THE PEACE I felt as I knocked back that can of beer, absorbing the gentleness of the moment, was not the peace I experienced in my sleep. Inside my dream, I relived the events at Harun’s home. The buildup to the final insult is painfully slow, fleshed out, filled with portent. For I sensed, knew what was coming. Harun slapped her. And slapped her again and that frightful sound woke me. I sat bolt upright in the darkness.
A frog jumps onto my tent: Slap! It loses its grip and slides off with a splash. The tent is one of the few dry spots; the frogs regard it as an island, and clinging tenaciously, they are taking refuge on it. The roof sags under their weight and I punch it from beneath, sending them flying into the water.
The stars dance on the sparkling surface of sea that is at my door. The four-inch rubberized strip above the floor holds back the flood, but it won’t be long before the water pours in over the top. The river is here. Surrounded, it is a sensation of being adrift on a life raft. Across the compound, the breeze ruffles the water under the canopied cots upon which the Somalis sleep.
“Good God!” Sounds like Robbie.
I crawl out naked and barefoot and stand surveying the rising water. Robbie is sitting up under his net, a bit dazed, looking puzzled. Water is lapping at his mattress, soaking it through.
“Morning, J-B. I say, David,” Robbie calls over quietly. His tone is now one of mild interest. “Do you feel like you’re living in an aquarium?”
A clear voice responds from within the old tent. “Should I, Robbie?”
“I should say so. Take a look outside.”
The tent flap opens and David’s stubbled face pokes through the opening, his white hair splayed in every direction. “I thought it was something of a wet dream, Robbie.”
“This is no time for levity, David. For God’s sakes, man, we’re sinking!”
“Shall we bail?”
“I shouldn’t think it would do much good. Perhaps it’s time to shift our homes elsewhere. Then perhaps a predawn cup of tea.”
Do people really talk like this? Why weren’t these jokers in Kismayo where we really needed the relief?
The process of moving is surreal. Through dark tones and tenebrous colors, ghostly figures rise from their sleep and look around in dismay at the shimmering water that ripples under them. In the dim light of the partial moon, with voices deep and hushed, shadowy Somalis with the movement of sleepwalkers carry armfuls of personal gear through the gloom, a dark-time shuffle accompanied by the laughter of frogs and cicadas.
The three of us sit together on the dirt alongside the runway, looking out upon the destruction. A few workmen sit beside us, finger-eating bowls of cold ugali. The sun is not quite up and lightning flashes to the northwest. David’s blackened kettle steams atop the small gas canister stove at our feet. We are surrounded by water; rubbish floats upon it like flotsam from a sunken ship. Something is skewed here—we are becoming those we are here to help.
The Somalis start removing the old warehouse shelter and re-creating it on the berm alongside the strip. After tea we will have to set up a new home for ourselves. It will be close quarters, bundled together on the end of the strip.
“Our backs are to the shag, gents,” Robbie says quietly.
He sweeps his hand over the endless miles of uninhabitable scrubland behind us. “British administrative term.”
Staring at the water that eats away at our feet proffers a curious sensation: The almighty power of man is impotent here. The Somalis with all their weaponry are powerless to stop the work of nature; they cannot shoot guns at the rising floodwater that drives them from their homes and expect it to obey. Watching the river chase us onto the runway is comparable to the sensation of the helplessness when the ground begins to vibrate with the first movement of an earthquake or when finding oneself at the mercy of a cyclone at sea. Nature does what it does. Sometimes it is healthy to be so reminded.
* * *
Those red flat-bottom eighteen-foot motorboats that Robbie and David drive are nearly perfect for the job. Each is powered by a Yamaha 40; they scoot right along. Comparing mine to theirs is like comparing a Maserati to a Datsun; with its sleek lines and shiny metallic blue hull—the cartoon faces long ago removed—I feel I have come to the party overdressed.
Driving my little go-fast loaded with supplies on fast-moving floodwater is not like tooling around Kismayo Bay. All our boats were designed for waterskiing and are tender and unstable when loaded, but mine, with its V-hull, is the least steady, as I discover during my first delivery.
My passengers are two village elders, dignified older men dressed in clean but threadbare shirts and trousers. In the absence of a formal government authority, it is the elder who administers the day-to-day affairs of the community. Joining the trip are two small children belonging to one of them and a couple of boy soldiers with their AK-47s, and they are all quick to get in. The children lend an air of excitement, as if we are going on an outing. We have been loaded with twelve fifty-kilo bags of maize, an assortment of blankets, and cartons of the Humanitarian Daily Rations. With only a few inches of the sides of the boat above the surface, I am worried. Yet David’s was similarly packed and looked as fragile, so I say nothing. I am the last one to board and I can’t move it—it sits solidly in the mud. We could just wait it out; the rising waters will float it eventually. However, some of the nearby workmen push it through the razor grass until it is free and pointed in the right direction, down what is known as the airport road.
Mounting the boat without spilling passengers and goods is difficult. As I crawl aboard, a strong current begins to sweep the boat downstream toward a half-submerged thorn tree. The groping fingers of the thorny branches beckon us closer into their clutches—we are about to be made a pincushion. Frantic, I try to start the engine. The startled eyes of my passengers turn to me with one common question: How are you going to stop us from getting hurt? One of the boys, holding his assault rifle by the barrel, tries to fend off the tree. The engine finally kicks in just in time for the thorns to miss the children and the elders sitting atop the supplies in the front. The guards move quickly out of the way, but I am at the wheel and cannot move and drive at the same time. The spiky tree claws at my exposed skin. I don’t feel the sting; I feel stupid. I know now the engine should have been running before we pushed the boat into the stream. I’d considered that, but I didn’t like the idea of starting it while I was still in the water. This was the way I saw David do it.
We were to follow David on this first trip, but he has disappeared—not an auspicious beginning. David is used to these little boats, apparently, having one or two of them at their river safari camp. I have never driven a wobbly overloaded boat with nervous, shifting passengers down a narrow winding road, through conflicting currents, lifting overfalls, and surrounded on each side by the gnarly fingers of twisted and broken trees. To maintain steerageway I have to keep us powered up to at least fifteen knots, dangerously fast considering our low freeboard (the distance between the water’s surface and the top of the sides). We are too loaded to rise to a plane, so we plow through the water, pushing out a large rolling wake. I am driving by the seat of my pants.
There is no chart to follow, not even a road map. But I was told how to get to the village: Drive down the airport road, then through the fourth break of the partially submerged hedgerow on the left (the breaks all look the same), past the big neem tree across from some protruding steel fence posts, across a field, which is about six feet underwater, but careful to avoid some sunken irrigation pipes that are near the two banana trees—those pipes will tear the bottom out if struck—through a copse of mango trees, diagonally across another field, under the long broken overhead line of irrigation pipes, then—careful again—a quick sharp left turn up the fast-moving waters of the canal, and then right at the white water that pours over a submerged bridge. Now you will be in the main irrigation canal. However, some of the landmarks may no longer be there, either washed away or submerged during the night. “Take care in the backwaters,” David had warned as his parting words. “Hippos like the quiet water.”
With David out of sight, I expect to be able to rely on the young gunmen and the elders for directions, all of whom assume I know where I’m going and how to get there. I try to ask for some directions in my kitchen Somali but am ignored. After a wrong turn, one of the puckered elders—he has no teeth—turns angrily and begins jabbering and pointing this way and that. His tirade is interrupted by a sudden jarring crunch that kicks the engine out of the water. The spinning propeller screams. We have hit the roof of a house. The current grabs us and sends us backward, spinning us in a vortex. I throw the transmission into neutral, then turn to the big engine behind me and bear-hug the thing back into the water. We are under way again, but I am shaking.
“Diep maleh! Diep maleh!” I say lightly. I am the pilot reassuring my passengers. They look up with suspicion. In the distance, the thumping of the rotors of the Mi-8 grows louder, apparently on the way to the base with another delivery.
The villagers on the dike about a hundred yards to the left, alerted by the sound of the outboard, begin massing before their temporary homes of plastic and poles and sticks and random cloth. These are the people I am here to help, those without potable water, food, or much adequate shelter. Spotting the boat, they begin yelling, waving pieces of rags, trying to attract my attention. Small children run excitedly up and down the dike. That, I think, is where we are headed, but we cannot get there directly; if we could go in a straight line we would be there in minutes. It will take another twenty minutes of this exhausting wrestle with an unresponsive overloaded boat in a current that attempts to spill us.
We never make it to the village. Two figures on the far side of the submerged field appear to be sitting on the water, perhaps on an island, and one is hailing us. I throttle down the engine and approach very slowly. A boy on a disintegrating polystyrene raft struggles to hold on to a bush to keep from being swept downstream. His passenger is a frail old man in a mud-covered djellaba who sits cross-legged at his feet, his possessions in a plaited basket in his lap. His silvery goatee is stained with drying blood and he is bleeding from the nose and ears. As the boy squawks a greeting and appeal, the old man slowly raises his canceled eyes.
Despite the muffled protests of the elders—I wonder if they would have me leave these two and continue the delivery?—I tie a rope to a nearby upstream bush and pay out the line until we are next to the raft. I order my passengers not to move; a little imbalance could overturn us. I reach over and lift the old man. He is merely a bundle of bones and loose skin. His fingers clamp on to my arms and dig into my skin like talons on a field snake. He communicates briefly through frightened clouded eyes, seeking less my physical help than some reassurance. As I haul him up and over the side of the boat, his body begins to convulse and he vomits blood—over himself, onto the white foam raft below, and over my hands. I am paralyzed. I freeze. There is an explosive movement of bowels and a terrible smell. My passengers are all shouting at once, angrily, but I jerk him onto the one unoccupied space available, atop some thick woolen blankets. My guards have scurried away to the front of the boat.
I scrub my hands desperately in the floodwater, put the boat in gear, and return to Marerey Base. The old man lies brokenly, his white robe soiled with color. Back at camp, the Mi-8 has landed by the water’s edge on the airstrip and is being off-loaded. I am almost able to run the boat up to the helicopter’s ramp.
Interesting, the expressions of disgust on the faces of the Somalis as they lift the stained and nearly lifeless human off the boat into the interior of the chopper—as if they haven’t gotten used to spilled blood by now. With some luck he will be alive by the time he arrives at the MSF hospital in Kismayo. But not likely.
“What do we have here?” Robbie stands by the chopper, his arms crossed like an inspecting sergeant major. “Rather messy business.”
“Bleeding from everywhere. Don’t suppose he has AIDS, do you?”
“At his age? Probably not. Though you might get yourself checked, old fellow. I’d say Rift Valley Fever, by the look of it. Or Ebola. Some sort of hemorrhagic fever, certainly. Surprised it is here in Somalia, though.”
“Infectious?”
“Don’t think anyone knows. Get it from flies or mosquitoes, I hear.”
Africa is the breeding ground of a number of mysterious infectious viruses, and new unidentified strains crop up with frightening regularity. (HIV/AIDS, which kills three million people each year worldwide, is thought to have originated in west-central Africa when an isolated tribe ate infected chimpanzee meat.)
Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers (VHF), and this is probably one of them, are some of the least understood diseases and the most difficult to control. According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, they affect the body’s organs and vascular system. While some types of hemorrhagic fever viruses can cause relatively mild illnesses, many trigger diseases that are contagious and particularly deadly.
It is not surprising that out here, where cholera, malaria, dengue fever, typhus, and other diseases are widespread, especially during the floods, locals pick up the virus. There are enough transmitters. According to the CDC, humans get hemorrhagic fevers by coming in contact with urine, fecal matter, saliva, or other body excretions from infected rodents as well as from bites of mosquitoes and ticks. Initial symptoms include fever, fatigue, dizziness, muscle aches, loss of strength, and exhaustion, and those with severe cases bleed under the skin and from the mouth, eyes, or ears. It is not the loss of blood that causes death but shock, nervous-system malfunction, coma, delirium, kidney failure, and seizures.
“Very little one can do, you know,” Robbie says. Noticing the thorn slashes on my arm: “Missed the turnoff?”
“You might say. Shouldn’t we have gloves when we handle people like that?”
“Probably. Oh, Yusuf has other plans for you now. Needs a boat with the bigger engine—he wants you to go downriver. Your supplies are being loaded onto mine. I think he wants you to take him to Gadudey. Cheers,” he says, and returns to his own boat.
A torrential downpour rolls across the camp and my instinct is to seek shelter, but no one else seems to notice. Within less than a minute, the few clothes I wear are soaked. I raise my face to the rain and I feel at least partially cleansed. Still, I cannot wash out a feeling of revulsion.
If there is a headman at Marerey Base, it is Yusuf, the link to the elders of the nearby villages. Dressed almost always in a long-sleeve black shirt, black trousers, and muddy running shoes, Yusuf is sophisticated and well mannered. A member of the feared Marehan clan, he is one of those I was warned about in Kismayo, but he seems anything but cruel, murderous, bloodthirsty, or crazy. I would have thought there would be some noticeable cultural difference between the Somalis in Kismayo and those of this area. Yet these people, the sworn enemy, speak the same language and worship the same god, look the same, act pretty much the same. Before the factional divisions of the grubbing warlords, when there was a government, Somalis traveled from village to village, from clan to clan, visiting kin without shooting or being shot at. It would not be unusual for many on both sides of what is now the Green Line to be related by blood. More than a simple two-sided civil war, it is a conflict of subclan against sub-subclan, village against village, family against family, brother against brother—between hundreds of factions with little cause and limited purpose. Adding to the confusion of alliances, yesterday’s enemy often becomes today’s ally. Subclan militias will switch allegiances for as little as an insult or for the proceeds from a qat delivery. It is often difficult to know who the enemy is at any given time. Anarchy seems to be the result.
Yusuf approaches the boat, seems to have been reading my thoughts.
“You were very lucky to get out of Kismayo alive, my American friend.”
“I know, Yusuf.”
“General Morgan is a very crazy man—the Majerteen are all crazy. They kill for sport.”
“I think they feel the same way about you, the Marehan.”
“But we have the history. Kismayo was once our home. General Morgan wants to control all of Somalia. He is not to be trusted.”
“But you are both Darood clan. You are brothers.”
“Once we were brothers. Never again.”
* * *
My boat has been loaded with a few sacks of maize meal and flour and boxes of BP-5—dried, unappetizing compressed biscuits that the WFP distributes during the first days of an acute emergency where cooking is difficult. Each BP-5 tablet contains 458 kilo-calories (a unit used by nutritionists to characterize the energy-producing potential in food) and is fortified with protein, fat, and carbohydrate, vitamins and minerals. Six of these unpalatable tablets, according to the WFP, will provide one starving person enough for the “short-term maintenance of a healthy body.” All the moisture has been removed from the biscuit, and the bars look like cardboard and taste like cardboard. According to the manufacturer, CompactAS of Norway, these things must be eaten slowly and chewed well, and for children they can be turned into porridge by dissolving in boiling water. Basically a survival ration, the biscuit is packed in foil that is moisture-proof and resistant to germs, insects, and rodents; a ton of them costs about $3,000.
This voyage has its own particular nasty stretches. We travel fully loaded with different supplies and different village officials, and at the end of the airport road I am directed south on the wide irrigation canal. As the flood pours down the Jubba on its last twenty miles to the ocean, the current is so strong that I must travel much faster just to maintain control, and at times we reach a thrilling but incautious fifty knots. I feel I have about as much control as I would have trying to control a raft with a broken paddle down the white water of a Rocky Mountain river in the spring. We wind our way over an invisible route that Yusuf seems to know intimately. I am not unused to trailblazing or sailing through uncharted waters, but to me every towering mango tree, every torn and rusty pipe poking out of the water, every isolated island looks pretty much like all the others. I have a small compass but it is useless; the river winds, turns, doubles back, and then disappears. The only certain direction is with the current.
A large earthen dike materializes out of the haze. It appears more solid than any of the others, and at least for now, it holds. Still, the flood has picked away at it, ripping great chunks off the embankment; portions of the dike crumble away like a calving glacier, and in places where it has been breached, torrents of muddy water pour through the breaks. There is a wide opening ahead and Yusuf signals me to drive through it. This is like driving down the Ventura Freeway at top speed and being told to turn into the exit that we are about to pass. It will be tricky. This overloaded, any attempt to steer and turn the boat into the current will set us broadside to the flow, and that could swamp us. We cannot go directly into the opening while flying at this speed, so I steer high and slow and try to make a wide swing. I misjudge it and nearly lose control. Aborting the turn, we are set downstream well beyond the entrance. There is no other way: I make a fast, sharp U-turn, and as we lie briefly broadside to the fast-moving current, water starts to pour in over the side. My passengers hold on with a death grip. I steady her just before we would have swamped. Nose finally into the stream, we barely move, but we are stable. Eventually we motor through the break in the dike into still water, toward the remains of a village on a slowly disappearing island.
“Whew!”
“There is much water now,” Yusuf says. “More difficult every time. You do well, my friend.” I am cheered by his confidence.
“A strong current, Yusuf. Next time I’ll know the entrance.”
He smiles genuinely, turns, and raises his face to the villagers waiting above us. This is a village that was originally some miles from the river but now is in the middle of it. We motor around the island to a small half-moon backwater. A crowd watches silently as I ease the bow onto the embankment. These are a different people, not like Yusuf or other Somalis but darker, smaller, less prognathous. They stand above in tiered ranks, ascending rows according to social position. Excitable little children in threadbare clothes, with bones that look as fragile as bird wings, splash in and out of the water’s edge at the bottom, pushing and shoving, daring but afraid to get too close to the strange craft and the strange-looking foreigner. It is evident by their curious eyes they are keen to touch the boat. Older boys and sullen teens stand behind and above them, arms crossed, saying nothing, watching; their eyes are on mine, sizing me up. The village women, clad in T-shirts and torn blouses and colorful kangas that wrap their particularly steatopygous bottoms, stand above them. Several hold rheumy-eyed infants in their arms, others breast-feed their little bundles. Only a few of the women wear chadors. The men rank them all and stand on the highest ground, looking down in a pose of communal authority.
“These are the Bantu,” Yusuf says. “Not Somalis.” I would find the matter-of-fact comment odd; was not everyone a Somali? Not to the indigenous Somalis, many of whom proudly trace their ancestry to the nomadic tribes of eastern Cushites who collected incense and myrrh for the pharaohs in the southern Ethiopian highlands. Somalis do not consider themselves African, not like the sub-Saharan Bantu, whom they treat little better than animals. The majority of Bantu are relative newcomers to Somalia, stolen in the nineteenth century from the shores of Mozambique and Tanzania and from the depths of Malawi and brought here on Arab slave ships. The Bantu are an animistic people, who still today tell time by the rising of the sun (their midnight coincides with six in the morning, local Western time). The Somalis, who have always derided the Bantu for their darker African color and wide features, often call them Jareer, meaning “thick hair.” (Naturalist and explorer Peter Matthiessen wrote that Bantu simply meant “people” and was used by scholars to describe a language family rather than an ethnic group.) Small-scale farmers or laborers of the Somali heartland, they have been persecuted and marginalized and kept outside the system of clan alliances and protection. More commonly, indigenous Somalis call the people of the Bantu Adoon—slave.
In 1999, the United States officially recognized the Bantu as a persecuted people, and in the largest resettlement program since the Vietnam War, the U.S. offered asylum to about thirteen thousand who had fled the civil war to refugee camps in Kenya. Life in the squalid camps where they lived for more than a decade was not much better. Even there, indigenous Somalis, waiting for peace to return to Somalia, treated them as second-class citizens and many Bantu were victims of violence, starvation, disease, and death of newborns.
The refugees were flown to fifty cities throughout the U.S. Many suffered from the traumas of readjustment, isolation, and the startling change in culture. For most, their voyage of thousands of miles had less impact than their passage through time. Denied access to education and jobs in Somalia, most Bantu were illiterate; they had never turned on a light switch or ever seen a telephone. They had to be taught how to tell time the Western way, how to be punctual, how to flush a toilet. Before their flight to the U.S., many had never seen an airplane except for the mysterious white streaks that sliced across the sky above them.
Ten Christian relief organizations had been charged with helping the Bantu integrate into American society. Churches throughout the U.S. sponsored families at a cost of about $5,000 per family of four to help cover rent, medical care, and start-up costs like dishes and diapers. Local community volunteers took the new immigrants to grocery stores, doctors, and on field trips, easing them into modern American life. After one year in the U.S. the Somali Bantu were to be granted permanent residency, and after five years they were to be eligible for U.S. citizenship.
State Department officials responsible for refugees reported that the resettled Bantu assimilated well and were generally regarded as hard workers; many took part in community affairs and their children often excelled at their studies. More than half found some form of work within six months.
While thousands of Bantu had been accepted into the Promised Land, more than a million Bantu (and another million of other minorities) remain in Somalia. Today many of those continue to be held as slaves. According to the State Department, they are part of the estimated four million people bought or otherwise treated as slaves globally each year. Human-rights advocates say that there are more slaves in the world today than there were during the entire four hundred years of the transatlantic trade.
“These people have no more place to go,” Yusuf says. He lowers his eyes to the rising flood. “Inshah Allah, the water will come no further.”
The crowd parts, and he and my passengers disappear over the ridge. The villagers close up quickly, swallowing any traces of those I ferried, and now I feel eerily alone under their critical silent stare.
This is my first village, and it is momentarily disconcerting. My instant reaction is to confront the challenging looks. I am not so stupid.
“Subah wanaqsan! Subah wanaqsan!” My attempt is greeted by giggles, mostly from the older girls and women. Some children respond with delighted squeals. They grow bolder and approach the boat.
The villagers are beginning to prattle among themselves, pointing down in my direction, a sign I would like to think indicates that they are accepting my presence. Is it my machine that attracts their fascination? I rather suspect it is the older long-haired white man with the cutoffs, sleeveless T-shirt, and baseball cap that is such an oddity. Some of the younger men timidly ask me questions in Somali, and I only shrug. Yusuf returns and works his way back through the crowd and shouts from above to join him in the village. After climbing the slippery hillside, I find myself pressed in by the villagers. The older girls—some toothless, some with perfect white teeth, some with curly Bantu hair, others with long black hair and Somali faces—smile and, if I didn’t know any better, flirt. The men stand off and speak among themselves appraising me—with wonder, with compliments, with derision. It is all babble. A scruffy little boy with crossed almond-shaped eyes and shredded clothes stands before me and with a stern little face demands something. I shrug and continue onward, and the crowd parts. Some children dart in and dart out of my walking circle, like children chasing sprinkler water on a suburban lawn. Yusuf takes my hand and leads me through the crowd.
The little boy tries to imitate my strange gait, my poor posture, the swing of my arms. He is mocking me and the villagers laugh. I stop, turn suddenly, and make some silly face, and he scrabbles away with a shriek. There is plenty of laughter and it appears to be good-natured. Yet some of the older eyes in the crowd watch me carefully.
Our procession leads to a square encircled by mud-daub and brick buildings of thatch and metal roofs. Village life, it appears, continues apace, and those who were not curious enough to see our arrival go about their business: Women balance on their heads bundles of wood, buckets of water, sacks of charcoal; some sweep the packed red dirt in front of their buildings with brooms of twigs; men and boys who once tended the fields and livestock squat on their haunches or lean lazily against the building corners, waiting for the water to go away. A few open stalls serve as community shops; other than some mangoes and stringy roots, the shelves are bare. The village boasts a hotel. At least the faded sign above the open-fronted whitewashed building proclaims in English it is one: THE SANGA HOTEL. A few thin mattresses lie scattered across the dirt floor inside. Under a palm tree, four large black ravenlike birds with white necks squabble over some meager pickings. A scrawny, almost featherless chicken pecks at the dirt.
Yusuf suggests the shade under one of the two large mango trees near the building of his meeting, and I sit back against one, looking up at the surrounding villagers looking down at me. Yusuf’s business with the local officials does not concern me. Here I am only a boat driver, and it is wonderful to have so little responsibility.
“You!” I beckon to the little boy who has been dogging me since the boat. He appears to be the town clown or its mascot. “Come!”
He turns to the crowd for support, which offers none, then back to me. Leaving the protection of the others, he cautiously starts to advance. Slowly, in the crouch of the stealthy, he comes closer, poised to bolt. The villagers go quiet. One of the older children runs up to the boy and cruelly pushes him toward me, and the boy screams in fright and disappears into the safety of the crowd and I laugh. The villagers laugh. Emerging from between two very wide women, he looks up with those queer, crossed but beautiful dark eyes and comes forward. Getting slowly to my feet lest I spook this skittish little mustang, I hold out my hand and he darts sideways like a crab on a hot beach. With a mixture of fear, caution, and bravado and urged on by the other boys, he starts to return. Like a clown, he exaggerates every move, every sneaking step. This seems like a lot of work, but we have the time. Rising from a slouch, then more confidently, chest out, chin high, and proud, he stands before me.
I take his hand. “Give me five!” and go through the routine. He is quick to learn, and after only two attempts we are slapping hands and shaking our butts in front of the dumbfounded villagers. They are delighted and cheer at the final bump/grind. Some of the mothers push their reluctant children toward me for a lesson. Soon a mob of children gathers round, all wanting to give me five.
Yusuf comes quietly through the crowd and stands unnoticed while I teach some of the youngsters.
“Chanti kan.” He smiles. “I have seen that on television from America. Chanti kan—how you Americans say, high five.”
I offer to slap hands and shake butts, but he declines. Yusuf is a regional leader with responsibility and stature. He would never be seen making a fool of himself. When Somalia gets a government, I suspect he will run for office.