Abaarso Village is little more than an assortment of shack-like shops on a half-mile stretch of the highway that runs from the border of Ethiopia to Somaliland’s capital of Hargeisa. It is not a highway in the American sense, more a main road through a desolate stretch of desert, with goats rummaging among the rocks and scrub plants. Abaarso Village is only nine miles from the outer-city limit of Hargeisa, and it is home to a customs office that processes imports from Ethiopia. The shops sell drinks, packaged cookies, and sambusas, bite-size pastries stuffed with meat, to the passing travelers. That’s about it in terms of commerce. The shops themselves look so flimsy that I wonder how they remain standing in an Abaarso wind.
Most of the dwellings in the village, which is along the main road, are makeshift. You see materials marked “UN” being used for roofing. Flattened tin cans have been nailed together to form aluminum walls. Other shelters are made of cloth propped up by sticks. There are not many concrete houses. There are small farms in the distance, but in this arid, inhospitable climate, the fields are only green in the rainy season.
The first weekend of school, I lead the students on the thirty-minute walk down to the village. We bring garbage pails with us and upon arriving start picking up the trash that is everywhere. The villagers’ first reaction is anger. They think we are stealing their trash. Not that they want the trash for anything; in fact, they’d rather it get cleaned up. It is simply that no one has ever done something like this before, and they can’t comprehend that we are truly there to help. There is absolutely no trust.
Periodically, students make the walk down to the village for tea and sambusas, which they eat at the plastic tables and chairs outside the shops. The boys are allowed to go to the village unchaperoned, but the girls need a teacher to escort them. On the occasions when male teachers walk the girls, the villagers make comments. We have to prod them to translate, as the comments are in Somali, but it is always some version of “Stay away from these white men,” with an implication that we Westerners must have plans to harm Somali women.
The girls are rightfully embarrassed and at the time, of course, I am infuriated. Not only is it insulting, but it is also an injustice based on prejudice. There is no way they would say these things if our teachers were Somali men.
Before the staff and I arrived in Abaarso, most of the villagers had probably never seen a white person, not even on TV, as the village only recently received electricity. Some of them had never seen a non-Somali. They were completely unfamiliar with anything that was not Somali, and in this way they were like the vast majority of their countrymen. Somaliland used to be a British “protectorate,” not a “colony,” because the British only had a small interest in the area. It is thought that fewer than one hundred British were ever in the country, and almost all of them pulled out at independence in 1960. After the merger with Somalia, Mogadishu, five hundred miles to the south, became the dominant city in the country, not Hargeisa or any other city in the north. Mogadishu was the international city where all the foreigners stayed, while the former British Somaliland remained a mostly rural and nomadic society.
When I first arrived in Somaliland, a security expert told me that there were fewer than fifty Westerners in the country, and I’d already learned that those people were not interacting with the actual society. Mostly they were hopping between secured compounds meeting with bigwigs and writing reports.
Like the nomadic Mubarik thinking a truck was an animal, the villagers had no framework to approach what they were seeing at the school. They only knew that it looked and acted different, which made them uncomfortable and put them on the defensive. It is not that different from when a first black family would move into an all-white town in the United States. People often believe the worst until they are convinced otherwise.