We are four now, with no dad. Five if you count the baby inside Mom. Just me, Hassan, Nima, and pregnant Mom. That night I hear gunfire. Aseey has gone away for half an hour and returns, saying she has seen bodies in the streets of Baidoa. We hear more gunshots, distant screams. Every shot worries us it might be Dad. Mom and Aseey are reading the Koran. The gunfire continues all night. I see red tracers across the sky. Bullets easily pierce the thorn fence around the house, one passing close enough that I can feel its warmth on my cheek. It is not safe to sleep in the cool of the open air, so we pile into the stuffy house, already crowded with other displaced people. Mom tells us we will leave in the morning by foot into the bush; I know from her stories that we could face wild animals, thirst, and hunger.
As the sun is rising, we creep through the thorn fence. I see the bodies of a man and a woman in an embrace of death. Just beyond them I see a woman on her back crying, blood coming from her stomach, stray dogs preparing to feast. Then shots thud against a wall beside us and we turn and flee back to the house. I am six years old and learning that nowhere in the world is safe.
For six hours we tremble inside the fence while listening to the sounds of war. Finally a bazooka shell hits the fence in a fiery explosion. Aseey pushes Hassan and me behind a giant termite mound in the yard.
“Bring your men outside now or we will kill you!” says a dark, skinny man who stands outside the burning fence.
“There are no men here!” says Aseey, mimicking the gunman’s Darod accent in the hope that buys a reprieve.
But gunmen force themselves inside through the remains of the fence, and they drag us roughly from behind the termite mound to our mom’s side. I try not to move and I cry for the man to let my hand go, but he only pulls harder, then throws me violently onto the dusty ground and kicks me. It is a painful lesson not to argue with a gunman. When he orders me to stand up, I do so, silently. I can see that one of the men’s hands is trembling on the trigger of his gun. They are scarred hands with small cuts, rough hands that tell of a different life in the country—the only tools that he possessed before a gun, the hands he used for pulling up thorn trees or digging graves. His fingernails curve inward and scare me. His Uzi, covered in dust, matches his dusty hands. The gun is pointed at my face. I stare into the dark hole where bullets come out.
A bright object drops into the sand. A bullet. I pick it up and hold it up to the gunman. It’s the first bullet I have ever touched; it looks too small and shiny to cause all the bloodshed I have seen. “Uncle,” I say, because in Africa children call adults auntie and uncle as a sign of respect. “Uncle, you dropped this.”
At first he ignores me. “Uncle, Uncle, Uncle!” I plead. My Mogadishan dialect probably confuses him. Maybe the man thinks we are Darod.
He finally looks down and snatches the bullet. Maybe he’s embarrassed that a small boy has found his bullet. Our eyes meet. His aren’t the angry or threatening eyes that I expect; they are just tired and red. I can see the dust in his hair, the rough skin through several days of stubble, and I become aware of the powerful smell of sweat and dust from the man and his torn black shirt.
As I look up, I see his mouth open briefly, revealing ugly brown qat stains on his teeth. He turns to his comrade. “Leave these women and children, we have to go.”
We look at each other in silence for a few seconds before he leaves, still holding the bullet I gave him. Then he turns around and shouts, “You must leave as soon as possible because if I see you again I won’t let you go! I will return at midnight, and if you’re still here, I will kill you all!”
Twilight. Mom ties Nima to her back and grabs me and Hassan by the arms. Aseey paces around for a minute and decides to leave by herself. We say good-bye to her and head out into the darkening streets. Aseey herself would wander in the bush for a year, avoiding the gunfire and eating whatever she could find. When she finally returned to Baidoa, her house had been burned to the ground, so she left again, hiding in the bush until the Rahanweyn Resistance Army took back Baidoa a couple years later.
Mom leads with Nima on her shoulders, me and Hassan behind in bare feet—we never owned shoes even before the war—warily making our way past dogs chewing on dead bodies. We see more tracer bullets arcing through the night and flashes of light, and from time to time we hear the screams of women. Mom has known these narrow alleyways since her childhood, and she finds hiding places by the side of the huts whenever we see or hear any movement.
At the edge of the town we look back and see that much of Baidoa is burning. In front of us is the bush, that dangerous land of lions and hyenas. She points out places where she chased hyenas and herded goats in her childhood, but this time I am not ready to hear any stories; I am struggling to stay on my feet.
The bush at least gives us some concealment from gunmen. Instead, we must contend with the vultures and crows that are swarming everywhere, fighting with dogs over the flesh of dead human beings. As we move, the ugly scavenger birds follow us. Mom angrily shoos them away. We carry on in silence, even though the cuts from the thornbushes make us want to scream out in pain. Sometimes Mom stops briefly to pull us closer to her dress and shoo off more crows. Sometimes she stumbles in the dark over the undulations of the sand or a thornbush. The ride with Dad and Siciid in the truck now seems so much better. Mom is used to the bush, but we are not.
Overwhelmed by hunger, thirst, and fatigue, I am by now being pulled along by Mom. I have forgotten about Dad, my aching feet stumbling through the sands until finally I fall. Hassan sits down beside me. His lips are cracking. A film of dust coats his face. He no longer looks like my brave brother. Mom looks back and remarks that she can no longer see fires or hear bullets. “There may be predators and snakes here, but we are safe from the soldiers,” she says. “We’ll sleep under this acacia tree.”
Mom tries to stay awake to guard us, but she is too desperately tired. Soon we are all asleep.
When the sun wakes Mom, she stands up quickly. “Look at all the footprints of animals, so many of them! We have slept near the den of the hyenas. I think they have gone to Baidoa to eat human flesh. Let’s go before they return.” Strange sounds fill the land, sounds I never heard in Mogadishu. I can’t even tell if they are birds or animals, but Mom can tell. She even knows if the sound is a female or a male. She looks, smells, listens, and then knows which way to go. I am glad she knows so much about the bush and the animals.
We continue walking through the heat. I now have stomach pains and need to stop frequently. I scream all the time because my feet are bleeding, but Mom knows what to do. She makes us sit under a bush, Hassan and I squeezing close together for the little shade it throws. Mom goes off for a few minutes, then returns with some leaves in her hand. These are the awrodhaye plants, she says, good for wounds. We watch her chew the leaves, then put the paste on our foot wounds like an ointment. It feels so good. I always thought her nomad stories were like fairy tales; they seemed so far away from our city life in Mogadishu. But now we are living them, and I see how much my mom really knows about how to survive. And now, without Dad to lead us, I see how strong and brave she is. At that moment in the bush, as the awrodhaye leaves and my mom’s spit soothe my cracked and bleeding feet, I vow that I will always survive like her.
Suddenly Mom stoops low, waving her hand in a downward motion to tell us to do the same. She used to do this when she spotted lions and hyenas, but today it is not an animal, it is a group of five militiamen dragging a short, middle-aged man along a track and yelling in Maay dialect. “They are Rahanweyn! Thank Allah!” Mom stands and walks toward them. “How are you?” she shouts in Maay.
All five of the Rahanweyn men look to be in their thirties, dressed in tattered shirts with missing buttons. Their eyebrows are obscured by layers of dirt. One is in trousers rolled up to his knees, revealing the dirt on his legs. They push their hostage against a rock and listen to Mom’s account of our escape. “There is no possibility that you can escape this way because you are heading toward their territory,” one of the men says. “You will stand a better chance in Baidoa.” Then he points his gun at the hostage, who begs for his life. “Forgive me!” are the prisoner’s last words. The bullets throw the dust from his jacket against my nose and cheeks. These are the Rahanweyn Resistance Army militias, who will retake Baidoa later.
One of the men hands Mom a jug of water. Nima drinks first, then I, then Hassan, and finally Mom, who doesn’t stop drinking until the jug is snatched from her. “Don’t finish the water!” the man scolds her. They give Mom a few segments of mandarin orange but insist that she leave. So we set off again on foot, eating our fruit, knowing we cannot go back to Baidoa, and wondering if any place is safe.
By now my stomach pains have turned into diarrhea; Hassan isn’t much better, so we need to stop a lot. Mom makes us chew the awrodhaye; it is bitter and sour but still comforting. One time as I’m stooping along the rough dirt path, a man approaches from the distance on a small wooden cart pulled by a donkey. When he reaches us, I can see that the cart is transporting the skin of a freshly killed camel, blood still dripping from it onto the path below.
“This is my last camel,” says the old nomad. “I slaughtered it before it died.”
The man is wearing a turban of faded red, and he has a little gray hair left. Mom asks him if he can give us a lift. He agrees. Mom thanks him and the four of us climb on the back of the cart and return to the outskirts of Baidoa, sitting on the bloody camel skin. We travel in silence, the only noise being the heavy breathing of the donkey struggling to lift the wheels through the sand. We keep moving through the thornbushes to bypass Baidoa; the donkey cart driver knows it is too dangerous to go into the city. Shots can still be heard, and along the path we can see bodies swelling and rotten. Two dogs are tearing at the stomach of a corpse, while two puppies play tug-of-war with a bloodstained sleeve.
Finally we reach the main road to Mogadishu, where we flag down a truck so crowded with people that it is standing room only in the back. The driver is a huge, strongly built man who agrees to let us on board, but he refuses a bleeding woman who begs him to take her to a hospital. “There is no hospital now,” he says. “Who will be able to help someone who is bleeding to death?” The woman sits by the road, then lies down to die. “Today death is better than living,” says the driver. “Let the dying die.”
The truck is going to Mogadishu, from where we had fled only days before. What else can we do? We have no more strength to walk through the bush, and no food or water. But the road back to Mogadishu is not the same as two days earlier. Power has shifted into the hands of the USC militias, and the carnage is everywhere. The mango trees in Afgooye have all been destroyed. Even the crocodiles and monkeys are dead, rotting in the streets. Militias hide in the bushes, ambushing people and raping women.
Next to me on the truck is a woman carrying her dead child. She didn’t want to abandon his corpse to be eaten by the dogs. Hundreds of flies are landing on the dead boy’s face, then lighting on my own filthy face and eyes. We are riding in a banana truck, and the smell of bananas mingles with the stench coming from all the people in the open bed where we are standing. Everyone is trying to find a banana to scavenge, but there are none left. The luckiest ones find a few banana peels and eat those. Mom finds none for us. She doesn’t bother to complain that she is pregnant; no one can help anyone else.
The road is blocked with boulders and burning cars, and the driver threads the truck through the debris. At one point he stops to move some corpses blocking the way, dragging them off the road into the scrub. The stiff ones he just kicks to make them roll like a barrel.
“My son!” cries a woman, leaping from the truck and falling face-first to the ground. A body on the road is her son. Blood is coming from her mouth as she pleads with the driver to carry her son’s corpse for burial. The driver refuses, saying there is no room for corpses. He gets back in the truck and starts to drive away, leaving the bleeding woman hugging her dead son by the side of the road.
“Mommy! Come with us please!” She has other children, still alive, on the truck, which is pulling away. “Mommy!”
The truck stops and reverses slowly. The woman gives her dead son one last hug, then returns to the truck and sits in silent grief for the rest of the journey. We pass by many more corpses on the road. Mom looks closely at all of them, looking for Dad or Siciid.
We drive on for more than 120 miles. My stomach throbs. I am barely conscious, aware of the flies, the heat, and the pain and of Mom’s trembling hand holding on to my own. I am aware of the checkpoint that the truck is approaching and of the gunshots that hit the vehicle, but by now I am prepared to accept any outcome, even death.
Then I am aware of the driver on the ground, pleading that he is of the Darod clan like them and is taking sick people to Mogadishu. He is offering the gunmen money. I am aware of harsh, merciless faces looking at him, aware of the dirt and smell of their faces but not seeing any shape to them. You can’t know what clan or tribe someone belongs to just by looking at them. You can tell only by their speech, so people learn how to fake accents. Maybe the driver is pretending to be Darod, I don’t know. But my mom could fake any accent, she is prepared for anything.
I realize that the vehicle is moving again and that it has turned off the road to follow rough tracks where there would be, we hoped, no more checkpoints or militias. But then, less than twelve miles from Mogadishu, a bullet shatters the side window and explodes in the driver’s head. The truck veers wildly off the road, then shudders into a ditch and finally stops at an angle. Everyone panics and stumbles out of the truck, people pushing and shoving. A woman throws me off the truck and I land on the ground. Mom struggles to keep us together, holding Nima tight. I take one last look at the truck and the driver who moments earlier was kicking bodies off the road, now himself dead. Mom knows we too might die any minute, from a random gunshot, and she is thinking our dad is dead by now, but she says she will die herself before she leaves our bodies to rot on the road. The rebels who shot the driver are running toward the truck. Mom takes our hands, me and Hassan, Nima on her back, and we walk again into the blazing bush. We are four, going on five, and we cast our feet and our fate forward into the breeze that rises from the sea, toward the White Pearl of the Indian Ocean. With our brave mom by our side, we will live or die in Mogadishu.