a volcanic crater, it has castles and beaches set against mountains. It's beautiful. Like the rest of the country, it is also in the midst of an ongoing civil war. This summer, protests broke out over living conditions and basic services in the city -- like electricity, which can be shut off for 18 hours at a time. But despite these conditions, for the last five years, Mo has been fighting for a persistent dream of his –– a video game internet cafe for his neighborhood. This week on Endless Thread Ben and Amory tell the story of how Mo, against all odds, has kept the lights on (quite literally) at his gaming cafe thanks to his persistence, and the help of internet strangers across the world. This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. This family is on the brink of Civil War. Mobland. The hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. We are the Hurricanes. Don't know the net? And Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie. Do you want to step up the ladder? I won't calm up dead. Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Do I have to do everything myself?

You want to want! Moblad, new season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, you remember my pen pal from earlier this year? Your audio pen pal, yes. Yeah, my pen pal in Yemen. We were sending voice memos back and forth, And it was surprisingly kind of a fun way to get to know somebody.

Ben, I think the internet right now is not the best. Can we do like to interview via voice messages or we can wait till the internet is better for voice calling? Hey, yeah, we can totally do an interview via voice messages. What's your name? What shall I call you? My name is Ben. It's nice to meet you. Hey, Ben, you can call me Mo. You can call me Mohammed. You can call me Mahomet. You can call me Mahal. So anything is fine, to be honest.

I think I'd rather have my nickname, like you can say Mo. Because here in Yemen, you know, it's probably the best to stay a little bit under the radar, you know. I'm just want to make sure to protect, you know, my family. Because if the wrong people hear it, just want to make sure that I don't have to look always over my shoulders, you know. Mo is talking here about the broader situation in his home country. Yemeni politics are volatile. Mo is living in the middle of a civil war, a civil war that's been going on since 2015. External powers like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and by extension, the United States, support the recognized government.

While sectarian tribal groups like the Houthis, backed by Iran, have been fighting the Yemeni government for control. The result of this violent conflict has been poverty and famine, and of course, casualties. But Mo and I didn't talk about that at first. Where do you live? Where are you in Yemen? What kind of place is it? What is the industry that is there? If there's like a major industry, what do you do for work? I live in the south of Yemen. It's a city called Aden. It's like on the point. You know, it's like we have like this endless beach. It's very beautiful here.

It's the whole year around. It's summer, you know, blue skies, the beach. Aden is an ancient city that used to be the capital of southern Yemen until southern Yemen and northern Yemen were united in 1990. It's beautiful. It has castles and beaches set against the mountains. It was built on a volcanic crater. Like the larger country,

politics in the city seem to have frequent eruptions. Mo sees the good and the not-so-good. The people are so nice, you know, very welcoming, very helpful, very, like, they're helping each other, you know. It's a very amazing environment to live in, but sadly there's also some downsides, you know. For example, right now we're getting into the summer, and the summer is basically a nightmare because it gets so warm, it gets so hot. Like, how many people already, like, especially people who are sick and the elderly, you know, how many get like a heat stroke? For example, two years ago, my father already had a stroke. My father already had, like, heart problems,

high blood pressure and a lot of stuff. And then, plus the heat, you know, sadly he passed away. That was two years ago. But the problems are perennial. And they say, seem to be getting worse. This summer, protests broke out about living conditions and basic services in the city, like electricity. The warmer it gets, the longer the electricity turns off. For example, right now, we are at nine hours off and two hours on, which the sad part is it will get worse.

You know, the warmer it gets, sometimes it turns off for 18 hours off, and then two hours on, you know. So basically the whole day is off. In this environment, infrastructure, the ability for normal business to commence, it's all pretty tricky. So everybody who's struggling, especially the sick and the elderly,

they will suffer, you know? And also, like, the other problem that we have in Yemen is the currency, you know? I remember when I started the business, like $100, was like 85,000 Yemenis, okay? That was back in 2018. Now it cost something like three times that,

or more for staples like food and energy. I was lucky to start my business at that time, you know? And everything I bought secondhand. And but now... Yes, Mo started a business amid all this. It was in some ways the culmination of a persistent dream and lifelong interests. My whole life, I like video games.

Mo likes video games. And so he wanted to make a video game cafe, a place where people in his neighborhood, those people he describes as nice and willing to help each other, could gather and play together. He started years ago, posting questions online. Hello, community. I'm in a third world country,

and I would love to open an internet cafe, focused on gaming. But I have no idea how to build a PC over here. It's impossible to get even parts. But I still want to try. Is there a website or someone who can build a computer for

$500? Sorry for all these dumb questions. I'm very serious about this. These posts made on Reddit are how we found Mo. Eventually, he made progress. He had some basic computers, some headsets, even some customers.

So we wanted to hear more about his internet cafe. Take things beyond the audio pen pal phase and call him up together. Who is your clientele? Are these kids or these adults a combination of the two? And what do they pay to use the cafe? You know, the gaming cafe is mostly used as a media hub Because you have to understand, like, the internet in Yemen is very bad. So people who want to watch movies, they call to the internet cafe to watch their movies.

But a year in, after huge amounts of work on his persistent dream, Mo thought his dream was about to die forever. Electricity cuts across the city, challenges with equipment, and what he describes as the betrayal of a close friend, It was all becoming too much. But he was still proud, so he posted. When I made my first post on Reddit, I was like defeated and I was like maybe maybe this is it. You know, I tried my best and maybe it shouldn't be, you know, with all the electric cuts.

And then I had to spend basically all my money just to repair the generator. Except internet strangers, man. You just never know what they're going to do. Maybe they love video games too. Maybe they want to see you stay afloat. Maybe they're ready to step up. The next day I woke up, it had like millions of views, tens of thousands of upboats.

I was kind of shocked. I'm very grateful that our story reached so many people and they resonate with us. Yeah, it changed everything completely. This is very silly, but we forgot to ask you. What is the name of your cafe? It's called PowerNet. PowerNet?

Yes. Power Net. I'm Amory Severson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode? Moe's Cafe. Mo lives in Aden now, but he wasn't born there.

His families lived in a few places. My mother is Yemeni. My father is from Somalia. So they both get to know. each other in Somalia. But then in the 1990s, you know, when the Civil War in Somalia started, they moved to Germany. Moe was into computers and video games from an early age, but like a normal amount. I think we had like Super Nintendo first, and then later on, I think my parents bought

on also a Nintendo 64, and we had, of course, Game Boy and stuff. I don't know how special my childhood was. It was good. My father used to work in a bank. My mother was a housewife. Mo says his parents made sure he and his siblings valued education. But his family also valued family. And living in Germany was difficult.

They had a lot of troubles integrating in Germany and that felt kind of like isolated and kind of like lonely. And because my mother's family, the whole family is like Germany, you know. So my mother was always trying to convince my father, hey, well, how about we moved to Yemen, you know? Around the time Mo became a teenager, they did. And, you know, from this point on, I loved here in Yemen. The family sold all of their belongings to move. And eventually, they built their dream home in Yemen.

Mo looks back on this decision as unlucky. The political tensions in the country flared up around this time with the official government. which had tacitly supported the Houthis in order to help it resist interference from Saudi Arabia, beginning to clash more often with these fighters. Then the Arab Spring happened. 2000 police flooded the streets of Yemen's capital. They're trying to halt six days of demonstrations. Protesters are unhappy with the U.S.-backed president.

After that, in 2014, a full-on civil war broke out in Yemen. To be clear, specific political tensions is the subject Moe seems to avoid in our conversations. But he does post more generally on YouTube, with commentary. In the news, all you see is statistic. But this is not a statistic. Here he's showing a pretty torn-up street and a building that looks like it's been hit with a bomb. This used to be someone's home. And despite all of this, life goes on.

It continues, and we're making the best out of it, no matter what. Mo does seem to embody this ethos of making the best of it no matter what. As a younger guy, his interest in technology helped land him some odd jobs and even some notoriety. In 2016, he built a Facebook page that made him briefly famous. Well, I was a meme lord, you know, on Facebook. Not everyone can say that, Mo. I was a meme lord. I was a meme lord, you said, which means you've been dethroned, I guess, but please tell us more.

Yes, I was. They call it you got zucked, you know, when you get your account deleted, you know? Oh, you got zucked. It was like deleted. The page got 700,000 followers before Facebook shut it down. At the same time, he was doing sidework for Halo. trust. I don't know if you know the Halo Trust, they are an organization that looks for mines. Wow. That's quite a combination. When you said looking for mines, does that mean looking for

landmines? Yes, exactly. Even Princess Diana, she is endorsing this organization and I was like working in data entry for a few months. Data entry. So you weren't looking for the mines yourself. You were helping with more computers. No, no, not. No, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's for the professionals. Over time, though, Moe's longtime interest was the thing that would inspire him

to chase his persistent dream. But I think the defining change for me was when I had my own laptop, you know, and it wasn't even a good laptop, but it was strong enough to play some games. And one of the games that really changed my mind, mind about what gaming is, was like, I don't know if you know this game, it's called the Batman Akram City. Do we know it?

Okay, I do not know it. I know it. I played it way back in the day on an Android tablet. It is indeed pretty awesome. Open world map, super dark vibe, great action, hanging out on rooftops. I get it. I remember thinking, man, this is better than any movie I watched in my life. life, you know. And that was probably the beginning of me, not seeing games as just like

something, you know, just randomly, but actually one of the best mediums, you know. And, you know, trying to bring it to my community was, I think from that point on, was like my goal. Why is that? Why did you want to bring it to your community? I think I'm mostly because I could see that people here in Yemen, they were still stuck in the early 2000s, you know, because most inside cafes here have, like, core-to-do computers, you know, very, very old computers. And most of these games are, like I said, very old games, like, from 20 years ago.

So I was like, man, you guys are missing so much. Mo didn't want his friends and neighbors to miss how exciting the video game world had become. When you say you want to bring these games to, the masses, what do you get out of playing them? What do you learn or how does it enrich your life? This is a good question. I think one thing that I love about games is like it gives you, it opens the world for you, you know, like you are sitting in your room, but it like, it broadens your horizon. There's this game called mafia, for example, and it's, focuses on the 1920s.

Or there's other games that teach you about old Egypt or Greece, you know, old history. So I feel like there's a lot to learn, you know, and it's interactive. You know, you are learning and also problem solving. I feel like there's a lot to gain from video games. But before he could help other people in Yemen gain something from video games, Mo was going to experience some loss. And a moment that he was certain would be game over. Back in a minute.

It's Ben Brock Johnson, director of digital audio at WBUR. You've probably been following our consistent coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case, along with people around the country and around the world. Well, if you want to hear even more from WBUR's own veteran reporter Deborah Becker, who has been covering the story for three years, We're putting deep dive podcast episodes and analysis about the Clancy case in a podcast feed. You can listen by searching Beyond All Repair wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. thought leader, recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at wbUR.org slash creative studio. Every episode of Planet Money begins with a question. Can we help people rise out of poverty by improving the neighborhood where they live? What would you build on a piece of land when all the normal rules go out the window? What do robot chefs mean for the restaurant industry?

Planet Money helps you find answers by going to places, watching people, and sometimes robots at work and asking questions. Listen to Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. So Mo has a dream of bringing the expansive world of modern video games to his neighbors in Yemen. But there's an issue with building out that dream. You might not even get electricity for two hours per day in the summertime. To get the kind of high-speed internet connection

so that you can sit at home, chat, and game with your friends, without the kind of lag that would make, say, I don't know, storming a castle in a video game, of course, together, or passing a ball back and forth, that is pretty much impossible. Both because the infrastructure doesn't exist and because the capital doesn't exist, even with technological advances like internet via Elon Musk's satellites, Starlink. More people have good internet because I think a year ago or two years ago, Starlink started. to work in Yemen. So more and more people are getting Starlink.

But of course, you know, you have to understand that most people are making like barely $20 in a month. Starlink can cost $50 a month. But let's go back to the good that Mo sees in his community, how people take care of one another. This is probably the best thing about Yemen, you know, the people who, like every street is like a family. So we have people who are checking up on us.

There's people we're checking up on, you know. So there are people in Moe's city of Aden who can afford Starlink, in part because they create hotspots that they can then sell for a much cheaper price to other people in the community. Basically, daisy-chaining internet access so that people all over town can show up and get it. Mo doesn't have the kind of money to get his own Starlink, but he knows some places to get it for a price he can actually own. afford, which is why, like Batman, he's become nocturnal, awake when the bandwidth is high.

Because online gaming isn't really a thing there, Mo settled on a plan to build a gaming cafe with a close friend, where people could go to play downloaded games with each other in the cafe and experience the kinds of games and other media that he sees as part of an expanding world of possibility. But at the last minute, his friend backed out. He kind of decided to just open his own internet cafe where he kind of left me like stranded, even though I gave him the idea, I gave him the name. But when he found like a location and we already spent some money on it, he said, no, I'm just going to open it myself. Which kind of put a little bit fire under me was like, no, I cannot just, this was always my dream.

Mo says, even though he's not that aggressive of a person, he just felt like he had to follow through. We haven't talked to Mo's old friend. They might have a different story to tell. But while Mo says he isn't aggressive, he is persistent. So he restarted scrounging the money to do it himself and started looking for a new location that was viable, somewhere that had electricity, for instance, which in Aden isn't guaranteed. It took me like four months to find a place to rent, but the guy who rented me the place, he kind of, again, kind of lied to me because the whole area didn't have electricity.

So I had to buy like a very long cable. It's like 300 meters to use like an electric pole from another area. and it was a whole thing. Another not insignificant setback. But Mo kept going. He got the 300 meter cable hooked up. He found a generator that could burn 20 liters of diesel fuel at a time to keep the lights and computers on when the power got cut.

And he started looking for used computers, which can be hard to find in Yemen. He was using every avenue he could. Slowly, surely, Mo's persistent dream started to build. He pulled together cash, scavenged for parts, got his hands on some used computers, but only a few of the computers had graphics processing units,

GPUs, the kind of technology you need to play the more modern single-player games that Mo saw the community rallying around in his mind's eye. He started getting the word out, and kids started showing up. He started decorating a mural on the wall, combining the Arabic word for power, A Nett, a new name, not the one his former friend had taken for the other gaming cafe.

And a bat, sort of like the Batman insignia. And other references. I don't know if you know the Naruto anime. There's a character called Itashi from the Naruto anime. So my friend, he actually painted it on the wall. I still think it looks good, you know. Cool. That's very cool.

From the mural to the ramshackle computers and headsets, PowerNet Cafe wasn't necessarily the best gaming cafe in the world, but for Mo, it was. But the hits to the dream, they kept coming. Someone is, for me personally, the worst time. Like two years ago, in June, which is my birth, like the month where I was born, you know. My father passed, and then last year, also in June, my little brother passed, you know. Was he sick? Yes, he was, he had like some problems, you know.

He was already sick. He had like tuberculosis. And with the heat, I guess, it increased everything. And, yeah. I'm sorry. How old was he? He was like 29. So very young.

A year into the opening of his PowerNet Cafe, Mo was barely holding things together. People use the phrase, keeping the lights on when they talk about running a business. For Mo, this could not have been more true. You have to understand that, like you're playing video games, and then bam, there's just this off. The whole room is dark.

You know, people with flashlights, you're looking for the generator. You have to turn on the generator. And then you turn on the generator, but then you have to be careful, because if it hit the generator on for too long, it becomes too hot. The generator practically exploded every two weeks. It was always a ticking time bomb.

There was no information about the blackouts. Could Mo keep the lights on literally long enough for the generator to not overheat and the electricity to come back on? Would the generator even last that long? I think of the first year I had to probably repair my generator like 20, 30, times. And, you know, I was kind of, I kind of felt defeated. But then I inside my gaming cafe, you know, I was still proud of myself. I was like, wow, this is something you did by yourself, you know, like it was always your dream and you did it, you know, nobody can take this away from

you. In a tender moment, Mo posted a selfie to Reddit, showing himself inside the cafe, talking about how proud he was of it. But also, Also, Mo felt like his business couldn't survive. There were still only a few working computers. The electricity was dicey at best. And fuel, when you could even get it at the long lines at Yemeni gas stations, was expensive. His selfie post felt more like an ending than a triumph. I posted it on Reddit.

One year of opening my dream project in Yemen. And, you know, the rest is history. The post went super viral. The next day I woke up, it had like millions of views and tens of tons of upboats. I was kind of shocked. He was also inundated with messages that offered to help. People wanted to send laptops, video game mousees, headsets for gaming. All of a sudden, PowerNet Cafe was feeling the power of the community beyond the Yemeni Street it sat on.

But Mo wasn't sure what to do. We don't have individual mailing address here. Meaning, it's tough to send stuff there. People wanted to send those graphics processing units that would help Mo upgrade his computers. They might cost 30 bucks, but a guy in Australia discovered that trying to send something to Mo would cost $800 in shipping costs. This left Mo with a lot of people who wanted to help, but who couldn't afford to. A few people did come through in a big way. You know, at the beginning, we only had like 12 pterbury.

for the server, but somebody on Reddit sent us a 20 terabyte HD, which directly doubled our storage. Which was amazing. Another crucial moment came when Mo reached out to an old friend he had had in Germany, who he had met through a language learning app. Demetrius Mercki was from the U.S., but was living in Germany. So we met on a language exchange app called Hello Talk. Demetrius was in the U.S. Army and was sent to the Middle East twice. Like, I won't get into, like, you know, like politics and everything, but not a huge fan of the things happening to civilians there. But anyway, so, yes, so I do have a lot of sympathy for Yemen.

Demetrius could help Mo do something that Mo couldn't do from inside Yemen. Set up a GoFundMe to help send Mo cash from Redditors. Because fundraising in countries that are partially, controlled by organizations labeled terrorist groups by the United States is difficult. I had to go through a bit of red tape with them and provide proof like, oh, here's exactly what is happening. Demetrius had to provide documentation. So did Mo. But GoFundMe administrators approved the page. And Demetrius has been sending a couple hundred bucks at a time to a friend he's never met in person. It adds up.

I just logged in. And as of today, so from the summer of 2022, up till, I guess now the summer of 2026, he's raised $22,859. Whoa. That is wild. Wild indeed. And PowerNet Cafe is still going strong. A lot of people that come and they sit and watch a movie or play. video games or we also have courses, we have like anything they want, you know, nothing that requires any internet.

But then there's also some people who want us to help them fix their phones, you know, maybe they need their WhatsApp opens or something like this or they need like anything that's PC related. And how much it costs. It's very cheap, you know, like it's a hundred Yemenis, which is how much is it like maybe 20 cents and you can. I can sit for like half an hour. I love the idea of this because I feel like with the technology that is available in many other places in the world, playing games and watching movies or watching shows or whatever it is, that's generally an activity that you don't need to leave your house for in some cases. If the internet is good or you have all of the, you know,

all of the various forms of media right on your phone or at your fingertips. But the whole idea of the gaming cafe is the opposite of that. It's the idea that you would come together in person with a group of people and watch your various forms of media

or play your various games sitting next to each other. Yes, this is probably, you hit the nail on the head. Mo's posts that went viral was nothing special, just a selfie with him and his gaming cafe celebrating his successes, even though he was teetering at the brink of his project failing. A few weeks ago, Mo sent us a message on Reddit.

It was a link to an update video on his small YouTube channel. Mo's standing among some nondescript buildings in a blue shirt, the sun shining from behind him. So I decided to make a video about it began with an ending. He's talking into earbuds, using them as a microphone. You can hear crows calling in the background. Mo's still talking about his persistent dream. You know, when you lose a job, or you lose a relationship, you lose money, you lose a dream, you know.

For example, my dream was for seven years to open this dream project or gaming cafe, you know. And if it doesn't, when it doesn't work out the way you want to work out, it feels like this is the end, this is final. But what if it's not final, you know? What if this ending was actually the first line of the new chapter? But the first year has been, I don't want to say hell, but it was pretty bad. It's been a great journey. We'll see what the next chapter brings. I hope you have a good day, good evening the rest of the year.

I'm sorry that the video is kind of like random, you know, but we reach 1,000 subscribers, five years opening my dream business. I think we made it, guys. I think we made it. But life is good. Mo gets ready to do that, oh, so familiar influencer video sign-off, stepping towards the camera and turning it off,

his palm taking up the screen. It's an ending, but his dream is still going. So take care and see you guys when I see you. Peace. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Koli Saq Saksana, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monaghan. It was written, reported, and hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson. And co-hosted by me, Amory Siebertsin.

It was edited by Dave Shaw, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, our production manager, Paul Vikis, and our senior managing producer, Sumitajoshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between video games and internet access that runs on diesel fuel. If you have an unsolved mystery and untold history or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, you can hit us up.

Endless Thread at wb.r.org.