ONE VILLAGER REPORTED the building simply collapsed without warning. The woman and her three children and the two old people on the tin roof vanished under the fast-moving brown floodwaters and were swept away.
Marerey was one of the villages on the banks of the southern stretch of the Webbi Jubba. It was disappearing fast, ripped apart by the rising river that had broken its banks and was sweeping away everything in its path.
Its people were a strong lot, used to hardship. They had weathered searing droughts and previous floods, the pestilence of locusts and mysterious diseases. They were more fortunate than others.
One time not so long ago, there had been a sugar factory on the other side of the airstrip, where many worked, and so the villagers could afford tin roofs instead of thatch, could afford to build their homes of mud bricks instead of wattle. There had even been a school. But the fighting had come and families fought families and the area had been divvied up by the warlords and their clans. The sugar factory had been destroyed in one of the many seesaw battles for turf and was now no more than a skeletal ruin. There had been things to salvage, however, and the youths who remained in the village, who had not left to join the fighting, had scavenged wood and cement blocks, slabs of Styrofoam, wire and rope, furniture and vessels, poles and plastic.
Marerey was in the breadbasket of Somalia, a land of cultivated fields and grazing plains, veined with a complex network of irrigation canals and roads; those who had not worked at the factory had raised cattle and goats, sugarcane, bananas, maize, and sorghum. Although they lived on the river, they were not fishermen and they seldom ate fish. They were pastoralists. The Jubba, one of Somalia’s only two perennial streams, existed in their eyes mainly to provide the water for the fields and to carry away the effluence. The muddy river originating in Ethiopia to the north was not very polluted; there had been few pesticides in use and little industry and it was still pretty clean by the time it got this far, tainted only by the raw sewage from the communities on the river. The men usually quit their homes around dawn and took their places in a row, lifted their sarongs or dropped their trousers, squatted over the river, and performed their ablutions. The women performed theirs on the bend downriver where the Jubba took a turn.
The rains that were causing the floods had started suddenly. They say that one day, one month, it was normally dry and plans were made for the harvest. Then the next day the black clouds rolled in off the ocean to the east, merging with storms that drifted down from the north, and the skies opened up. And still it rained.
There were not many left in Marerey. Most of the residents had fled earlier to the narrow earthen dike about a half mile downriver, taking what little they could; the dike was bigger then and it had looked solid and safe and indestructible. They were, however, only a little safer there than had they taken refuge on the roofs of their homes, for the fast-moving river was steadily eating away at the dike; sections of earth peeled away, broke off, and tumbled into the flood.
Those who decided to stay in Marerey huddled together for warmth on top of their roofs under the pelting rains that never seemed to end. Some had tucked themselves under plastic sheeting; others had only cotton cloth as cover, and that only deadened the sting from the deluge.
The waters were rising steadily, two to three inches an hour. The night before, the river had climbed over the embankment and crept through the village, slowly, like a serpent searching, covering, consuming everything in its path. By daybreak, the roads, the town center, and finally the floors of the homes had disappeared under the flood. Those who took to their roofs watched the water below reach ever higher and spread out over the plains nearby, through the fields of maize that had been nearly ready to harvest, and vanish in the distance toward the untilled savanna. In this gray and dismal afternoon, this was a landscape without definition. In days—perhaps in hours if the rains didn’t let up—the entire region would be just one large lake with only a mound of dry land here and there isolated as islands.
As the floodwater continued to rise, it no longer extended gradually as spillover but picked up the swiftly moving current and became the river itself. It tore at the foundations and sucked away the ground from under the heavier homes. Those on the roofs grasped the sharp edges of the corrugated iron, fearing, sensing, that these were their last moments on something solid before falling into the turgid waters below.
The buildings under them swayed from the pressure of the current; the mud-daub houses with thatched roofs were surprisingly solid, but they could never be expected to withstand the force of the flood. They stood defiantly against the rising waters until finally, one by one, they loosened their hold on the land and began to move slowly with the river. They broke apart and became just so much unidentified flotsam.
There was a grand old mango tree on the submerged embankment on the other side. One witness told of an old man who balanced on a thick bough on the second level. He clasped two small children in one arm and circled the tree with the other. He stared in frozen disbelief, too afraid for panic, at the water pressing against the trunk on its passage down to the sea. The bloated, whitening carcass of something bigger than a cow, a camel perhaps, broke the surface just below as if emerging from some depth; it floated briefly, then vanished, pulled under the swirl of the furious river. He felt the force of the raging stream as tight vibrations. Occasionally there was a shudder as the current changed and a more massive wall of water challenged the tree.
* * *
Russ Ulrey, the regional logistics officer of the UN’s World Food Program, stood beside his desk staring out the window at the steady rain and tried to suppress his frustration. He had just left the meeting of diplomats, agency heads, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, donor groups, and donor nations. He shouldn’t have expected anything different for this crisis: The competition, the gentlemanly infighting, the need for public approbation, the breast-beating—these were the negative elements that bothered him the most during these emergencies. There were already signs that the same conflicts were cropping up again. Despite it all, however, the job always did get done: Many of the malnourished and starving were fed, some of the refugees relocated and housed, many of the sick and dying treated and saved. Yet he damn well regretted that there was such competition on the way to saving lives.
The rain outside his office swept across the manicured lawn of the UN compound in Nairobi like a moving wall. The cement walks were almost underwater and he watched two women pause under an overhang, slip off their shoes, and sprint across to the next building. The steady heavy rains were an irritant to the office workers.
The crisis on the Horn of Africa had come suddenly. Last year, the Deyr, Somalia’s secondary rainy season, had been unseasonably sparse, and the expectations had been that this year the drought would be more severe. This was an El Niño year, however, and it had been anybody’s guess what the season would bring. Local farm knowledge didn’t help: The mangoes were hanging heavily on the trees as usual and the sugarcane was a little stunted, but that didn’t mean much (it was not like looking at woolly-bear caterpillars in Russ’ native Michigan and measuring the black stripe to determine how severe the winter would be). Nothing, according to the locals on the Jubba, heralded the disaster that was to come.
Among the papers on his desk were the reports from the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development Famine Early Warning System:
Unusually heavy and sustained rains have fallen in the Jubba Valley during October. Many homes in Gedo and Middle Jubba regions have been destroyed by floods and possessions swept away, prompting a new wave of displaced people in need of food, medicine, drinking water, blankets, and shelter. Floodwaters are moving downriver to Lower Jubba. Waterborne diseases are a threat. Hundreds of underground grain storage pits have been flooded.
A low-pressure trough had dropped from northern Europe to the Horn of Africa and had collided with the retreating Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, the band of permanent low pressure that circles the planet near the equator. The combination of the two systems created a low-pressure belt over the Horn that pulled in moisture off the Indian Ocean. Unusually heavy rains in the north began falling in the Ethiopian highlands on the Great Rift Valley in October. There were some breaks in the weather, but in early November another wave of storms charged in from the ocean and the rain never stopped. Above-average sea temperatures fed the drifting storm clouds, and meteorologists predicted that until those temperatures fell, the rains would only become more frequent and more intense. The swollen streams poured into the Ganale River, and in Ethiopia thousands were left homeless. The Ganale fed the Webbi Jubba and the Webbi Shabeelle, and the normally arid Ogaděn region had been flooded. While Ethiopia faced a crisis, it paled compared to that which was to strike downriver in the fertile midsection of Somalia.
Russ had flown over the region the day before. Keeping just above gunshot range, the small airplane followed what he guessed was the original course of the Jubba to the ocean port of Kismayo. Many of the dikes already had been breached. He saw, felt the panic of those massed tightly on the small patches of bare land, on their roofs, on the few remaining raised roads, even in the trees as they waited for help.
There were a half million people stranded on the high ground, and most of them had no access to shelter, food, drinking water, medicine. How was he going to deliver hundreds of tons of food out to these remote and isolated communities? Airdrops into the floodwaters were not an option. Trucks could go only so far before running out of land. Helicopters could deliver to distribution bases, but only small boats could get the supplies to those huddled on islands near their flimsy shelters, surrounded by the rising water. That was his priority—boats and people to drive them.
Russ was not unaccustomed to the challenges of putting together a lifesaving mission: delivering emergency supplies, coordinating with other often-competing agencies within the UN and assisting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the Red Cross, Médecins sans Frontières, Oxfam, CARE, and dozens of others. As WFP regional logistics officer, Russ handled humanitarian operations for the entire Horn—parts of Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan—an area as large as the landmass from New York to the Mississippi. Until now his primary task had been Operation Lifeline Sudan, a WFP mission that provided food for more than two and a half million people displaced by the civil war or suffering from massive crop losses. He had been responsible for putting together the largest humanitarian airlift in history in terms of tons per day delivered, he was proud to say.
Then suddenly there was Somalia, a complex emergency in one of the most hostile places on earth. The country had been rent by civil war since the overthrow of the central government in 1991. Somalia was said to have more guns per capita than anywhere else on earth. Stitching together a multiorganizational, multinational emergency operation in a war zone amid competition with other agencies was a challenge beyond imagination. Russ never questioned his ability to put it together. It was a matter of delegating; it also required begging, borrowing, cutting corners, and creative thinking.
Russ had personal, hard-won experience with Somalia. While head of logistics for operations in Sudan, he was assigned to arrange cross-border relief deliveries into Somalia during the famine crisis in 1992. Warlord militia had been looting and hijacking his trucks as soon as they crossed the border. To get the emergency supplies through, he knew that clan and subclan militia first must be disarmed. Indeed, Somali leaders had requested UN assistance in disarming the population and had suggested that Somalis would voluntarily turn in their weapons for a basket of food or other inducement. Russ recommended to the American troops who had been sent to assure delivery of humanitarian assistance that their first priority be to get the guns away from the locals. The demobilization program never got off the ground. “I asked them to disarm the Somalis as soon as they landed and before I authorized any further delivery,” he recalled. “They could have done so. But they didn’t—it was a formula for going sideways.” Because of this dispute with the military, Russ was unceremoniously sent back to Sudan, and the United Nations operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) later ended in disgrace and tragedy. There was little conviction in his mind that the current flood emergency mission would be any more successful.
Russ had started his humanitarian work years back driving a relief barge on the Nile in the Sudan. He had been hijacked and kidnapped by bandits, toward whom he holds no ill will. Before that, he had been a sailor, a licensed mechanic, a boat builder, had swung a hammer on construction sites, had a pilot’s license, and had the schooling, a degree in geophysics. Today, in his early fifties, with a peppery beard and dark, concerned eyes, he says he was convinced at the time he could put the Somali operation together, although he recalls wondering if he was not beginning to wear down. WFP missions are 24/7.
Indeed, the WFP fed a hundred four million people in eighty-one countries in 2003, at a cost of $3.3 billion. Despite these Herculean efforts, one person starves to death every four seconds. That is twenty-four thousand people a day worldwide—three quarters of them children and women.
Working alongside the WFP in most of these humanitarian crises is the United Nations Children’s Fund, and because of Unicef’s more sweeping mandate, which includes funding appeals, child welfare, health, nutrition, hygiene, and development, it was the agency assigned to coordinate the Somali flood-relief mission.
As Russ stared out his window of the UN compound waiting for two of his logistics staff, Dr. Agostino Paganini of Unicef, the interagency coordinator, was describing the situation at a news conference in the conference room on the ground floor:
“Unless we get helicopters and boats now, immediately, we may as well hang our hats on it. Instead of saving lives, we will be helping to bury the dead. Thousands of people will die. The response team’s plan of operation is in place; a lot of relief equipment and food rations are ready to go, but what we absolutely lack is the means of getting these things to the affected population. . . . It is deeply frustrating. The world community cannot remain indifferent in the face of a disaster that is slowly and cruelly evolving before our eyes, hour by hour. Nor can bureaucracy ever be an excuse for inaction.” A few hundred families had been reached by donkey cart out of Kenya, Paganini added. “The hideous situation is compounded by the presence of deadly crocodiles, snakes, and land mines.”
Only a few months before, Paganini had launched a hundred-million-dollar appeal to help Somalia pull itself out of its continual state of lawlessness and reintegrate with the international community. There had been few sympathetic listeners. Following the controversial humanitarian and military intervention in the early nineties, contributors had tired of Somali horror stories and the contributions were drying up, a clear sign of “donor fatigue.” Paganini was announcing at the press conference that the current Somali flood crisis would require at least an additional $10 million.
There was only a finite amount of resources that donor organizations and donor nations could contribute: money, food, material, and personnel. The inter-and intraorganizational competition for these resources, often a matter of an organization’s solvency, is frequently unpleasant. Russ wondered how intense the competition would get this time—between WFP and Unicef, between the WFP and other UN agencies and the NGOs, which often relied on the WFP for logistical support. A war of egos—the efforts to strengthen their empires and to remain financially secure, as well as to assure their eminence in the eyes of the donors—is often waged on the battlefield of public relations. It occurs during nearly every humanitarian emergency.
The origins of this self-serving puffery began in earnest in 1992. International attention had been focused on Somalia, where more than three hundred thousand people already had died of hunger and hunger-related diseases and at least three thousand people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were starving to death daily. In a high-profile media blitz, one agency, CARE, not the first on the scene, airlifted and distributed supplies from ships anchored off Mogadishu. Then someone in CARE with a sense of marketing saw an opportunity and distributed agency T-shirts and baseball caps to its workers, which were highly visible to the world media. WFP and Unicef, not to be outdone, quickly did the same. “It was a chance to get recognition and to impress the donors with their efficiency, their high-profile presence,” Russ remembered. “A photo opportunity. Everyone kept score—how many people have we saved today?”
Competing press conferences were held, the numbers inflated and presented, and some NGOs that had been little known before were assured that, as a result of their high-profile media efforts, they would be kept funded and operating. (The need for public exposure, however, did a one-eighty following the bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad in August 2003: Many agencies, including the well-respected International Committee of the Red Cross, removed their logos from their cars and offices, fearing they were targets of the forces opposed to Coalition occupation.)
Each humanitarian crisis is different, but the Somalia flood crisis had all the ingredients of the worst that could befall mankind: It was a natural disaster that had occurred without warning; thousands suffered from malnutrition and starvation and required immediate rescue; it was in a part of the world that was poorly mapped; it was within a combat area; there were diseases known and unknown; and so far there was not much money to do the job.
The reports from the towns on the Jubba River had been urgent, desperate. Russ had received one account from the Médecins sans Frontières staff upstream in the Ogaděn that malaria, dysentery, watery and bloody diarrhea, cholera, and snakebites were already taking their toll, and as usual the first to die were children under five. Hippos and pythons, confused and displaced, were moving into the quieter waters that covered the villages, and there was one confirmed report that a child had been taken by a crocodile. One community of two hundred fifty families was reported stranded on a narrow coastal sand dune north of Kismayo, an island with the Indian Ocean on one side and the swift floodwaters on the other. They had no possessions, had not eaten for five days, and had only rainwater to drink. The need for rescue, food, and medicines was immediate. MSF, World Vision (an international Christian relief NGO), and Somali Community Services (an NGO that liaised with the hard-hit villages) also were asking Russ to help them arrange delivery of staff and equipment and supplies.
Russ cataloged some of the items he had to consider. In addition to meeting the requests and needs of other UN agencies and NGOs, there were a few other pressing matters: He was desperate for helicopters, and Russ thought he could contract an Mi-8 from South Africa and another from Ukraine. He had a line on some cargo planes: two venerable C-130 Hercules—each with a payload of fifty thousand pounds of food, enough to feed a hundred twenty thousand people for a day—standing by at the Lokichoggio base in southern Sudan and one at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi; and there was that Ukrainian Anotov still without charter at JKIA. He had to meet with Kenyan government officials—Customs, Immigrations, Interior—always a headache because of the corruption, the money needed to get things done. There were houses to rent for staff in Nairobi and arrangements to be made for accommodations in some of the villages in Somalia. Locations where Unicef had semipermanent quarters—Kismayo, for example—could house some of his crew. The former military base at Garissa in northeast Kenya would be a good staging area for relief flights into the Somali heartland. He would offer to repair the landing strip, cheaper than paying landing fees every time a WFP plane landed. He would have to contract for smaller cargo planes—the Buffaloes and the Caravans—that could land on the dirt strips. Aviation fuel would have to be trucked through the bush from Nairobi to Garissa and a fuel depot built for the planes and helicopters. Problem: How was he going to prevent shifta, wandering Somali thieves, from hijacking the fuel trucks, as they do occasionally in the Sudan operations (aircraft fuel is ideal for their lamps and cooking stoves)? And there were the boats; there could be no effective relief mission without them. All this had to have been done yesterday—the waters were rising and people were being swept away.
He expected this emergency to be stressful, but he had a staff upon which most of the grunt work would fall. Saskia von Meijenfeldt had been loaned to the WFP by the Dutch government as a junior projects officer, an intern. A tall, slender blonde in her late twenties, Saskia was to become indispensable to the relief operation. With boundless nervous energy and remarkable efficiency, Saskia learned quickly the intricacies and politics of the bureaucracy. Russ gave her a permanent posting with the WFP and appointed her Somalia logistics officer.
WFP headquarters in Rome had pulled Matt Wolff from a posting in Iraq and seconded him to the regional logistics office in Nairobi for the Somali emergency. A square-bodied former racing yachtsman from the UK with time on the ground in Rwanda, Matt was to run the river operations.
Saskia and Matt sat across the desk from Russ, waiting for an update.
“The meeting went as I expected,” Russ began. “You’ll be attending them in the future, Saskia. They will be held every morning at seven-thirty. Unicef, of course, wants the limelight—wants to run the river operations, thinks those are the glamour jobs. Photo opportunities.
“But they are not ready to do the job. They are starting an operation in Kismayo, but they have no boats. I think we should give them a hand. If we send boats and drivers to Kismayo, we can work the flooded areas of the river from both ends. Saskia, you see what we can arrange in Kismayo.”
Saskia nodded, took notes on her pad.
In this early stage of the emergency, Russ knew that the boats were vital not only for rescue but for access. He recalled that the agencies couldn’t get out to the villages by airplane or truck, and access was also politically difficult: Many of the villages were either on one side of a combat line or the other. The gift of food provided an opening, an entrance, and he could make decisions based on that.
Russ continued: “I told them, ‘If you give me a quarter of a million dollars, I will hire twelve boat guys and I’ll get those little boats I already have for our Sudan operation and in the next couple of days we’ll fly them in on the Buffalo with some food and save those people. We will get them out of the trees.’”
“And?” Saskia asked.
“What could they say? It looks like we will keep the river operations as well as the airlifts. And of course we’ll help them any way we can. Unicef is holding a news conference as we speak.”
“Where do we get boats?” Saskia asked.
“I’m flying two down from Loki that are on standby for Sudan, but we are going to have to find more. The Norwegians are supposed to be donating ten boats to Unicef but I expect we will be in charge of them; some safari operators probably have some that we can hire. I know there are a few in the Mombasa area—you should check on that. We may have to borrow some bigger dinghies from ‘yachties’ on the coast. You’ll have to figure where to put the boats on the river, figure out where to set up distribution sites, and arrange for the transport of the boat operators.”
“Where do we get the drivers?” Matt asked.
“Well, you’re the sailor. I guess that is your job.”
This was one of the most pressing issues, Russ recalled later in an interview:
“There was an immediate need to go into the bush—in the next couple of days, in fact. We didn’t have the people for the jobs; we required people who had skills that were not common to our organization. We don’t have bosun’s mates. The WFP usually hires contractors, but there weren’t any contractors in the area whose job descriptions, whose skills, were such that they rescue people out of trees in the bush in Somalia. It wasn’t the case where we could have done an open tender. We needed people who were very unique. So we hired yachties, round-the-world sailors, and anyone who was familiar with boats.
“This was going to be some of the toughest and most heartbreaking work in the world, and some of those guys were perfect for it. If you can sail the Third World and get through the Customs and Immigrations and negotiate in the marketplaces and live for a while with the locals, you probably have the right attitude to negotiate with a tribe in southern Sudan or in Somalia. I was looking for self-sufficient people used to living in rough conditions and willing to make some sacrifices.”
“Write a fax,” Russ told Wolff, “and send it to anyplace where you think there are boat people. Might try the Dar es Salaam Yacht Club, Mombasa Yacht Club, the Tanga Yacht Club, and the boatyard in Kilifi. I am sure we can get some yachties to sign on.
“Oh, and, Matt,” Russ said, raising his eyes directly to the solidly built figure opposite, “this is going to be one very frustrating job. You are going to have to do some of the things that I haven’t got the time or space for. You have a bit of a history—so keep your temper, keep your patience, and go with the flow, eh?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem. Are you going to tell the drivers that it could get a little dangerous?”
“Everyone has heard about Somalia. You could add in the fax that there are some security problems they should be aware of. Also better tell them that it pays more because of those risks.”
Security of humanitarian workers sent into the field was an issue. So was the urgency to get the operations under way and save lives. Security balanced against operations was an administrative conflict that dated back to the very first relief mission in a hostile area. While Russ was mindful that already that year nine WFP staff members had been killed in the line of duty, he was just as concerned with getting the boats, food, water, medicine, blankets, tarps, and tons of other material out to the field and to the flood victims as soon as possible. Security measures were based on an assessment of conditions in the field and officially categorized by phases. Somalia was Phase Four, an area unquestionably hazardous, where only the most essential personnel required to carry out the mission would be permitted. As long as people were dying and the UN had committed a relief mission to save them, then the workers in the field could be expected to face some risks; that came with the job, always did. The applicants would be warned of the dangers, would get some security training, and they would get additional pay, of course. This time, however, it was not as it had been in 1992, when the UN Security Council authorized a military force into Somalia to protect the aid and those relief workers distributing it. For this emergency, there would be no troops. Better because, in the eyes of the locals, his people would not be associated with any foreign nation’s military or political policies. Worse because his people would have to face the guns alone and fend for themselves. While security of the staff was important, operations—getting the food out to those who so desperately needed it—were more so.
“We should get a security window,” Ross told Wolff. “Usually happens in an unexpected natural disaster—the locals put down their guns and help. Who knows? Our window might last the crisis. It is not like they are going to shoot at each other over a worthless patch of water. Run the list of those you want to hire by me first.”