IT IS NATURAL to feel a little out of context when arriving at a strange place that will have to become home. Strange place, indeed: This dusty airstrip that appeared too short a few days ago is considerably shorter today, nothing more than an elevated two-track. The wide area at the northeast end of the runway where the tents are located is being swallowed by the encroaching floodwater; in the opposite direction the strip vanishes into a vibrating heat that hovers above the last of the dry land. Conical red-dirt termite mounds rise out of the scrub. Shoulder-high grass on the embankment waves gently in a slight breeze and disappears down into the deeper water beyond. A row of steel ribs, remains of the bombed-out sugar factory, reaches out of the horizon. This is one hell of a lonely place.
It was reported that the rains were particularly heavy in this area, but you would never know it by the parched land yet unclaimed by the rising water. It had been raining as we landed, but minutes after the passage of the shower, the moisture steamed out of the ground and the earth caked dry and hard. While part of Somalia is hemorrhaging into the Indian Ocean from the torrents in the high country, the serious rains here have let up for a time, although evidently they are not far away: A dark squall line lies ominously to the north; sweeping gray brushstrokes from the distant downpour drag obliquely over the earth.
I stand as a solitary figure on the airstrip with my tin lockbox and my old backpack at my feet. I am no longer certain I want to be here. I have an odd sensation of being exiled, banished from a place that I was beginning to accept as home; to some degree Kismayo had become livable, endurable. Looking over this desolation, I feel very alone.
* * *
Less than an hour before, the Mi-8, preceded by the thumping of its rotors, had sped out of the west, skimmed across Kismayo Bay, and settled onto the helicopter-landing zone on the wharf. The Russian-built helicopter, with World Food Program initials stenciled roughly on its fat belly, appeared big enough to carry the boat and then some. The blades had hardly stopped spinning before three crewmen, loud, good-natured South Africans, alighted.
“Well, now, who is Juliet Bravo?” one of them bawled. This was a big man, with giant calves, huge hands, cheerful blue eyes, and a bushy cavalry mustache.
“You Juliet Bravo?” the pilot asked the gawking relief worker.
“Yes, and you’re the angels of mercy come to take me out of here.”
“Yah, okay. We have another stop after this—what are we taking?”
“That.” I nod toward the still dripping boat lying on its side on the pier. “And my gear, and that stack of relief supplies over by the warehouse. Will it all fit?”
“Yah, we can take up to three tons. Let’s get the boat loaded first.”
“You guys look like football players—or rugby. You ever play for the Springboks?”
“He’s the one,” the man said, pointing to a smaller blond companion who leaned against the aluminum fuselage, drinking out of a plastic water bottle. “He once played for them—fly half.” He grins, apparently pleased with the question. “I was too bloody slow. You a Springboks fan?”
“Absolutely. Great team.”
“We think so. Where are we taking you?”
“They haven’t told you?”
“They said it was up to you. Heard Bardera, Sakow, or Marerey.”
I jerked my thumb upward. “Anywhere that is up and out. Marerey will do.”
It was not important where I went; it would be out of Kismayo and I would be able to start work: delivering, rescuing, feeding, whatever it was I was hired to do. Although I was not certain that in Marerey I would do anything more than I did in Kismayo: sit on my ass, duck the Somali tempers, find make-work, collect the time and the money. Possibly that is what UN relief workers were supposed to do. In the many weeks in Kismayo I had not seen any humanitarian efforts. Jeri was apparently trying to feed the IDP, but I didn’t see it and so it meant nothing to me.
Sakow was a consideration, a town on the middle Jubba where Wolff’s flotilla had been working for weeks. The bridges were washed out and the boats were being used to ferry villagers across the river. There was ample reason to choose to go to Sakow: Andrew had said he heard that there was plenty of cold beer, and the sociable Swedes were there. But could I handle communal tents, sitting around a campfire, and someone with a guitar kicking off a singalong? Perhaps it was because of my reclusive tendencies but after Kismayo and the strange intimacy shared with the others, I didn’t think I was prepared to adapt to some marshmallow camaraderie, some Adirondack bonding. There was Marerey, on the other hand, a small base next to an airstrip, no more than a few tarps draped over some stakes chopped out of the bush—that was good enough for me.
Loading the boat onto the helicopter’s ramp went remarkably smoothly—no shouting, no pushing, no punches thrown, and no clacking of rifles cocked. There was no tense selection of men to heave the thing up the helicopter’s gaping backside. Without so much as an angry word, the Somalis positioned themselves behind, beside, and under, and for the last time we good-naturedly koh, laba, sader, hoek the boat into the aircraft. One of the men with whom I had worked caught my eye, grinned, and flipped me a private little thumbs-up.
A UN rig sped onto the wharf. A change in plans? Sierra Sierra popped out, serious and dour as usual, announced he was joining the flight to . . . “Where did you decide to go?”
“Marerey.”
“You’ve been there before?” He apparently didn’t remember.
“Brian not joining us?”
“No.” No explanation.
“I would have thought he could use a break from this place.” Chet simply shrugged. I sensed there might have been some conflict between the two.
The loaded boat and a few extra bags of maize meal and other relief supplies filled the bird. Turbos on, the eight-bladed chopper began its windup with an ear-piercing whine. Sitting on bags of relief supplies, I stared off into the middle distance, curiously deadened. I knew with some certainty that I had gone to the edge and I dared to be pushed over. I felt I had seen into that window of my fate. I knew absolutely that the chances of surviving a run between the warring sides were not good, no better than those of someone walking between German and Allied trenches in WWI. My reprieve was a divine gift. I am hardly a religious person, but it has since become a conviction of faith: Someone or something decided to rework the future. And, too, I suppose I should have expected that if the United Nations was not able to guarantee my safety, it would not send me into the lion’s den. Or would it? At what point do the decisions in the field conflict with official policy and the need to please the donors? There comes a time, but more often in the military, I suspect, when the requirement for victory, success, advancement, ego—call it what you will—overrides common sense and soldiers are sent marching foolishly to their deaths—the last soldier to die in a war that was a mistake. Are relief workers really fodder, expendable? Here in Somalia, despite the talk, I don’t think I will ever have an answer. I will never know who made the final decision to cancel the run, but I feel certain it was Chet. He is the security man. His is the last word.
As we lifted off the landing zone, I peered out the porthole for one last look at the wharf. Harun was there among the dockworkers. He held on to his baseball cap against the rotor wash and looked up. His thin dark face grew smaller. He offered a blind uncertain wave, then walked slowly back to the car.
Skirring over the bay to the mainland—a little higher than roof level to avoid drug-induced potshots—we reached the murky floodwaters, a blurred brown canvas underneath, and later hovered, then landed on the single strip of burnt earth that was Marerey Base.
The dry land at the site appeared to have been halved since my visit. The camp balanced on the very edge of a watery grave, about to tip over and drown in it. Open living quarters and storage areas of poles and gray tarp flapped and shook in the prop wash of the helicopter’s blades. A blinding rain shower pelted us and quickly passed on as we piled out and ducked instinctively under the slowing blades. The Somalis at the camp wandered over to the chopper and waited for the rear ramp to lower.
“Not much of a place.” The bushy Afrikaner wiped the back of his neck with a kerchief and stared at the collection of small tents.
“Hell of a lot better than Kismayo.”
“Yah, I’ve heard. I’d say these would come in handy.” He reached through the door and pulled out a six-pack of beer in a black plastic bag. I’m not one to demonstrate affection for other men, but I came close to kissing the guy. Not just because it was beer but because of the unexpected friendship. “From the Springboks.”
“I owe you a few in Nairobi.”
“Sure. Keep your head down out here.”
Within minutes the boat was off-loaded, and with the encouragement of the Somali chant it was eased down the embankment and into the water next to a row of small Styrofoam rafts. The helicopter lifted off and away and disappeared with its noisy thumping chasing not far behind.
My boat attracted a crowd. Some glided their fingers reverently over its smooth metallic-blue hull. Others reached over and cautiously turned the steering wheel.
* * *
Alone on the dusty strip with my gear at my feet, the chaos that surrounds me should provide the makings of a fine new adventure. This, however, has become less an adventure than something more personal. It has become an emotional and mental testing ground. Whether because of the events in Kismayo or because of some unknown or smothered fragility that I have always had, I find myself now overwhelmed by dislocation and dissociation. I don’t know where I’ve been, where I’m going, and in the private scheme of things, to what purpose. I don’t know whether I am happy, sad, or fearful. By God, I think that for one of the few times in my recent adult life I am experiencing real emptiness, a hollowness.
I drag my tin trunk toward what looks like the largest tented structure. Yusuf Hersi, the soft-speaking NGO representative in charge of organizing the deliveries in the area, appears from behind the largest of the tents at the end of the runway and shouts a greeting and approaches. He cuts quite a figure walking down the airstrip; erect bearing, long narrow black face, long legs, tall as a Masai warrior, he might have carried a spear but he carries a notebook, his finger still in the pages where he had been interrupted. His saintly eyes confer gratitude undeserved. Tucking his papers under his arm, he takes my hand with both of his and thanks me for bringing my boat here. He makes me feel needed, a savior. Lifting one end of my lockbox, he leads the way through ankle-deep water to a large open tarpaulin-covered shelter on dry land at the other side of the compound.
Turning the corner, I jerk back at the sight of a white man inside, reclining against stacked bags of maize and reading a newspaper. He is a big man, more brawn than fat, balding at the crown. His insouciant pose and his loosely wrapped sarong immediately suggest Charles Laughton acting the part of some jowly Roman emperor, popping grapes into his mouth as Nubian concubines dance naked before him.
“Hello, who have we here?” he says, peering over his glasses. “A new arrival, is it? Well, very good, very good indeed. The more the merrier.”
I did not expect another international. I think I’m pleased. However, privately and immediately I wonder what this guy is doing sitting on his ass while all around people are supposed to be dying. Is this relief work?
The man leans forward a little and offers a limp hand of welcome. “Robin Pierpoint-Twitchell. At your service.” His voice is softly resonant, and his diction imprecise, the loose and lazy marbles-in-the-mouth speech that hints of some refinement.
“Cup of tea?” he offers.
“Thanks.”
“And what brings you to our little gathering? I heard the helicopter. Brought some supplies, I hope.”
“Some. And my boat.”
“Another intrepid mariner. Excellent. I’m afraid there is no milk. We do have sugar. Where did you come in from?”
“Kismayo.”
“Ah, the port. A lovely spot for a resort, I understand.”
“Not anytime soon—fifty years, perhaps. A hard place to call home.”
“Yes, I’ve heard. You won’t find the security situation here as bad as Kismayo. Still, we have our own troubles, hippos and pythons, that sort of thing. Fortunately—”
“You’re also a boat driver?” I ask.
“Six trips today. Quite a challenge, as you no doubt will discover.” Frowning, he adds, “As I was saying—the security situation is a little different here than in Kismayo. Fortunately, the children with the guns are more interested in the helping than in the killing. I rather suspect it is because they are getting paid to do so. Not sure how long that will last, however.”
“I have noticed a lot less guns.” The few assault rifles I have seen are carried casually across the top of the bony shoulders of the young soldiers. Not a posture that lent their weapons to immediate use. “How long have you been here?”
“This is our third day. Still getting our feet wet, you might say.”
“We?”
“My partner, David, is on a run at the moment. He should be back soon.”
“Some palace you have here,” I say, looking around.
“Yes, we do quite well considering our circumstances—something like a home. Our storeroom, vegetables and the like, is in that corner. Our kitchen is here where the kettle is. We take turns cooking for each other. Our library, such as it is, is next to the veggies. You’re welcome to what we have: some old Spectators if you are of the conservative bent, an outdated Guardian Weekly or two if you lean a little left of center, and a few Granta if you have some literary interests.”
“Quite a library.”
“David tends toward the literary. I, on the other hand, tend toward the political. I wonder which are you?”
“Somewhere in the middle, I guess.”
Robin Pierpoint-Twitchell, who drops that he is a Cambridge graduate, strikes me as the sort who should be wearing a bowler and carrying an umbrella to his nine-to-five in the City, London’s financial district. He says he and his partner own a camp on the Tana River in Kenya. Because of tribal battles on the coast and preelection riots in Nairobi, tourism in Kenya has taken a hit and their safari business is temporarily closed. “Nothing like a little local disaster to keep the coffers full in times of need,” he says.
“You’ve done this sort of thing before?”
“Two years ago in Loki.”
“Loki?”
“Lokichoggio—the Sudan. Before that, Mogadishu. You can usually count on a humanitarian crisis somewhere in the area. Usually comes around Christmastime. Good for the finances, you see. You?”
“First time.”
“Well, I suspect you will become another disaster junkie like the rest of us. Are you a Yank?”
“You mean American? Yes. Are you English?”
“No, Kenyan. You know, I quite like the Americans. I am going to marry one.” I am not sure whether this is a boast—I’ve bagged an American—or condescension to marrying one. It might be that communications between us will be difficult. “Yes,” he continues, “the money from this job should get us off on the right foot.”
“Is the river still rising?” I ask, nodding toward the floodwater that nibbles away at the dry earth a few yards from the shelter.
“Actually, I don’t believe so. It has peaked.”
“Looks like it has risen just since I arrived. Looks like it might drown this place.”
“Rubbish. Don’t you know? It simply must go down. Because we are here.”
“I brought some beer.”
“I could tell straightaway you were a gentleman.”
The tinny sound of a small outboard grows out of the distance. “Ah, that would be David. Another cuppa?” A few minutes later a bright red motorboat, one of those I had seen in front of the hangar in Nairobi, putters through the tall grass up to the edge of the airstrip. A wiry figure in short-sleeve shirt, multipocketed shorts, and a faded baseball cap on a ponytail of white hair unlatches the outboard and tilts it upward. Two young gunmen jump out into the ankle-deep water.
Robin’s partner sloshes toward us, lugging two jerry cans. “That’s it for the day, Robbie,” David announces in a scratchy voice. A singsong quality accents a slight brogue. He places the jerry cans neatly in a corner. “How many trips today, Robbie?”
“Six—three up, three down. You?”
“Five.” Turning to me he offers his hand. “That your ski boat, is it?”
“In a manner of speaking. I brought it in from Kismayo. Doesn’t look like it’s the right boat for the job.”
“No, it doesn’t really.” His boxy red runabout tethered to a bush seems ideal: higher freeboard and lying not as deep in the water. The draft of my go-fast with a planing V-hull may not permit me to get too close to the supply tents. I hope I can get help lugging full jerry cans of fuel and the fifty-kilo bags of supplies, more than a hundred pounds each, through the mud.
“Tea, Robbie?” David asks.
“Well, of course, old chap. It is usually your job, you know, but I forced myself since you were on another perilous mission. Did it go well?”
“No problems. Managed to avoid a small crocodile.” David withdraws a red bandanna from his back pocket, wipes his brow, and gazes hard at the edge of creeping water. “You know, Robbie, I believe the river is still rising.”
“Oh, no, it just can’t, David. I was just telling our new American friend that it couldn’t possibly. We do live here.”
“I don’t think that matters very much, Robbie.”
“Well, it certainly matters to me, David.”
This sententious banter is the form through which these two, evidently very close friends, communicate. The antiquated style of stereotypical English, I am to discover later, is also the manner of speech of many of those white Kenyans whose ancestors, sons of the English aristocracy, colonized the nation at the turn of the century. Robbie natters like a woman of the landed gentry playing whist, and David responds like a quiet husband who never takes his wife very seriously. He is the straight man. It is a routine that apparently has been well practiced over the years, a competitive and playful verbosity that keeps matters from becoming too serious.
In the course of introduction and small talk, David reveals that he is a fourth-generation Kenyan of Irish descent. When Kenya was still British territory, he started a survey business charting frontiers as well as boundaries for wildlife parks and game reserves. He makes it quite clear that he is not Irish and certainly not British: He is a white Kenyan. Robin interrupts that despite these depravities, his partner has somehow managed to learn the difference between a rutting hippo and a love-struck rhino. David’s darkened leathery skin, a victim of years under the tropic sun, attests to his lifetime in the bush.
Both David and Robbie appear to be the quintessential “Kenya cowboys,” those frontier types who feel just as comfortable in the bush as on the streets of Nairobi. Fluent in Kiswahili, they are not long-standing expatriates but in fact are Kenyans, regarded as just another tribe, one with its own strange codes and rituals but African nonetheless. While many are sent to England for their education, most return to the family business or to the interior, where through the generations their families owned or managed huge coffee, tea, and sisal plantations.
The younger Robin, the self-appointed grand seigneur of our estate here on this part of the Jubba, keeps the records and reports to the office in Nairobi the daily tally of the supplies delivered. I cannot help but wonder if he has not already tried to organize a cricket team among the Somalis.
“I’ve suggested to J-B that he put his tent next to yours, David. Improve the neighborhood, I should imagine.”
“Yes, I think the neighborhood could use some improvement, Robbie.”
Robin sleeps on the same ratty mattress he says he carries with him on safari. It looks moth-eaten but it is clean enough for him. Like a child’s tattered security blanket. Whatever critters reside therein, at least they are his own. He sleeps in public view under a large mosquito net strung from pole to pole.
I set up my tent nearby on a small patch of dry ground next to David’s. His old dirt-brown tent, stained, frayed, and repaired with duct tape, looks like it has seen a thousand bush camps. It is about the same size as mine, a little two-man affair. My tent still boasts the store-bought sheen of a greenhorn. It is not mine; carrying a tent across oceans in a boat is unusual—the boat is tent enough. The German owner of a fishing club in Kilifi loaned it on the condition that I ask the UN people in Nairobi if there was work for him during his off-season. I asked. They laughed. You want the job, you come get it. We don’t call you.
The humorous tweaking between the two old friends is a blessed relief; they seem to find humor in most of what they discuss. I take long healthy sighs, breathe the air that is free of tension, fear, and the threat of violence. We sit around the gas camp-stove cooker. David chops onions into some packages of Chinese noodle soup.
I step out into the dark for a pee. The soft glow from the many cooking fires illumines a strange night scene: The fires line the edge of the strip like a row of landing lights; their smoke floats low over the camp like a gentle blanket. The hundred or so locals who off-loaded the aircraft sleep under mosquito nets on army-issue-type cots on the side of the runway. Their murmuring voices create a gentle current under the din of strange night sounds from outside the base. Stars and a thin slice of moon reflect on the still water at my feet as motes of dancing light: Orion, the constellation, sprawls across the sky overhead, and down to the northwest, the Pleiades, the cluster of seven sisters. The Southern Cross leans on its side just above the horizon. Fresh out of Kismayo, it is as close to the heavens as this earthbound mortal can ever hope to get.
I can’t walk far; there is not much land left. At the rate the water is rising, it might reach us sometime tonight. The last dry land then will be the edges of the strip and the strip itself. Landing a cargo flight here on this shrinking airfield should test the best of them.
The mosquitoes in Kismayo were a nuisance, but here they are pestilential. At dusk they arrived at the camp as clouds and attacked as a swarm. I have no Somali kikoi, that light cotton sarong that the workers and Robin wear during their off-hours, but I did bring a pair of Thai fisherman’s trousers, baggy loose-fitting pants held up by cinching the waistband and folding it back upon itself. Despite the bug dope and long-sleeve shirts, the mosquitoes still manage to needle through. I have seen what malaria can do and I don’t fancy a case of it.
“Now, do tell David and me everything you can about Kismayo,” Robin says. “Our little outing is quite a change, I should imagine.”
I am eager to talk. I begin with the pirates on the wharf and intend to tell about the child at the roadblock, the dying baby, and the shooting of the airplane, and I begin to lose my audience. They are not much interested, and although both make pretenses of being fascinated, David’s eyes grow heavy and he wants to sleep. Robbie’s attention is wandering, I suspect more from some solipsistic affliction than from the telling. Maybe it cannot be told. Maybe it shouldn’t be.
Sitting in a lotus position inside my tent, sipping a warm beer, I listen, revel in the peace. This is not a Kismayo silence, a silence of suspension, nerves open, alert, tense, ready to spring, ready to dive for cover, broken by the rattle of automatics. This is a sound of nature, a tender scherzo of frog croaks and cicada scratches.
A sudden unexpected grunt, loud and impatient from within the grass next to us, makes my back hairs stand. “What the hell was that?” David’s tent is so close that I can hear him rustling inside.
“Warthogs.”
“Dangerous?”
“Sometimes.”
The ratchetlike chatter from the cicadas comes in waves, softly at first, then reaching a volume that briefly overwhelms all conversation. They fall abruptly silent, then tentatively begin again, reaching a drawn-out crescendo; the wave collapses upon itself and the silence is sudden, total. During the intermission a slough of a breeze and the delicate piddling of the water as it laps the shore only a foot or so from the tent create a soothing berceuse. I lie in relative peace, feeling safer inside this flimsy shelter than I did behind the walled fortress of the UN quarters in Kismayo. Yet I am mindful of those who remain. What will become of them? In my mind’s eye I see them going about their jobs, bouncing like pinballs from crisis to crisis. Blood money and the number of camels now seem so absurd, so otherworldly. I must not forget them, I should be concerned for them, and for a fleeting moment I am and then I sleep.