THE CHATTER OF frogs, the twitter from early birds, the muffled voices of men rising, and the tinny sounds of David’s little short-wave radio confer within the darkness of my tent a peace that I still cannot accept. Despite the trips yesterday upriver, downriver, and a growing knowledge that I may be doing something worthwhile finally, I cannot unload Kismayo; it is baggage I cannot abandon simply because I am elsewhere.
“Excellent, David! Excellent,” Robbie calls out. “Let’s have some news, shall we?”
The BBC Africa Service is telling its listeners about the devastation in Somalia. Some official interviewed is predicting hundreds of thousands will die unless Unicef and the WFP receive more contributions for the flood emergency efforts. I suppose we should be pleased to know that someone realizes there is a crisis and that relief workers are out here. It is a small feeling; we know that few are really interested, and I am too corroded to care. But Robbie, ever offering his insight, opines from under his net: “Yes, right. Quite right.”
I have to take a shit. I had held back yesterday because I did not know the routine, but I cannot wait around to be told. It is a fast hands-on lesson. During nonworking hours many of the men wear cotton kikoi around their waists instead of trousers or short pants. Clad like this, it is quite simple. They wade off into the current until nearly knee deep, hoist up their skirts, and squat. There are no thoughts of privacy and apparently no need for it. It will take me a little time to feel comfortable enough to join them at the communal toilet, so at the boat, which is further away, I mount the boarding ladder, hold on to the rail, and hunker down.
David has put the kettle on for tea and my instant coffee when I return.
“Pour some more water in the kettle, John, there’s a good chap,” Robbie says.
“This stuff?” I say, indicating a nearby plastic bottle filled with murky water.
“Yes. It’s perfectly all right to drink even though it is the local brew.”
“Floodwater?”
“Certainly. As long as the water is moving, there is no risk at all. Quite pure, you see.”
“Don’t you sterilize it or put chlorine in it?”
“No need to. We let it sit, wait for the dirt to settle, and then drink it. We’ve never gotten sick from it, have we, David?”
“No, Robbie.”
I shrug.
“We are experienced bush wallahs, you know. Or certainly David is. I am merely a wallah.”
Not quite sure what a wallah is, but I doubt Robbie is precisely that. He is, however, someone who might have been at home a hundred years ago as the educated adventurer with pith helmet, swagger stick, and a line of natives carrying boxes of Geographic Society equipment on their heads through dense unexplored jungle.
“Looking steamy, guys,” he says. “God, the miseries of hell. So let us have tea before we disappear into this watery wilderness.”
My trip upriver to Hargeisa (not to be confused with the city of the same name in the northwest bombed by General Morgan), the village I never got to yesterday, is less eventful than the first attempt. Apparently it is not uncommon to clip a submerged roof, a tree, or an irrigation pipe on these delivery runs. It was in one of these fields that Robbie claims he made hamburger of a floating corpse on his very first trip. How long can these boats last? Without equipment and spares, our part of the operation will come to an undignified halt if, when peeling the top off a submerged roof, we lose a propeller. The engines tilt forward and this gives us a chance to inspect the props; already the prop on my boat is well nicked, chewed, and a little bent. David’s metal file and a pair of pliers seem to keep her spinning smoothly enough.
Some of Hargeisa remains above water, at least enough to see that it was once a large settlement. On the riverside where the water is deeper, the houses are submerged, and as we approach—thunk!—the engine kicks out of the water. I have struck something metallic, a car or a farm implement or irrigation pipe; who the hell knows? Once the engine is back in the water, the vibration from the bent prop is irritatingly obvious.
Toward higher ground, the buildings rise out of the water in progression, and it is now possible to drive down the clearly defined streets toward dry ground. At the edge of the shoreline, a family is removing the last of their mean possessions from their partially submerged mud-brick home, handing what is left down a line of neighbors who stack it on the bank. The river is pinching this town on all sides, a disappearing island of mud; the roads that once connected it to other villages in the region disappeared long ago under the flood. Hargeisa is a write-off. Soon it will be submerged. Most of the residents have evacuated, forming crowded makeshift communities on crumbling patches of nearby dike.
My arrival here sparks the same reaction that it did in Gadudey: giggles, comments, curiosity. I pull up to the village like Santa Claus on his metal steed. I am guaranteed to amuse. Instead of a “ho ho ho” with a bag of goodies over my shoulder, I shout, Subah wanaqsan! Diep maleh! Diep maleh! and toss down boxes and sacks of emergency supplies to village youths helping to unload. I spend every Somali word I know. While the adults stand on the higher bank, silent and watchful, the children below are eager to interact, to talk, even to teach me Somali. They want to learn English in return. They are starved for knowledge. Like children.
“Setih?” How are you? I shout.
“Ficaan! Ficaan!” Good! Good! the children respond.
A little girl with tangled hair and a torn mud-stained dress wades boldly up to the boat and with doleful eyes says quietly, “Bia mehisa? Bia?” A teenager standing nearby at the edge of the flood offers, “Water—to drink—no water to drink.” I will try to find a jerry can back at the base and fill it. It is the water we drink, almost the same sludge water they stand in.
It is not clear how much my deliveries help these people. Before these low-yield efforts, they subsisted only on mangoes and water-lily roots. We have heard the WFP is delivering eleven hundred tons of emergency food—biscuits, Humanitarian Daily Rations, flour, maize—enough food to feed a hundred thousand people for a month. I see no evidence of that. Perhaps those Herculean efforts occur upstream. In this area alone, there are an estimated fifty-six thousand people to feed. My boat is so small that a dozen trips a day may help, but only three or four seem to do no more than boost their morale and let them know that outside their world, their sunken villages, someone gives a damn. We should be airlifting supplies with that big Russian helicopter, but when I ask Yusuf why this isn’t being done, he just looks at me with his soft sad eyes and says he has asked. Can’t do more than that. Our success seems so insignificant.
* * *
David and I arrive back at the base camp at about the same time, he from upriver and I from the river south. While we are being loaded for another run, I remark that it is gratifying to feel like I might be doing something worthwhile instead of ducking bullets and worrying about my own skin. “Although I am still not sure that we are making much of a difference.”
“You make more of a difference than you realize. These people won’t forget what we are doing.” I am too much of a cynic and find that hard to believe.
We carry the conversation toward the fuel drums, where Robbie is pumping gasoline into a jerry can.
On the way, we pass a figure in a dark chador who sits cross-legged on a wool blanket under a tree near the supply tent, a round woven basket at her side. With just her eyes showing through the crack in her veil, she stares out into the scrub beyond, immobile, like a stone. She may have always been there, but I had never noticed her. She must have arrived in the night.
David is saying that he always signs up whenever there is a humanitarian crisis. “It is for the money certainly, but it is also because of a debt. All of this is my country, from here to Zaire. I have lived here all my life, know no other land. No, there is nothing wrong about wanting to serve your fellow man and save a few lives in the bargain. It is not just for our own satisfaction that we might be saving a life or two. There’s something more profound. You could feel it one day.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“‘Save one life and you are saving the life of all mankind’—the Koran.”
“You Muslim?”
Robbie overhears the discussion and remarks, “Right, boys—that’s it! Enough of that altruistic poppycock. We are all here to fill the war chests, and let’s not deny it. It is also written: ‘Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.’ More to the point, I should imagine.”
It is a valid point. For the time I had spent in the field, it was still no clearer to me why anyone would want to become a relief worker. Back in the other world, I had heard of one humanitarian disaster and then another, heard appeals for aid, rock concerts for the starving, but I never really considered going out in the field and doing anything about it. Nor do I suspect many others are so inclined. Sitting comfortably away from the action and hearing about a remote humanitarian crisis, I doubt many perk up and say: By golly, I am going to go help someone. Yet there are thousands of relief workers risking their lives. They are out here for some reason.
I had a chat in 2003 with James T. Morris, the Executive Director of the WFP, and I asked him if he knew what motivated his people to go into the field. This soft-spoken Midwest industrialist was quite convinced that most of those entered aid work solely for the pleasure of helping others, serving mankind. I suggested that money, adventure, even sometimes the inability to survive in the mainstream could be primary motivating factors, but he demurred and, with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader, spoke of the “sacrifice and the commitment” of his employees. “You never feel better about yourself than when you are helping others,” he said. “They are remarkable people.” I wondered if I had felt any better about myself.
* * *
A small cargo plane makes a flyby, skims over the tented roofs, then touches down. We had been radioed to expect guests, and Robbie, who usually doesn’t move very fast, is up like a shot when the aircraft lands. With stiff gait he struts out to the airplane and waits for the doors to open, like a welcoming potentate with chest out and hands clasped behind his back. I once tried to keep up with him when the chopper landed, but it was no use. I would have had to run.
Robbie’s safari business makes it important for him to be at the forefront, where he might snare a client or two. I have nothing to gain from anyone here, and it is a relief to put a lid on the ego.
I have developed an attitude from Kismayo. I cannot think of anything worth competing for. I hope I take this away with me, an attitude of indifference, non-interest in anything other than what I am paid to do. Since I have always been too enthusiastic, childishly so to the point of occasionally irritating people (Andrew, not unkindly, told me I had the enthusiasm of a fifteen-year-old), I think this new look might be rather becoming.
Our visitors are from Nairobi: an agronomist, a marketing man, and a nutritionist from Unicef’s Food Security Assessment Unit armed with scales and height sticks. Our loquacious colleague who has undertaken the role of base spokesman proudly describes our operations and the area around us with the zeal of a real estate salesman describing the grounds of a château in Provence. Our guests wear dark sunglasses as they talk. I would presume they know enough to take them off when dealing with the village elders; communicating in this part of the world while wearing shades is very bad form.
David and I chauffeur the visitors to the emergency settlement of Marerey. The original village, located at the confluence of the main irrigation canal and the river not far from the airstrip, was one of the agricultural centers of the Jubbada Hoose region on the southern Jubba. Once, before the war, before the floods, time, money, and energy had been spent to make this village and its surrounding fields important to the region’s economy. That was before 1975. Under the Marxist regime of President Siad Barre, the lands were expropriated and the Bantu farmers forced to abandon their holdings—hundreds of mango trees, large fields of maize and underground crops—without compensation. Much of the area’s assets were distributed among the president’s cronies from the Marehan clan. With the overthrow of Barre, the rich agricultural region became just another territorial spoil for feuding warlords. The lines of broken aerial-irrigation pipes, vast cultivated fields, the shell-damaged cement walls of the fertilizer-storage buildings, the half-submerged ancient John Deere tractor lying on its side, the neatly planted lines of mango trees, the torn banana stalks poking out of the shallow sea, and even the twisted spires of the sugar factory are proud but pathetic indications of the importance of the area.
The entire town is underwater. The protecting system of dikes along the canal and river collapsed, submerging homes, mosques, and shops. Like Gadudey to the south, the villagers have sought refuge on top of a small section of dike that could go at any minute. We bring them tarpaulins, which they stretch over poles to keep the rain and sun off, but it is not much. We deliver bags of maize, their main staple, but who wants to live on gruel alone? They hunger for the small things—matches for a fire, a clean used T-shirt without holes, a piece of candy.
A few half-naked youngsters begin to unload the sacks of flour, Unimix, and maize meal. Many of the bags are gaily colored with the American flag, the clasped hands of friendship of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and, like the HDRs, the message: Gift of the People of the United States of America. I wonder if these illiterate villagers, so isolated from the affairs of the outside world, recognize the flag or can identify the origin of these rations—writing that is possibly no more decipherable to them than hieroglyphics. I wonder, too, if they might believe that the food is a gift from us, the relief workers.
I mentioned to Director Morris that in the field I had questioned whether those who received American aid knew or really cared where it came from. The United States donates more than half of the world’s total to feed the starving, $1.4 billion in 2003.
“It is important to see who cares about them, to know of the genuine goodness of the United States,” he said.
It is natural to accept that this brightly labeled foodstuff, the HDRs, and the tarp that covered the boat that I had delivered to the port in Kismayo should boast the national origin of these donations. On the other hand, was not such an obvious display of the national goodness a two-edged sword?
The global community marches into disaster areas with an international duty to intervene: to feed, to house, to heal. Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins sans Frontières and former UN administrator of postwar Kosovo, was one of the first to outline the doctrine of devoir d’ingérence. He also noted that such intervention comes with a price: “I believe in the right to intervene and people must recognize that humanitarian aid is political. A boat sent to rescue people is making an inherently political act.”
Were not those bags of lifesaving supplies with the colorful Stars and Stripes a political tool, a weapon in the battle of influence in the war of winning hearts and minds? I put the question to Director Morris.
“I know the President personally. I have spoken to him about this,” Morris said. “He told me that the U.S. will never use food as a political weapon.”
As we delivered those relief supplies decorated by the clasped hands of Uncle Sam, I had wondered vaguely if we could be identified with the donor. If, in Kouchner’s view, our work was a political act, then by extension were we not associating with a donor nation’s foreign policy? Thus, was not the professed neutrality of the UN and the neutrality of its humanitarian workers compromised?
Russ Ulrey, who had worked on the ill-fated 1992 famine relief mission in Mogadishu, echoed this apprehension:
“At the end of the day, Somalis know that aid agencies are funded by the U.S. We carry bags that have USA written all over them, but we say we are the UN, we are neutral, not the military. Yet we were funded by those with the guns. How do we separate ourselves from them? Damn good question.”
The answer to the question was offered years later by the administration of George W. Bush. The new canon of humanitarian assistance post 9/11 was clear: Aid workers should not separate themselves from United States policy. Addressing NGOs during Operation Enduring Freedom, the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell put paid to the notion that humanitarian work could ever be considered anything but a political act.
. . . just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGOs are out there serving and sacrificing on the front lines of freedom. . . . NGOs are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team. [We are] all committed to the same, singular purpose: to help every man and woman in the world who is in need, who is hungry, who is without hope, to help every one of them fill a belly, get a roof over their heads, educate their children, have hope.
To equate humanitarian organizations with an American combat team sent shivers through the international relief community. Had “combat team” not been uttered by a former general and one of the President’s good soldiers, one might have interpreted his intention to create not an alliance in a war but a force to combat the humanitarian ills that affected an oppressed people.
Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of USAID, the world’s most generous food aid donor, left no doubt how the administration felt when he told international humanitarian leaders that by receiving U.S. government money for their activities—and most of them do—they were in effect “an arm of the U.S. government.” At a speech at the InterAction Forum, the umbrella group for American humanitarian and development organizations, Natsios challenged relief workers to do a better job of promoting connections to the U.S. government or else he was going to personally “tear up their contracts” and find new partners.
Most humanitarian workers do not consider themselves arms of the U.S. government, nor, while on the job, do they associate themselves with any nation’s political or military policies. To be perceived in the eyes of locals as aligned with the donor nation often results in tragic consequences.
Such occurred in June 2004 when five relief workers of the unquestionably neutral Médecins sans Frontières were assassinated by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Three of those slain were doctors. A Taliban spokesman said they were killed for “working and espionage” for the U.S. After twenty-four years in the country, after saving countless lives during what had been the worst of times—Soviet oppression and Taliban restrictions—the MSF, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, pulled out. Kenny Gluck, Director of Operations for MSF/Holland, said the withdrawal was due in part to the American military’s use of humanitarian aid for “political and military motives.”
“Independent humanitarian action, which involves unarmed aid workers going into areas of conflict to provide aid, has become impossible,” Gluck said at the time. “The Americans are pretending that NGOs are with them fighting the war against terror, and they are not. That puts us in danger. We want to be relevant medically and irrelevant militarily and politically.” Gluck, an American, was himself held hostage for twenty-two days in a moldy root cellar in Chechnya because, in part, his unidentified kidnappers questioned MSF’s neutrality.
Some aid workers have suggested that all national labels and identifying origins be removed completely. As I deliver the bags of USAID-donated flour and maize, it is natural to wonder whether these people, wretched and desperate, pause to ask who is giving them this food. And why.
* * *
We off-load our visitors from Nairobi and wait under the broiling sun for them to take care of whatever it is they came for. David remarks that he suspects that the visitors—here for only a few hours—are sightseers on holiday wanting to see what suffering is all about.
I have been clowning with the children, yet despite my antics, I still feel privately a little uncomfortable. The adults, men mostly, stare directly at us without a word uttered. Each face seems to bear a message, a question, an answer. I look up at any one man and there he is, eyes drilling into me. Not with hostility but not without. I wouldn’t know. These people are unreadable.
“Half-devil and half-child,” David mutters.
“What was that?”
“Half-devil and half-child.” He looks up and grins:
“Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. . . .
“Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.”
As David recites the Kipling poem, his long ropy hands, with personalities of their own, dance with the verse, writhe, twist, probe the air as if palsied, reminding me of an old rocker’s finger gyrations during Woodstock. I am captivated and listen and watch in fascination every illustrated word. It is evident to the villagers that this is a performance, and they observe in silence.
An old man atop the embankment yells down to David and me and beckons. Because of the children hanging on to the gunnels, we are reluctant to leave the boat, but through sign language and gesture, some of the nearby adults who have been staring at us from above yell at the children to move away and indicate the boats should be safe.
At the top of the hill, we follow this silent ancient fellow into an open shack walled by a sheet of plastic. Turning to us, his shriveled face and tiny eyes constrict as he begins to scold us, gesticulating toward his open mouth. There is nothing I can do; I do not even have a BP-5 in my pocket. But a teenage boy interprets in surprisingly good English: “He says you stupid men. You do not bring water to drink.” The old man nods and breaks into a miraastained grin. He picks up a plastic bottle filled with off-colored water and hands it to David. “Can’t insult the gentleman,” David says. He takes a swig and passes the bottle to me. I expect a case of cholera in the morning.
Two other weathered men, nearly as old, sit upon a board laid across some cinder blocks nearby, observing us. A small, ornately carved meranti wood box rests, almost as a secret, between them. Leaning forward on their walking canes, they call us over.
“Shikamoo, Mzee,” one of them greets David. It is the traditional Kiswahili greeting to a man your senior and presumably the wiser. Does he really think David is older?
“Marehaba,” David returns.
They speak briefly in Swahili. One of the men affectionately pats the wood box. David’s eyes focus on the reliquary and he breaks into a wrinkled smile.
The other old man taps the ground in front of them, an order for us to squat on our haunches. Reverently, he lifts the lid of the little box and passes it before our noses. A strong odor, pungent and sweet, makes my eyes water. He pinches a black leafy powder and places it between his cheek and gums, nods to us to do the same.
The tobacco, initially puckeringly bitter then sweet, kicks the salivary glands into full gear. This is not like Skoal or Copenhagen—certainly less refined than store-bought—but, after the first taste, instantly sweeter. I had done some PR work for the Mountain States Circuit of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in Cheyenne in the seventies, and to be a good old boy I had pinched snoose with the best of them; I always carried a round tin of Cope in my pearl-button shirt pocket. As hard as I tried, including once riding a bull out of the chute, I never could be a cowboy, always would be a “damn Easterner.” But it never stopped me from trying real hard.
* * *
Our deliveries concluded and the day-trippers now on their way back to Nairobi, Robbie announces that it is time for a bath.
With towels, soap, and shampoo, we pile into David’s red boat and motor slowly down the airport road into the field and tie up to a fence post. The sun is not far above the horizon and it will be dark soon. Clothes off, soap in hand, we dive in, just three little boys at the local swimming hole. As I lather my armpits, something big, rough, and slippery wraps itself around my stomach, then slithers off.
“Jesus wept!” I jump out of the water, claw back up onto the boat. A thick sheen of slime around my belly marks the creature’s embrace.
“Fish nibbling at your toes?” Robbie asks.
“Fucking bigger than that!” The slime shines in the sun. It is not easy to wipe off.
“Yes, well . . . Possibly a python. Time to get out, David.”
Later, cooking over the gas burner, I think about whatever it was that tried to seduce me. I toss some chopped tomatoes and onions in with some beans, stir it up, and stare at the slop. I can’t eat. I still feel that slimy creature moving across my belly.
Yusuf emerges from the shadows. Clad in his black shirt, Somali sarong, and rubber sandals, he sits cross-legged in front of the fire in silence. He is a mystery. Despite his easy empathetic nature, he holds himself regally, somewhat aloof. It is hard to know which is the dominant personality. His private and thoughtful countenance gives hint of some deeper inner strength—or is it inner turmoil? I have often seen him stand off alone and observe the activity in the camp and I have wondered what he is thinking, what he is feeling at the time. He is said to have a family, wife, and children in Nairobi, yet he is well-known and well respected in this area. In this soft flickering light, his peaceful face is seamed with concern.
“When the water goes down, we must move.”
“Where to?”
“I am not sure. But we must move away from here. Away from the airstrip. They know we are here and it will not be safe anymore.”
“You don’t say!” Robbie says.
“Yes. Now we are safe but soon we will be attacked. They will want the supplies.”
“Who, pray, are ‘they’?”
“Subclan militia.”
“I thought you had everything under control, Yusuf,” Robbie says. There is an edge in his voice.
“No man controls the subclans.” He stands and walks out into the dark. Very uncharacteristic.
“I do believe he’s heard something,” David says.
“Wonder how?” I say. “We’re pretty isolated.”
“Word gets around. Probably during one of the trips to the villages or over the radio.”
Robbie says, “Maybe our Somali friend is working both sides. . . .”
The water, however, this night continues to rise.
A discussion after we bedded down, as if we were all awake expecting one of us to speak first:
“I think I heard a lion, David.”
“I believe I heard it too, Robbie.”
“You know that inimitable grunting sound.”
“Quite. Not so far away.”
“Rather near, I’d venture.”
“Night, Robbie.”
“Night, David.”
“Night, all.”
Frog croaks and cicada ratchets, a soothing pastiche of night sounds, have been upstaged. By laughter. It is laughter, not from within the camp and not laughter that any human could create: not a cackle, not a snigger, not a rollicking good belly laugh, but three clear and sharp “Hahaha!” This series is joined by another from somewhere out there and then others, and the ensemble turns idiotically hilarious. Lying on my back in the tent, I can’t help but chuckle, and were it not for the fascination, the mystery of the laughter, I surely would be caught up by it for it is irresistibly infectious—hahahahahahahahahahaha—like watching someone laugh so hard you can’t help but laugh yourself. I try to picture the sort of creature that could create such a good-time noise—its size, its head, the shape of its mouth. I don’t want to sleep. I want to keep laughing.