“JOHN! WHERE ARE you going?”
Soap in hand, I had begun walking through the compound to the communal toilet. Amelia, dressed only in a bathrobe and felt slippers, had come running out after me, flip-flopping through the mud, breathless, desperate.
“Amelia, for God’s sakes. I am going to take a dump.”
“You needn’t be vulgar. I just want to know how it is done, that’s all.”
“How it’s done?”
“Where to go!”
A few dusky figures squatted ankle-deep in the water. She watched the performances with startled eyes.
“Well, how do you do it on safari?”
“Why, we have a portable loo that our servants take care of.”
“Well, kiddo, it is au naturel. Out here, there is no loo.”
She was horrified.
“Most of the men are up at dawn and drop their pants shortly thereafter. The area is usually pretty empty by this time.”
“But everyone can see!” She stood like a small pillar, her fists clenched tightly at her sides, her worried eyes fixed on the men hunkered in the water.
“Why don’t you do what David does: walk the other way—down the runway and into the grass?”
“Oh, yes! Thank you!” She hurried back to the camp.
Some Somalis sitting on their haunches around a cooking fire had watched Amelia march off down the runway. “Mister John!” one of them called, “You many wives. Many wives.”
“Mia whus, mia whus!”
The men laughed and took up the chant: “Mia whus, mia whus.”
Amelia apparently was successful and she returned cheerful. When she smiles that eager little-girl smile, there is something attractive there.
“What does mia whus mean?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, one of the men said it to me when I passed. Is that like—good morning?”
* * *
During the past days, the atmosphere at the base has become more relaxed, less urgent. Yusuf is not as eager to use us as he had been, possibly because the crisis has eased or because he is under pressure. It is not as if there is nothing to distribute. We still get deliveries to the base—bundles, sacks, and crates of supplies stacked ever higher on reclaimed land. We had discussed it among ourselves last night.
“He certainly uses the little polystyrene rafts,” Robbie said. “We have boats that will go everywhere.”
“Not mine, Robbie. With my V-hull, I am spending more time pushing us off than under way. I got stuck three times in a half hour. With the falling levels, our usefulness may be drawing to an end, at least in this area.”
“Rubbish. I, at least, can go anywhere they can. I mean he pays those little naked boys with their rafts and poles to make our deliveries.”
“Good social economics, Robbie,” David says.
“Quite. But if he can’t use us, then he should lose us. It beggars the question, what in God’s name are we doing here?”
Therefore, I am surprised when Yusuf asks me to go on a delivery run. First, an unusual request:
“Do you have a mosquito net?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t need it?”
“No, I have the tent.”
“Would you let her use it?” he says, pointing to the woman in the chador sitting across the compound.
“No problem. What’s her story? Why is she here? She just sits.”
“She has children in Nairobi and has Kenyan identity card but she is Somali. Her home and I think most of her family were lost in the flood. She now has no papers, has nothing. She waits for plane to Kenya.”
“Oh.”
“There is nothing we can do,” he continues. “My NGO is trying to help, but without papers, she has to stay.”
I dig out the net from under the tins of vegetables and instant noodle meals in my lock trunk and walk over to the austere and solemn figure. I have never been quite this close to her before. She is not dressed in black but in robes of dark deep purple and a black veil with a two-inch opening for her eyes. I am captivated by what little I can see of the woman. There are no other distracting body parts, and her silent eyes offer all there is: Nestled behind long curled lashes, they are beautiful, direct, and somewhat challenging, and it embarrasses me. Does she smile under that veil? Or does she sneer at this fascinated infidel?
“Here. For you.” She withdraws her hands from the folds of her robe and accepts the bundled net. By the appearance of her lithe and delicate fingers there is little indication she has ever had to do much manual work. One might get the impression she is from a family of some wealth, accustomed to slaves.
“What is your name?”
She lowers her eyes. “My name is Asha,” she whispers. Her English is precise.
“My name is John,” I volunteer.
“John,” she repeats, and says nothing more.
“I will try to help.” Her eyes meet mine. As I turn to leave, she whispers something in what sounds like Arabic. She lifts her palm to her face and appears to blow across it. It is a strange, incomprehensible act.
Amelia is wandering around alone in the camp like a lost puppy. “Let’s hit the road, kiddo,” I call over.
“Oh, good! Where are we going?”
“Upriver. Downriver. Who the hell knows? Wherever Yusuf points us. Thought you might like to see how it’s done before your boat gets here.”
“Oh, what fun! Thank you!”
We are running out of gasoline for the outboards, but mixing it with Jet A1, a kerosene-based aviation fuel, seems to work. After I siphon the fuel from the forty-four-gallon drum, Amelia offers to take one of the twenty-liter jerry cans; I am not sure she knows how much twenty liters weighs but, pausing every five yards, she gamely manages to lug it to the boat.
No matter how many times it is explained or demonstrated, the boat is being loaded haphazardly, blankets on the bottom, where they will get wet, and the watertight bags of meal on top of them. I tell the workers to unload and do it properly, and without complaint they do it right.
Yusuf, Amelia, an elder and his croupy three-year-old daughter, and two armed guards board the boat. We are precariously overloaded; water slops in from over the sides. It will be a very slow trip. Another guard wades toward us through the knee-deep water, gun in one hand and a sprig of miraa in the other. Without a word he tries to scramble aboard.
“Hey, you—Bes, bes! Stop, stop! MIA, MIA.”
The young gunman has one leg over the side, and as he tries to hoist himself aboard, the boat nearly turns turtle. “Hey, dickhead! Get out!” I shove him with both hands and he falls back into the water. Out of the corner of my eye I see the little girl begin to roll off the supplies and I lunge for her, but too late. She falls overboard. Her shrill screams rend the air and join the frantic shouts of her father and the sputtering anger of the sodden gunman. The guard gets to his feet, stumbles through the water, and jams his rifle hard into my stomach. I have not heard him cock the gun and I think this registers. On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t. Without thinking, I push the barrel away and jump into the water and grab the terrified child by the back of her thin T-shirt. The water is not deep, and if she had not panicked she could have stood up. The elder is shouting, the gunman is shouting, the little girl is screaming. I lift the frightened kicking child up by her armpits and turn toward the guard, who has his gun leveled at me, finger on the trigger. I realize with horror that I am inadvertently using this hysterical little girl as a shield. The gunman snarls something ugly in Somali. He is not insane; it is not in his eyes. He is just angry. It is not like that kid at the roadblock.
Turning my back to him, I pass the girl up to her father. Yusuf is bawling at the guard, who reluctantly lowers his gun, turns, and skulks back toward the camp.
“Yusuf.” I try to mask the fear in my voice. “I don’t bring this boat back to camp until that man is gone, off the base.”
“It is nothing. It is over.”
“Yusuf, I’ve heard that Somalis have long memories.”
“All right, I will see to it.”
“No, my friend. You see to it now. I will wait.” His black eyes spark. “Sorry, Yusuf, that is the way it has to be.” He nods and carefully climbs down from the boat into the water.
We finally motor through the fields toward Hargeisa. I am consumed by the incident. Scared. This is the sort of event that is the most frightening. An incident that turns personal; it is one thing to be caught between two angry guns, but to find oneself the target of some hothead’s personal enmity is downright dangerous. I wonder if I will not have to start watching my ass, sit with my back against a wall.
“You have to watch the fucking currents, Amelia. Excuse my French. You also have to watch the hotheads. You never know what gets you a bullet in the back.” I force a smile and manage a more cheerful tone: “Here the currents run in one direction, then—you see there? A few yards away, in the other.”
“That’s all right. I speak some French.” Is she a step ahead of me, with me, or way behind? The boat slews in a sudden crosscurrent. “Yes, I see what you mean.” Her eyes widen with fascination and thrill. “How ever do you find your way?”
“With difficulty. Took me days before I stopped asking directions. Now that the water is falling, it’s even more difficult—every morning we have to find new routes, deeper channels. Loaded like this, you can’t afford to have an accident.”
Amelia cocks her head and regards me as if I was speaking a foreign language. “Didn’t you understand?” I ask her.
“Quite. Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Why do you keep wiping your face with your hand? It’s like you have something on your face, like you walked through some spiderwebs or something.”
“I don’t do that, do I?”
“Lots.”
“I am getting neurotic,” I mutter. I catch myself before doing it again. How could I not be conscious of it? What sort of strange neurosis have I developed? I do it again and she laughs.
I do not feel like being a clown in the village today, getting people to laugh, getting them to forget about their problems. I could have plenty of tongues stenciled to my boat. So what? It was probably the newness of it all that got me to act like such a fool. The villagers standing in the stinking mud are not looking very friendly either. Subdued, more somber than usual. The village boys unload the relief supplies in silence while Yusuf meets with the elders.
“John, Amelia—please come,” Yusuf calls down. “The boat is safe.”
We climb up the slippery hillside and into what is left of the village of mud-and-stick homes. There is a soft, mournful sound, a reserved and plangent keening from a small crowd gathered under the last mango tree.
“We must help,” Yusuf says quietly.
Corpses of three children and four adults have been placed in a row under the shade of the huge tree. The bodies are frozen in the rictus of death, vacant jellied eyes, mouths locked open in the futile struggle for their last precious breaths. Every orifice visible appears stained and caked with blood, dried nearly black. Flies wander over the lifeless, bloating flesh, walk on the eyes, and dart in and out of the gaping mouths. The bodies have begun their initial stages of putrescence, and the cloying stench is gagging. I think I recognize one of the children but it is impossible to tell. Amelia is no longer with us; I suppose she is off somewhere vomiting.
“We must help,” Yusuf repeats hoarsely.
“Jesus, how?” Staring at the dead, I have a strange sense of emotional remove. Is this the beginning of the disconnect? The surrounding villagers look at me with pitiable expressions, plaintive, appealing, as if John-John could bring these people back to life or rid them of this disease.
I expect Yusuf to ask me to move these corpses, to take them away in the boat, to touch them. “You call Nairobi on the radio from base and you tell them what you see. Maybe they help.”
“I think this is something for the Red Cross. Don’t they have a camp somewhere near here?”
“Ah, yes, that is a good idea.”
“Do we just leave them here?”
“They will be taken care of. But they cannot be buried because of the flood. They will do what they have done before. They will cover them with mud and wait for the rains to stop.”
On the way back, I ask Yusuf about Asha’s strange gesture. “It looked as if she was blowing me a kiss.”
Yusuf’s smile is tolerant, almost reproachful. “It is from the Koran. It was to make you invisible to all who surround you. You are now protected.”
The Russian-built Mi-8 sweeps over the camp ahead, turns toward us and hovers above, then flies back to base. It is waiting for us on the strip as we jump off the boat into the waist-deep water.
Andrew, hands on hips, blue baseball cap cocked on his head, stands grinning under the blades of the helicopter. We offer each other a quick awkward hug. The crew is no longer the rugger boys from South Africa but three beefy gold-toothed Ukrainians, smoking cigarettes nearby.
“I thought that was you down there,” he says, pushing back his cap. “We were on our way to Sakow when I saw some musungu in a blue ski boat coming back to base. Not many people look as ugly as you do from an altitude of five hundred feet.”
“I get prettier when you are on the ground. What brings you out here?”
“Inspection trip of the delivery sites—see what can land where.”
He brings news: The Buffalo, the cargo plane that makes at least one stop a day at Marerey Base, crashed on landing at Jilib yesterday, a write-off. It is surprising that we don’t lose more aircraft. They seem to spend most of the time in the air with quick turnarounds, brief stops to unload and fuel, then back to Garissa or Nairobi for another pickup. There is not much time for anything but a little midnight maintenance by an overworked Kenyan crew. The loss of the Buffalo cuts our access to supplies by almost half. It may not make much difference; Andrew reports that Unicef is soon going to declare the Somali Flood Emergency over. Just as well. The El Niño rains are moving south and flooding parts of Kenya, destroying camps on the Tana River that house a hundred thousand Somali and Bantu refugees. With the quickly falling water levels here, boat deliveries are becoming more restricted and less efficient. As well as more dangerous. David ran aground yesterday. Not unusual, but as his guards climbed back onto the boat, a ten-foot crocodile sped past with what David claims was a covetous gleam in his eye.
According to Alpha Kilo, the sixty thousand tons of food promised by the European Community may never be sent. The donors have heard too many horror stories: Subclans and factions within subclans have ended their suspension of internecine warfare and have renewed fighting in what is/was the disaster area; the clans are planning raids on distribution bases like ours; relief workers have been kidnapped in the north. I presume news that my cargo plane was shot at also has gotten out (I suppose it had to be reported to some aviation authorities somewhere).
“So how is life in the bush?”
“In a word—weird.” I need to tell him about the gunman I pushed into the water—that is still very much on my mind. I need to tell him about the little Bantu boy in Marerey. I need to share; maybe it will sort out my confusion. However, what occurs out here is probably not much different from what other aid workers go through elsewhere. “Yeah, weird. Kismayo? Same-o, same-o?”
He was mugged in the control tower. He was talking-in the C-130 when a couple of miraa-crazed gunmen raced up the stairs, fired some shots through the tower windows, took his radios. Then they fired at the Hercules as it was landing. “Bloody glad to be away from that lunacy for a few days—this is like a holiday.”
“And Jeri? Still that tightly packed little package that nobody can unwrap?”
“Still. You had something going with her that I didn’t know about?”
“No, why? She say something?” I feel that awkward brush of a kiss on the cheek even now. “She is a hell of a woman. I wonder how she can put up with what she does day after day. Oh, thanks for the beer, by the way.”
“Right. The French photographer, he didn’t drink it all?”
“You could have prepared me.”
“What would you have done? Scrub up?”
“Something like that. You don’t have any bottled water on board, do you?”
“Beer?”
“Real water.”
“I’m taking a case to Sakow. Could give you a couple bottles. You don’t have water here?”
“A thousand square miles of it, give or take.”
“That’s what I mean. We shit in it, piss in it, bathe in it, brush our teeth in it, and drink it.” He looks shocked. “Oh, we have had the occasional bottled water, but for the most part, this is our water source. We have asked Nairobi for water, but it seems that out here we are pretty well forgotten. Actually, it was all right when the flood was high and fast-moving, but now it’s mostly mud and hardly moving at all. We end up drinking a gritty slurry—picking rocks out of our teeth.”
“I’ll give you guys the case and tell them at Sakow I forgot.”
“Terrific. That will keep cholera at bay for another few days. Oh, yeah, would you pass the word to Nairobi and Garissa that there is some kind of strange hemorrhagic fever going on here? People bleeding from the nose and mouth and dying real fast. Seems they get it one day, then they’re dead a couple of days later.”
“They already know. From that old man you sent us the other day. Who died, by the way. The fever is big news. In fact, I got a chopper-load of World Health Organization doctors, scientists—people like that going to Bardera. It’s worse up there.”
“I hope it’s not contagious.”
“You and me both.”
“Last thing before I forget it—can you take a passenger to Garissa?”
“A live one or a dead one?”
“Very alive. Over there.” Asha is watching us. I think she knows I am asking for her.
“Of course. Does she have Kenya papers?”
“Yes. Or she did. Yusuf says they were lost in the flood.”
He frowns and shakes his head. “Then we can’t. They all say that, and it worked in the beginning. But we aren’t responsible for the refugees. They go to the camps and then UNHCR handles them. If it were up to me I’d take her, but it’s the pilot’s choice. Without papers, Kenyan immigration won’t let her off the chopper.” He shrugs. “Not much we can do. Sorry. Oh, the chopper will be returning later today with a delivery.”
While I see the helicopter off, Robbie is concluding a conversation with Saskia on the HF radio:
“So there is no earthly reason to stay here, at least David and me. The American chap has a boat that can go almost wherever we can, and the girl’s boat should arrive any time. It is quite ridiculous to keep all of us here. After all, our delivery count is quite dismal, as you probably know. The NGO is using us less and the water level is dropping precipitously. You should have trucks in here within a few days.
“. . . Yes, yes, of course. There are places we can go—upriver, of course. Or we could follow the rains south. Haven’t you got an operation in Kenya?
“. . . Well, I would have thought that it is more expensive to keep us here idle than to fly us to where we are needed.
“. . . Well, there is that too. It is a wretched disease, whatever it is.
“. . . Good. Then we will leave it you. Cheers. Romeo Tango out.”
* * *
The Mi-8 returns, makes a sweep over the camp, then settles down on the strip. The Ukrainians lead us aft to the open tail ramp. Amelia’s red river boat, an eighteen-foot Sea Canoe, gleams inside like a long-promised Christmas present. She runs to the lowered gate.
“Oh, John, it’s here!” She dances. I haven’t imagined her expressing much enthusiasm about anything; it is good to see her this way.
“Well, let’s get it out and rigged up, kiddo.”
“Oh, yes, let’s do.”
The porters drag the boat to water’s edge, considerably further away than when I first arrived.
After preparation and loading, she mounts her red stallion like Jeanne d’Arc. The outboard engine is nearly as big as she is, and the moment of truth is nigh. She tries to tilt it forward to lift the prop out of the water, but she is just too small. Robbie and David, who have been helping outfit the boat, give her a few hints but she is near tears in frustration. She chews her lower lip with short, quick bites. “Leave it in,” David says. “If you hit something, it will bounce out.” He offers to accompany her on her first delivery and I will follow.
Amelia has to steer by tiller, by moving the outboard directly; there is no wheel as there is on mine. I would give her my boat, but it is just too powerful and too unstable for her. Moreover, that is her boat. This is what she signed up for. Hers is more of a regulation deliver-the-goods-and-turn-around motorboat.
Because of the lack of business, we take the opportunity to recce a location for a new camp south of Hargeisa. Marerey Base will return to a full-length airstrip in a few days, inaccessible to boats. The narrow dike above the irrigation canal, wide enough for a helicopter-landing site, would be ideal. However, it is in the heart of crocodile country; nearly every day one of us either sees a croc or the slithering tracks of one that scar the muddy slope.
The trip is not one for beginners. David, with his experienced eyes, seems to be able to spot a course by instinct and navigates for Amelia. The water runs more swiftly through the gullies and ditches and fields now that there is less of it. Amelia seems to be doing all right and she looks behind to me, smiles happily, and waves, something she must have done a thousand times on her family’s ski boat.
“Amelia!” The current grabs her boat and slams it broadside into a thorn tree. Throttling back to avoid running into her, we watch helplessly as inch-long needles rip her clothes, her bare arms, and her face. David had ducked to avoid the razor-sharp spikes. The boat has run up onto a hummock, its bow firmly embedded in the mud under the tree.
Amelia sits on a bag of maize meal with her head in her hands, and I imagine she is finally crying. Blood runs through her fingers from facial cuts. She looks up at David and forces a grim little-girl face of determination. She jerks the starter cord angrily and snaps at him to help her shove off the island with an oar. On the trip back, she stands facing forward, as solid as Nelson at Trafalgar, the tiller clasped tightly in her hand.
At the campsite, she has regained her composure and, resolute, carries herself with newfound defiance. In the period of a few hours, she has seen death and she has been injured. She is a sliced and punctured mess, and for a time she does not remove the smears and rivulets of dried blood, whether for our benefit or for the Somalis who had yet to take her seriously. We notice but say nothing.
Back at our tarped-over meeting place, Robbie has begun dismantling his squirrel’s nest. Carefully folding sheets, stacking his magazines—“I’ve read these, you want?”—removing canned food from makeshift shelves of the moment, and stashing them into his lockbox.
“What’s this? Deserting a sinking ship?”
He laughs. “Marching orders. We are being sent to Bardera. Then, if the gods smile, back to Kenya, where we will continue our mission of mercy closer to home.”
“When?”
“First light tomorrow. Saskia called on the HF while you three were doing battle with the local flora. David and I will take the boats upriver. An absolutely ghastly trip, I’m sure.”
“What about us. Amelia and me?”
“Haven’t heard. Carry on regardless, I imagine.”
Watching him pack his gear is a bit sad. I feel lost, deceived. We were coming to know each other, had worked well as a unit, but more personally, I was beginning to feel comfortable, was beginning to let these guys in. It had been an investment in a relationship, and while the relationship was not particularly close, it had the cohesion of a family in which each of its members knows the needs, the preferences, and the oddities of the other, in which one knows best how to deal with the other. We had established some sort of routine, a big step in the maintenance of sanity. You go through hell together, help each other, discover the other, get to know the other in the most trying and intimate of circumstances, then, without warning, some faceless administrator declares the unit in which we have invested so much merely a memory. That is the nature of relief work, I suppose: You go where they send you, where you are needed. We did not come out here to make lifelong friends, and no one was running a summer camp. It is no big loss, of course, but the suddenness, the finality of the end takes some adjustment.
* * *
Over the fire, Robbie breaks an awkward silence. “I say, David, have you told your menials we’ll need extra jerry cans for our perilous upriver adventure?”
“Yes, Robbie.”
“You know it is one of the perks of being a menial—not to have to plan for things. Just doing. Do you ever think we are on the wrong side, David?”
“Not often, Robbie.”
Robbie turns to Amelia: “Sing us a song, Amelia!”
“A what?”
“A song, dear girl. A ribald sea chantey to make our American sailor blush.”
“Robbie, I am waiting for my tea.”
“David, you fix our nightingale a cup of tea, there’s a good chap. Now, Amelia, there is no excuse, is there?”
Amelia whitens, trapped. She looks to David, then to me. “Robbieeee.”
It is David who bellows out—off-key:
“My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light,
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night.
From this union there came three,
A porpoise, a porgy and the other was me.
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free,
Oh, for the life on the rolling sea.”
“Oh, that is wonderful!” Amelia squeals.
“A bit lame, I’d say, David,” says Robbie. “But entertainment for our last evening, nevertheless. Come on, Amelia, give it a go, then, shall we?”
“I don’t know anything like that.”
“Oh, well, then:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night,
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.”
She raises her shy eyes for approval. “It was something I learned as a little girl.”
“Well, Amelia. You have succeeded in surprising us. However, I thought you knew one to make us fairly shrivel with embarrassment.”
“I’m sorry, Robbie.”
“I say, we should all tell stories tonight. John, won’t you tell us a sea story?”
“What? You some kind of camp counselor?”
“A what? Is that another Americanism?”
“Social director, Robbie. You know, someone who organizes shuffleboard on cruise ships.”
“You have a point, my good fellow,” he laughs. “I do seem to have that tendency, don’t I? Must be going troppo.”
It is hard to get upset with the man. I just don’t think he really knows who he is. “But I do have a few sea stories.”
“I imagine you have.”
“Bores the hell out of land people, though.”
“Yes, well, I am sure they might. By the way, why have you spent so many years at sea? Must be frightfully monotonous.”
“Not often.”
“But why the sea?”
“It is a refuge.”
“Ah, yes, understood. Well, another time, then. So. A toast to our lovely and winsome little heroine of the Jubba. You earned your stripes today, dear girl.”
Amelia blushes. “Oh! Well, I’d like tea instead,” but she takes a glass of whiskey mixed with swamp water.
“To the Queen of the Jubba,” I say.
“Well, if you really wanted to earn your stripes, you’d be three feet tall, with a flat head and toothless.”
“Why, Robbie?”
We laugh. Surely she has heard that one. If she hasn’t we won’t give insult with an explanation.
“You know,” she says. She pauses; her tone is serious—she wants to be heard. “I like working with you—you men.” It sounds as if she is trying to imitate George C. Scott doing Patton. It is difficult to take her seriously. Yet the respect she has earned is unspoken.