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Author: Yasmin Houamed
One early Sunday morning in the northern suburbs of Tunis, a small group of women – primarily from Côte d’Ivoire – set up shop in the middle of the bustling Bousalsla market. In the same spot every Sunday thereafter, accompanied almost exclusively by Tunisian male vendors, these women sold products from their homelands and anchored a growing sub-Saharan community to the neighborhood, until March 22, when measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 shut the market down and sent the vendors away. Their stories from a precarious, weeks-long confinement, firsthand.