MY WIFE, JACQUELINE, and I had arrived in Kenya after a voyage down the East African coast on the Unicorn, our thirty-two-foot yacht. Our temporary home was the ancient slave port of Kilifi, where we had stopped for provisions and maintenance. The passage had taken us from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea to Aden. From Yemen, another thirty-three days to reach our landfall, a frustrating nonstop passage of fickle winds, heavy rains, and a contrary north-setting current around the Horn of Africa. The trip was not expedited by the need to add hundreds of miles and tedious days to keep far off the coast of Somalia, a notorious feeding ground for pirates.
The rains seemed to chase us down the coast right into the harbor, and they’d kept us cooped up below nearly continuously since our arrival. God never intended Man and Woman to live together for twenty-four hours a day, week after week, in a small sailboat—a space smaller than many modern prison cells—and while the slow, interminable passage had been made in harmony, it was during the comedown, the soggy period following, that we had reached near boiling point.
It hadn’t rained since noon and, hoping a change in scenery would help, we had motored into the large bay up the creek, past the imposing mansions on the cliffs owned by white Kenyans who had sold their Up Country holdings and retired gracefully to the coast. I sat alone out on the deck against the doghouse, gazing across the water at the colonnaded villas, the well-manicured lawns, the deep jungle beyond, and the cumulonimbus that built over the interior. This was the season of the traditional Short Rains, a transition between monsoons, but the locals said it had rained straight through the dry season and there were no signs that it would stop anytime soon. The thunderheads, tops splaying off into the upper reaches of sky, emptied heavy rains on the interior. Lightning, a brief swelling of silent light, throbbed within those powerful storms. Here on the still waters of the bay, the humid air was redolent of the strange smells of tropic jungle and unseen flowers, of the tang of salt from the exposed reef. Carmine bee-eaters, tucking wings missilelike to intercept the insects of the evening, swooped and darted above the boat, twisting and diving in the frantic last hour before dark. Broad-winged fox bats flapped heavily and erratically across the water at mast height. They came as many and they flew scattered and alone. Other than the distant rumble of thunder, it was quiet and peaceful, and mercifully dry. This evening, this anchorage, this peace—any anchorage and peace like it—were the destinations, the reasons. Yet I still stewed a little over our recent sharp exchange about something now forgettable, and I was thankful for the brief solitude.
Jackie came from below and sat next to me without speaking, without touching. I felt her body from a distance. In her middle years, her pretty Dutch features had become more defined, giving her a handsome quality. I was pleased she had joined me; I chose to believe she was feeling at peace and forgiving at this moment. She leaned forward, her chin on her knees, staring outboard, abstracted.
She sighed, whether from aggravation or contentment I could not tell. But it was communication, an opening.
“Peaceful,” I said.
“Yes . . . I need space.”
“And?”
“I need a break.”
“I don’t blame you. It was a difficult trip.”
“No, I mean a long break. I need to do something with my life.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“So what? I need to get off this damn boat.”
It was a night of a late moon, and the darkness this close to the equator comes quickly. The silhouettes of fronds of the palm trees that lined the ridge on the hills before us were growing indistinct. Despite the gentle tropic air, I felt chilled, and cheated of a moment.
“It sounds like something more serious than the boat.”
Silence.
This had been gathering since the end of the passage like the turbulent Up Country weather, smaller blows building to the big one. The tension was electric and dangerous. I needed to postpone, to deny. We had had too many good years to say something stupid. I realized, perhaps with some relief, we were too defeated to begin yelling at each other.
Jacqueline had owned a bar and restaurant on a resort island in Malaysia when we met. I was a solo blue-water sailor with a thirst. Some months later, she had sold her interest in the place and was crossing the Indian Ocean with me on a passage to Europe. That was eight years and a few adventures before.
I started the engine, hauled up the anchor, and motored us back down the river. I looked at my watch; if lucky, we would get to the bar at the boatyard before they shut it down for the night.
Deliverance arrived the next morning in the form of a fax, an urgent appeal for anyone with any sailing or maritime experience to contact the UN’s World Food Program in Nairobi. The WFP was looking for boat drivers to deliver emergency relief supplies up some river in Somalia and they paid well. For me, it didn’t matter whether the UN job was in Mogadishu or in Paris. It appeared that I had found my own modern-day Foreign Legion.
Without hesitation or consultation, I faxed back my interest, determined to sign up. The immediate response instructed me to go to Nairobi for an interview, arrive prepared “to camp in the bush, like going on safari.” I had never camped in the African bush, never gone on safari: I did know enough to borrow a tent and raid the boat’s galley of our Snickers bars. The fax also warned of “some security problems in Somalia.” I could imagine that a few sacks of food disappeared from time to time. Admission of security problems probably represented the caution with which the UN undertook its relief missions.
The day before my departure, Jackie left for her flight from Mombasa to the Netherlands. At our brief good-bye, I jokingly announced—with some self-pitying malice—that I was off to war. I would imagine that those running away into the unknown might enact similar peevish scenes. It is the annunciation of our intentions, the note left behind—you’re going to miss me when I’m gone—before jumping off a bridge. We hugged briefly, almost like strangers: “Be careful. . . . I am sorry,” she said, and took refuge in the shadows of the taxi. As the car pulled away, I thought I saw her face turn toward the rear window—and a brief uncertain wave.
Back on the Unicorn, I stood in the darkened cabin, owning myself completely after so many months, accepting with equal measure the bitter silence, the sense of loss, the emptiness, and the bubbling excitement of liberation. This is what I had needed. Yet the sense of loss prevailed and, like a thief in the night, I sought out the things she had left behind. If any. I rifled her drawers and at the bottom found her cherished photographs of family: her sons and their partners, her elderly parents, us. At her departure, at least, she intended to return. I was relieved.
* * *
After flying into Nairobi the next day, I dickered with the driver of a clapped-out rogue taxi, a cheerful youth with dreadlocks under a red, black, and gold woven Rasta cap, for the fare to the UN headquarters that I was told Kenyans would pay. “Okay, okay, bwana, I give you friend price, Rafiki price.”
The taxi sputtered and clanked past the cargo terminal. A row of airplanes wing-to-wing, a few with UN stenciled blue on their tails, appeared eager to spring over the horizon. Forklifts heavy with pallets of cargo drove onto the gaping ramps and disappeared inside their cavernous bowels. Dark half-naked human figures, balancing boxes and heavy sacks on their heads, marched toward the aircraft—relief supplies, I supposed, destined for faraway places in need: the Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, the Congo, Burundi. The pace of this industry provided a singularly subjective interpretation: Hurry up, hurry up, people are dying, relief workers need to get out there to save people, to get on with it. I felt a wonderful childlike proprietary pride in those aircraft, a sort of home team rah-rah—they were more important than anything and they were ours. And I had yet to be interviewed.
The four-lane Uhuru Highway passes through an Africa of less than postcard beauty. This was still the era of Daniel arap Moi, one of Africa’s longest-reigning autocrats. For twenty-four years, hundreds of millions of dollars of international funding for schools, sanitation, roads, and poverty relief were flushed down the latrine of corruption—convincingly displayed by this trip from the airport to the city. Squatters huddled over small cooking fires alongside their small homes of sticks and rustling plastic, and their naked children scrabbled in the dirt only a few feet away from the gravel-kicking lorries and buses that belched gagging exhaust. In those early-morning hours of washed-out light, with the dew still heavy on the ground, the smoke from the cooking fires snaked across the surface of the road. On the raised center median partially veiled by the haze, an old man, his trousers lowered to his knees, squatted and watched both sides of the rush hour.
The traffic moved fitfully, past the wealthy estates, clusters of residences protected by high cement walls embedded with shards of broken bottle glass.
An hour later and a little closer to the city, steam drifted out from under the taxi hood and from under our feet. The stop-and-go traffic was taking its toll and the car needed a break. That came at the roundabout at Kenyatta Avenue. Away from the industrial section, the air had begun to clear. But at the circle, we ran abruptly into a wall of thick, white semisweet smoke, caustic enough to be tasted. The familiar stench conjured up a distant memory. Tear gas. Not since as a reporter during the heady days of anti–Vietnam War protests and urban riots following the King assassination in the sixties had I tasted this.
Our taxi was suddenly quite alone and at the head of the line of slow-moving traffic; drivers honked and cursed behind us. Ahead, a phalanx of near-empty matatus, minibuses normally packed beyond the limit, charged toward us the wrong way on this one-way avenue. The taxi turned sharply, slithered up the muddy embankment, and, at the top, coughed and shuddered to its apparent death. The minibuses below, plastered with reflective decals warning MISTER DOOM, BLACK MAGIC MAN, LOVE FURST, charged the oncoming commuter traffic that we had left behind, sideswiping some cars and running others off the road. Gangs of youths jumped off the buses and beat on the hoods and windscreens with their fists. Helmeted police armed with shields, truncheons, and assault rifles piled into the rioters. Blaring horns, popping tear-gas canisters, angry exhortations amplified by megaphones, the cacophony of a riot mixed with cheerful bouncy African music that came from somewhere else.
“Bwana, you come with me. Quick smart!” The young Rasta man grabbed my sea bag, took my hand, and ran with me down the other side of the embankment into the relative quiet of the city. The noise from the demonstration grew faint, the smell of tear gas now only another memory. But I was shaken.
“Nairobi, bwana, Nairobi.”
* * *
The World Food Program/Somalia Office headquarters was not what I had expected, not a scrubbed modern office building but a sagging tin-roof settler’s house in Gigiri, the hilly suburbs of the city. During the days of the Empire, this might have been a substantial home that a new colonialist would have been proud to build, when a trip to the center of town was a full day’s outing through untamed bush. These days, it served as temporary quarters for the UN during one desultory humanitarian crisis or another. A small foyer had been turned into a reception area that was manned by an indifferent guard. The wooden floors sloped unevenly, and the 1940s-era wallpaper of pastel-colored posies—wallpaper that the imagination allows may have been eagerly awaited on the ship from England—was stained by the years. Flimsy walls painted pea green had been hastily nailed together to create small offices. Staff emerged from out of one closed door and disappeared into another, bumping into each other in the narrow corridor. There seemed to be a sense of urgency. But perhaps it was my own. I presented myself to the Kenyan guard behind the desk and announced that I was there to join the aid mission to Somalia. He shrugged, pointed down the hallway. I peered into another office and announced myself, and no one there seemed to know what to do with me either. I began to wonder if I was the only one being interviewed for the relief team or if in fact there even was an ongoing emergency operation in Somalia. The thrill of adventure, of belonging, of being part of an international effort, of being part of a mission for which I was desperately needed, all this began to evaporate and I saw myself returning on the next flight to the coast.
Sitting back on my haunches against the wall in the hall, I waited for someone who looked like they had some authority. The morning newspaper had a story about the planned demonstration by matatu drivers and their touts. Two days before, one of Moi’s bodyguards in the presidential motorcade had lost patience with a slow-thinking matatu driver caught in the inevitably slow-moving Nairobi traffic. The guard had pistol-whipped the driver, then shot him and his tout. He was to be charged with the double murder, but not before this morning’s riot.
Reading the account, I thought that if all went well I soon would be working with the United Nations in Somalia. Not in some nuthouse like Nairobi.
“Here to sign up?” A tall, stern-looking woman in her late twenties had emerged from an office and stood over me.
“I heard you were looking for boat drivers,” I said, rising awkwardly to my feet. “I’m from Kilifi—on the coast. I faxed that I was coming.”
“Good, excellent—yes, we do need drivers. When can you start?”
“Immediately.” I hadn’t thought about getting a hotel. I’m not sure what I was thinking—that the UN was a compound that offered barracks? It was apparent there was no room in this place, except perhaps some space on the uneven floors. Maybe they’d send me to Somalia tonight.
Her eyes fixed critically on my sea bag, a large canvas laundry sack with the faded stenciled name of some forgotten merchant ship. She looked up and smiled. She reminded me of the nerdish little girl with oversize glasses whose pigtails I pulled in class. Yet her strong blue eyes, short hair, and reluctant smile briefly kindled some other curiosity.
“I’m Saskia, WFP logistics officer. You have gear?”
“Not much. I wasn’t sure what I would need.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, neither are we. Your own things should be enough to keep you in the field for a month or two—your own food, of course—anything you think you would need for the bush.” She led me down the hallway to meet the manager of the Somalia boat operations.
The tight quarters in the rummy little office pinched the young administrator’s heavy features. Here was a harried, overweight, overworked, hard-smoking bureaucrat who appeared to take things very seriously. Possibly it was the nature of the work. Organizing an emergency relief operation to save lives, I imagined, was serious business. Wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with sweat stains under the arms, Matt Wolff sat imposingly behind a battered wood desk of mottled stain and varnish; a four-blade fan overhead provided some relief, occasionally stirring papers on the desk and the edges of maps that were tacked haphazardly to the wall. An ashtray of heavy ebony wood filled with cigarette butts kept some loose forms in place.
He shuffled some papers on his desk, lifted tired eyes, and inspected the figure before him with the enthusiasm of a drill sergeant checking out a raw recruit.
“I’m looking for people who aren’t child molesters, don’t have prison records, and who aren’t sought by the police.” It was evident by his scrutiny that he was assessing which of the above might disqualify me.
“Tough requirements. All other vices accepted?”
“Most others. No pissheads. No journalists. And they should have some knowledge of boats.”
“I know the difference between port and starboard.”
“Good, you’ll do fine.”
No journalists? There was no danger of being a journalist again. There was no story in Somalia, just another African famine crisis.
“We’ve got people hanging on to tree limbs out there, dying by the minute, and bloody Customs won’t let us get the boats out of their warehouses. What absolute crap!” Responsible also for dealing with Kenya Customs, he was up to his neck battling the notoriously greedy bureaucracy, their efficiency proportionate only to the amount of kitu kidogo—bribery money—to grease the skids.
“I’ll probably send you to Kismayo. You’ll set up a logistics base, prepare the boats, and deliver the supplies upriver from there. Ever been to Somalia?”
“I’ve seen it from offshore.”
“Know anything about it?”
“Not a hell of a lot. Some American soldiers got killed in Mogadishu a few years back.”
“That was UNOSOM—United Nations in Somalia. A real fuckup and we’re still paying for it. You don’t need to know the details—it’s in the history books. The success of our mission, whether or not we are able to help these people, save these people, depends, as it did then, on the locals. To be more specific, on a bunch of crazy warlords letting us do our job.”
“Warlords?”
“Regional tribal leaders. Somalia has no central government and the country is run by warlords. It is like Europe in the Middle Ages; each warlord has his own fiefdom—a twenty-first-century feudal system. No knights in shining armor, just militiamen with guns. The warlords can make our job easier, or impossible.”
A passing shower pelting the tin roof like thrown pebbles drowned out the last of what Matt Wolff had to say.
“. . . so nothing much has changed since the UNOSOM days of 1992, except that there are no soldiers to protect us.”
The chain-smoking young Brit revealed that he had just arrived from Iraq and had worked in Iran, Rwanda, and Azerbaijan during the past eight years. He was hardly the stereotypical out-of-shape starched paper-pusher with green eyeshade and suspenders that I imagined. I was to learn later that when not involved with relief operations for UN agencies, he was working toward his Ph.D. His subject: management—or mismanagement—of UN relief programs.
The logistics officer knocked on the partially opened door and entered, followed quickly by a dour, preoccupied figure with a black beard and a distant impersonal air.
“You’ve met Saskia,” Wolff said. “And this is Russ Ulrey, the regional logistics officer—he’s in charge of the whole WFP operation. He and Saskia—”
“Yeah, hi,” Russ interrupted. “Matt, you got those Norwegian boats out yet? I got the donors on my butt. They don’t want to hear that they are still in the Customs hangar when they see reports on television about how many people a day are being flushed down the rivers.”
“They promised me one out this afternoon, another out tomorrow. At the latest.”
“Well, stay on it—maybe you should go over there and shake some cages. You a boat driver?” he said, turning to me. He didn’t seem unfriendly, merely stressed.
“Don’t know. I’m here for the job.”
“Yeah, he’s on board,” Matt said.
“Good. Let me know when that boat is released.” He disappeared, leaving the three of us in silence.
“Russ also runs our Sudan and Kenya operations. Busy guy.”
“So, you are ready to go?” Saskia asked me.
“Almost—I have to buy some things.”
“Kismayo?” to Wolff.
“I think so.” He turned to me. “Kismayo is Somalia’s southern port on the Jubba River. For the next day or so, I want you to assemble the boats at the airport here. Then you take one of the fast boats to Kismayo—there is another already there—and set up an operations base. While you’re at it, you might help the locals put their port back together. We have some ships ready to deliver supplies from Mombasa, but first the port has to be up and running.”
“Also, when you are in Kismayo,” Saskia added, “I’d like you to check on the security situation. Unicef has a security man out there, but I haven’t got much sense of what to expect. Radio us a report, daily if you can, about what’s going on.”
“You don’t know?”
It was evident by her expression that she took my question as criticism.
“We do know, of course. From others. But you will be representing the World Food Program, the first from our office, and I would like to hear it from you. Okay?”
“We haven’t heard of any problems,” Wolff interceded, lighting a cigarette. “But the port and airport are prime real estate. Whoever controls those controls most of southern Somalia. Things change by the minute. We can bonk a few threatening crocodiles but we can’t do anything about the militia and the AK-47s. Everyone there has a gun, and they don’t need an excuse to shoot. And if it gets tense, well,” he paused, running his fingers through his short sandy hair. He snorted. “Well, we are all quite sure it won’t get that tense.”
“And if it does?”
“We will pull you and the others out. We’ll all go home. The Somalis bloody well know that. They know that we’re the good guys. We rescue them and provide them food. They know this is their last chance for any assistance from the international community. Oh, here,” he said, taking a blue baseball cap embroidered with WFP from a box on the shelf. “Help keep the sun off.”
I left the office feeling like a man who had just won the lottery, but at the same time, I had the misgiving that maybe I should not have bought the ticket. I chose to dwell on the positive. I would have a job and at the same time earn a bundle of money for a new adventure. As an aid worker I hoped I would get the satisfaction of doing something worthwhile for others for the first time in my life, not for lovers, partners, friends, sons, or a daughter. I would help alleviate the misery of a thousand strangers, of those I would not know, normally would not care about. I might even save lives—for that was the purpose of this mission. (Saving lives—such a portentous concept. Saving someone from dying, not something to spend too much time thinking about; if you are there, you save a life. If you are not, a person dies?) At least I would not be standing on the sidelines, reading about some faraway humanitarian disaster that really did not interest me, or scribbling some throwaway words about an event that I would soon discard—I was being sent out there where I might even make a difference.
It was further reassuring that I would be a neutral, working for not one nation but for all the nations. There were to be no guns, no uniforms, no enforcement of a nation’s Manifest Destiny. I would not be a representative of any military or political power. Moreover, while there might be some danger to the work, I would be part of a mission for the UN, reason enough to be convinced that it was safe.