By 2008, Somalia had been at war for seventeen years, but calling this living hell a “war” was too polite. It was really just endless gory terrorism on starving civilians who didn’t care which side won. A million people had been killed, and a million and a half forced from their homes. Half a million had now evacuated the city for the camp in Eelasha, where my mom and sister lived. But some remained, like me, and some form of life was still going on inside the city despite the constant slaughter. There were cybercafes, shops, restaurants, and even colleges. I paid five dollars and enrolled in the Somali Institute of Management and Administration, which promised to teach math, English, computer programs, Arabic, Sharia law, Tarbiyah (Islamic education), administration, and management. I was asked to take an English placement test and answered all the questions, which were easy for me, unlike the other students who either failed or barely passed. I started in a class with twenty-five students, learning English and computer. Our teacher, Mr. Wewe, was surprised at how well I answered the English questions. Soon he put me in charge of the English class on days when he was late because the roads were blocked. I would stand in front of the class and repeat the lessons in my American accent. Other students asked me how I learned this English. I couldn’t say I learned from movies, because someone in the class could be al-Shabaab, so I said I learned it from reading the class books.
Classes were always fun, but getting to school was not. One day I was in a bus behind another bus that drove over a roadside bomb, killing most of the passengers, some of them students I knew well. Another day a rocket hit the college itself, killing students and teachers. None of this closed the school or stopped us from going. When the shelling led to the cancellation of all bus service, I had to walk the six miles to school. There were always two or three al-Shabaab soldiers at the entrance of the college, checking our books, hair, and clothes. One time they whipped a girl for wearing a skirt. Windows were broken and doors were missing, though that was a godsend one day when Ethiopian troops entered the college after they had pushed al-Shabaab out of the area. We all managed to escape through the open windows.
One afternoon in early 2009, after classes I went into a cybercafe and saw an e-mail from Paul:
Keep your head down, Abdi. [Somalia] is getting a lot of international news. By the way, how old are you now? I’d like to write a short piece about how you and others who have been sending news emails—I won’t use your full name, if that is a security problem, but I would like readers to know your age. And are you still teaching?
Not long after that, Paul wrote again with a link to his story in The Atlantic. It was titled “The War Is Bitter and Nasty,” which was a quote from one of the e-mails I had sent him. A week or so later, around five o’clock, just before sunset, I was walking home when my phone rang with a strange number. I answered even though I was shaking, thinking it was al-Shabaab again. Maybe they found out about my communications with Paul! This could be the death call. My heart was beating so fast I did not say anything, I just waited for the person on the other end to say he would kill me now.
“Hi, is this Abdi?”
It was a female voice, in American English. She sounded like a movie actress.
My heart was still pounding, but now from excitement. Maybe Paul had used his connections! Maybe this is someone from the U.S. government who wants to get me out of Somalia!
“Yes, this is Abdi.” Speaking English on a phone in public could mean death, so I was looking around in case anyone was watching. The woman on the phone said she was Cori Princell, a producer for an American public radio show called The Story, which was hosted by Dick Gordon. They hired local people on the ground in places around the world and had them talk about their lives for American listeners. She had read Paul’s article in The Atlantic and wanted to discuss a diary recording project with me.
“Could you call me back in fifteen minutes?” I said. “I am walking on the street now. I can’t talk.”
I raced home just before Cori called me back. We spoke for twenty minutes until my battery died. I told her my frustration in the city, how I wanted to live a life like everyone else in the world. How I was trying to make something out of my life by going to college.
“I don’t have a future here,” I said. “I could die anytime; it can be tomorrow, or this evening, who knows? Everything I enjoy has been taken from me. I live in a world isolated from the rest of the world. I dream of going to America. I know I belong in that country.”
Just before my battery died, she said, “Abdi, we would love to share your voice with our listeners. Please let me know, and stay safe.”
Of course while Cori and I were on the phone, all the people in her studio were listening. I was later told they had been so surprised at the way I spoke—not just my English, but my confidence. I know that not many people in Mogadishu would have risked meeting Paul or picking up a phone call from America while walking on the street. But I did all of this for two reasons: First, I had nothing to lose in Somalia; I would be killed anyway. Second, I wanted to break the barrier and connect myself to the world. I wanted to tell my story.
But part of me said no. What if al-Shabaab is listening to American radio or reading the website? They know me: I’m the one they call American. They will easily find me and behead me.
The other part of me said I would be crazy not to try. This is finally my chance to be who I want to be! My voice would be known in America, like the Hollywood stars!
I e-mailed Hassan. He wrote back:
Do it. Do it. This is a chance. Don’t waste it. Al-Shabaab don’t read the website of The Story. Your audience will be in America not in Somalia. This is not the BBC. So say yes.
So I said yes. I did not tell my mom, who would have had a heart attack. America by now was the most hated country in Somalia. America had sponsored the Ethiopian troops in Somalia and led air strikes that took many lives. America was fighting Islam across the Middle East.
In the black stillness of a November night in 2009, I crawled six feet under the ground in my bedroom hidey-hole, pushed the record button on my cell phone, and started speaking to America:
It is midnight. Pitch-dark. I can hear gunshots ringing. Heavy shelling landing. This might be my last night on earth. Or I might survive.
I talked about my mom, my sister, Faisa, and the movies—all the good things that happened before.
I am a schoolteacher in the most dangerous city, Mogadishu. Before things got as bad as they are now, we at least had something to entertain us. Every night we would go to cinemas and come home late at night. I used to watch American Hollywood films. I couldn’t miss one. I was a movie buff. Most of my friends and my girlfriend would call me the American. It’s a name they gave me after seeing how I speak American English. I always like to keep my hair long and styled, and I always like to dress in an elegant way. And I have taught myself to walk, pump iron, and speak English like the carefree stars I have watched more often in Hollywood movies.
Every night I would record a diary. At the cybercafe I visited the website of The Story and heard my reports; they had a photo of me, taken by my friend Hussein with his phone, from behind; we had agreed not to show my face. My stories were titled “Messages from Mogadishu” and were introduced by Dick Gordon, the show’s host. He called me “our reporter” and “our man in Mogadishu.”
The producers liked my stories, but the audio quality was poor from my cheap cell phone, and it took a long time to upload the recordings. So the producers connected me to a BBC reporter in Mogadishu who was also a Somali, also taking a huge risk like me by broadcasting to the outside world. He had a computer, and his equipment was much better for recording. So once every week I would collect in my mind all the events around me, walk to his house, and tell my story.
After I filed a report called “Surviving Mogadishu,” e-mails flooded into The Story. One came from a doctor at Dartmouth College named Sharon McDonnell. The only Sharon I knew was Ariel Sharon of Israel, so I assumed this was a man. The e-mail carried the subject line “Gorgeous, Exquisite and Painful.” Sharon wrote,
I worked in Afghanistan and various parts of Africa and the Middle East. Every element of the story was brought to life by Dick Gordon and the understated way that Abdi tells his story.
I wrote back,
Hi Sharon,
This is Abdi from Mogadishu. I got a forward of your e-mail to The Story with Dick Gordon. I wanted to thank you for your kind feeling and appreciation. Mogadishu had been this way and worse for twenty years, without central government. I had never seen peace for my life. I had been experiencing the worst through my life. Al-Shabaab and the government are fighting for the third day of constant firing and shelling. I didn’t go out to my teaching these three days. I earn living by teaching English. I would like to flee but there is no way I can do that with no money. My mom is in the camps.
And then came an e-mail from Sharon that took a whole week to absorb. The first surprise was the line “As the mom of a son…” So this Sharon was a woman! The second was when she wrote, “Is there any way I can help?”
I felt my American dream was cracking open slowly. Every e-mail from Sharon after that was full of hope. She introduced me to winter, attaching photos of her house in Maine with snow covering the ground. She sent a Christmas card to my family as an e-mail attachment, with a picture of her family. Then we started speaking on the phone. Sharon was asking about ways I could leave. But where to go? For Christmas she wanted to send me some money, so I told her how to do it safely through Hassan in Kenya, who could then send it to me in the hawala wire transfers. That way no one would know it was coming from an American. The Story was also sending me payments for my reports; between The Story and Sharon, Hassan and I were receiving money from people who weren’t related to us and didn’t even look like us. Five hundred dollars from The Story, $300 from Sharon, $200, $100. One day I handed my mom $150. She had her mouth wide open and did not believe it.
“How did you get this much money?” she asked.
It was time to break the secret to her. I told her about the radio work, meeting Sharon, everything. I told her that some good human beings, Americans, non-Muslim, sent all this money not only to me but to my family.
“Mom, eat well. That’s all your money.”
I told her that through this generosity of Americans, Hassan also had enough money to survive and pay rent. Mom was able to hire three men to build a nice hut that could fit her, Nima, and my niece. Thick enough to protect them from the sun and the dust and cook out of the wind. They could buy food and water. Overnight my family joined the “upper class” of Eelasha, but accepting that money was hard for my mom. She and Nima needed food and shelter, but she worried that if she died, she would be banished to hell for taking infidel dollars.
Back in the city I kept going to college, with dollars hidden in my clothes. I communicated with Sharon every day. When our Internet was down, Hassan would e-mail her on my behalf. The discussions about leaving Somalia continued; Kenya seemed the best option. But leaving my mom behind was my biggest worry. If something happened to her, if she got injured, I would want to be there to help. Then I thought, “If I stay here, I will surely die and she will have no help anyway.”
Sharon organized a group she called Team Abdi. It included Ben Bellows, an American former student of hers working as a doctor in Kenya, Cori Princell and Dick Gordon from The Story, Paul Salopek, Hassan, and Sharon’s family. Their mission was to get me out of Somalia. Plan A was getting me a visa to Kenya. But the immigration official in Nairobi just laughed when Ben asked. He said they don’t grant visas to Somalis, ever. Somalis in Kenya are classified as refugees and are not allowed to work. They are supposed to be confined to those desperate camps near the border, where (theoretically) international agencies feed and shelter them. Somali refugees in Nairobi, like Hassan, lived in limbo—not allowed to work but with no access to refugee services. They were forced to survive by their wits and to avoid the police. Yet hundreds of thousands of Somalis lived in Nairobi; they owned shops, restaurants, and services. Somalis bought food and clothes and paid rent. They were responsible for roughly a third of all economic activity in the city, yet the Kenyan authorities pretended they did not exist, perhaps out of fear that acknowledging them would encourage more migration. So much for Plan A.
Plan B was an overland trip using smugglers, as Hassan had done years earlier. But that had become impossibly dangerous under al-Shabaab. You would be killed at the first roadblock.
More than a year passed as I continued to file reports for The Story. We kept discussing safe ways to get me out. Then, on a Saturday evening in March 2011, two explosions completely destroyed our house. Luckily, I was on my way home, still a few minutes away, when the bombs went off. I don’t know if I was targeted or if it was random, but either way I would have been definitely killed if I was at home. My hidey-hole wouldn’t have saved me; it was buried under debris and pieces of the tin roof. Breathless with fear, I called Hassan as I was standing there in the dust.
“There was a bomb in the house,” I told my brother. “I can still smell the powder. Everything is destroyed. I have nowhere to sleep. Tell Team Abdi it is a scary night.”
That night I slept at the corner of the street, in a dusty space behind a neem tree. When I woke up in the morning, I learned that Team Abdi had put together five hundred dollars to buy me a plane ticket out of Somalia. I did not yet know where I would fly to, but I would need to get a passport.
I went to the government immigration office downtown. The guard at the gate sneered at me.
“A passport costs eighty dollars,” he said.
I fished a hundred-dollar bill out from my pants and unfolded it in front of him. His look of disdain changed to respect as he opened the gate. The clerk inside took my picture. I filled out some forms. Within an hour I was clutching my new Somali passport. That was the easy part. Where was I going? What country would give me an entry visa?
While I was getting my passport, Team Abdi learned that I could fly directly from Mogadishu to Kampala and get a one-day Ugandan visa upon landing. That would give me twenty-four hours to find a way from there into neighboring Kenya. I went to the airline agency at KM4, showed my passport, and bought a ticket to Kampala. The clerk didn’t have to ask if it was one-way.
My flight was in three days. The safe thing would have been to lie low in Mogadishu until then, but I could not leave without saying good-bye to my mom. So the day before my flight, I stashed my plane ticket and phone under the debris of our house and made the dangerous minibus journey one last time to the miserable Eelasha camp.
The first roadblock was manned by government soldiers and was easy enough, they just asked where people were going and checked to see no one had long beards. After that we entered al-Shabaab territory, and the road was blocked by about ten checkpoints. At every one the bearded fighters would board the bus and make sure all the women were sitting in the back and not touching any men. Then they looked around at the men, checking their haircuts and their teeth for brown qat stains, which would indicate a non-Islamist and possibly a government spy. Anyone who looked suspicious was dragged off the bus. Someone suspected of working for the government might get beheaded on the spot. Men with hair too long might only be forced to endure a rough haircut. I was glad I did not have my plane ticket, that would have surely spelled death. I forced myself to show no fear on my face. I just acted like a regular guy who lived in the camps, liked al-Shabaab, and had gone to run errands in the city. But inside I was trembling that someone would recognize me as the recruit who had deserted after just one day.
Mom was cooking over a fire outside her new hut when I arrived. I whispered to her that I was leaving the next day on an airplane, and she stopped stirring her pot. She could think of nothing to say. Finally she told me she was happy and that this was a good thing. I said good-bye to Nima and told them both not to tell anyone of my plans.
“Wherever we end up, I’ll see you when I see you,” I said. Then I shook hands with my mom; under al-Shabaab it was forbidden even for a mom and grown son to hug, and there was no point in risking attention.
The bus back to Mogadishu was scary because the fighters didn’t like to see people leaving the camps. I was pulled out and interviewed three times. I made up so many stories—I was going to protect our house from burglars, I was going to fetch clothes for my mom, whatever I could think of. Every time they let me go. That night I slept for the last time in my hidey-hole, which I had cleared of enough debris in order to crawl in.
The next morning my mom showed up. She had taken a bus from the camp.
“Mom, why are you here?” I was worried her presence would attract attention.
“I wanted to say good-bye to you,” she said.
We walked together to the airport. I had no bag, no extra clothes, nothing that would look like I was going on a journey—just a guy taking a walk. Carefully hidden in my clothes were my plane ticket, my passport, my freshly charged phone, and seventy dollars.
The airport terminal entrance was guarded by Ugandan troops from the African Union mission. A soldier barked at us: “Only passengers allowed!”
I fished out my ticket. He inspected it warily.
“You may enter,” he said. “Not her.”
I turned to Mom. “So this is finally good-bye,” I said.
“Good-bye, my son. I am so happy for you, and I will pray for you.”
It was all I could do not to cry in front of that soldier. I felt so sad, but my mom’s blessing made me feel okay.
The airport was like a military base. Al-Shabaab had been targeting the airport every day with shelling, and I could feel the building shudder from nearby explosions. A Somali soldier laughed when I flinched. “This is the safest place in Mogadishu!” he said. More Ugandan soldiers searched all the passengers before we boarded the plane, then marched us through the terminal.
The plane’s engines were running, it was ready for a takeoff. There were not many people on the flight. I took a window seat, my phone ringing with calls from Paul, Cori, and Sharon. “I am on the plane,” I told them. “I will check with you when we land.” As the plane backed away from the terminal, I looked out and saw my mom standing there in the sun, waiting for us to take off. She passed from my view, and I could no longer hold back my tears. I wept in silence for a long time. Then I saw other passengers were crying too.
When the plane lifted off, everyone prayed to Allah for a safe flight. To avoid al-Shabaab rockets, the plane banked rapidly and turned out over the Indian Ocean. African Union gunships sped across the water, leaving white foamy trails. The plane climbed so fast I was surprised how quickly we were high above the city. The hot sun was glinting sharply off the tin roofs of the buildings of Mogadishu. I had seen the movie Escape from Alcatraz, and I felt like I had broken out of a prison. My future was a mystery, but at least I was leaving hell forever.
I was surprised to learn that our plane would first stop briefly in Nairobi, which made me excited and anxious. Excited because my brother lived there, and soon I hoped to be there myself, even though I knew I could not leave the airport that day. Anxious because some other passengers were telling stories of Somalis being taken off their flights in Nairobi and interrogated inside the airport. Some disappeared forever. To be young and from Somalia was like being a drug dealer who is being watched constantly by law enforcement.
After two hours we landed in Nairobi. I could tell this airport was very different from Mogadishu. It was much bigger, and there were airplanes from all over the world—Air France, British Airways, EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines, many others. The runway was not pocked with bomb holes. From the windows of the transit hall I could see airport shops and men dressed in suits hurrying to flights. “Maybe someday I would wear a suit,” I thought. I could not wait to get to this city.
I tried making some calls to Team Abdi, but my Somalia SIM card turned out to be useless in Kenya, and soon I was back on the plane, headed for Kampala. I found out later that the team was extremely worried. Al-Shabaab had recently targeted Kampala with twin bombings that killed nearly a hundred people at a soccer match. The attacks were revenge for the Ugandan military presence in Somalia, and Uganda had been on the alert since then. While I was flying, Team Abdi was working behind the scenes to ensure I would not be arrested at Entebbe Airport or turned away from the Kenyan border, but no official in either country seemed able to guarantee my passage.
The sun was just dipping below the horizon as the plane banked over Lake Victoria and descended to Entebbe Airport. Below me was the source of the Nile, the river that flowed all the way to the Mediterranean—the gateway to Europe and beyond. Somehow this was comforting and made me feel closer to safety and freedom. In fact I was a long way from either.
All the Somalis on the flight were directed to go into one of the waiting halls. There were no seats. Pregnant women, crying children, elderly people who seemed sick and weak, we all sat on the hard airport floor. Again my phone had no service. I paced back and forth wondering what was happening. Every now and then an officer would walk up to me and say, “You! Sit down.”
Hours passed. No one came. Other passengers, wearing nice clothes and transiting to other countries in Europe and North America, walked past us. None of us cared, we were Somalis and used to this. At least we were lying on a floor made of tiles, not a dusty road with dogs and graves. I was so tired I fell asleep on the floor with a bunch of other Somalis. It was past midnight when an officer with a cell phone in his hand stood above us and spoke. I was only half awake and thought I was dreaming when he said, “Who is Abdi Iftin?”
Everyone woke up. And every man raised his hand. Everyone was Abdi Iftin. It was like the movie Spartacus. Of course I raised my hand too. But the officer, who didn’t much care who was Abdi Iftin, turned to someone else. “Are you Abdi Iftin? Come with me.”
The young man and the officer were leaving when I dashed after them.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I am Abdi Iftin.”
The officer scowled, then demanded to see our tickets and passports. When he determined I was the right one, I followed him into a tiny room. Without saying anything, he handed me a phone.
“Hey, Abdi. How are you?”
It was Ben Bellows in Nairobi. He had called the airport to assure the authorities that I had a place to stay for the night and that I had a bus ticket for Kenya in the morning. Somalis were being held at the airport because the Ugandan government could not determine if they were leaving Uganda within twenty-four hours; indeed, many of my fellow passengers had told me they had no intention of leaving Uganda. They were essentially being imprisoned at the airport. Ben said Team Abdi had made me a reservation to spend the night at a Kampala hotel, and my bus ticket to Nairobi was waiting for me there. Someone from the hotel had been waiting for hours outside the airport, holding a sign with my name on it. She had finally left, said Ben.
“Fifty dollars, please!” the officer said to me.
I paid for the visa, which probably included a bribe to the officer. At one in the morning, my passport stamped for a twenty-four-hour visit, I walked out of the airport into the dark night. I shivered in the strange cold, something I had never felt; even though Entebbe Airport lies almost exactly on the equator, it is four thousand feet above sea level. Immediately, I was surrounded by a scrum of taxi drivers shouting at me in Swahili and English. I was so cold and hungry I just felt frozen in place.
Then came another piece of good luck. At that moment a middle-aged man shoved his way through the crowd of drivers and spoke to me in Somali.
“Are you Abdi Iftin?”
“Yes!”
He grabbed my hand and dragged me out, yelling to the drivers in Swahili, “Get away from him! He’s my friend!”
I had never met this friend, but he was Somali and also spoke Swahili, so I went along as he whispered in my ear: “They will charge you a lot of money. Don’t listen to them. They want to rip you off.”
“How do you know my name?”
“There was a beautiful woman who was standing here with your name on a sign. She left. I figured it must be you.” He kept talking as we walked to his own taxi. “What do you do? Are you a businessman?”
I didn’t know what to say. Apparently, he had never seen a Somali with his name on a sign held by a beautiful woman at the airport. He thought I was someone with a lot of money. We got in his car and he pushed a cassette tape into the player—Somali music! I had not heard it in so long. He told me his name was Aleey and he had left Somalia ten years earlier. He had crossed into Kenya, then moved to Kampala, where life was more hospitable for Somalis, though that was changing with the recent al-Shabaab attacks.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Yes!”
“Let’s eat here.”
He pulled over at a small late-night kiosk and ordered a soda and a mandazi, a type of fried bread. I ordered the same thing. He asked me to pay for it. I pulled out my last ten-dollar bill.
“Oh, you have to change the money,” he said. He took me to a nearby exchange center where I converted the American bill into Ugandan shillings.
“I need a SIM card,” I told him as we ate. “Do you know a place where I can buy one?”
“I will take you there.”
As we drove to the Somali neighborhood in Kampala called Kisenyi, he put on some brand-new Somali music: Farhia Fiska’s “Desire for Love.” Farhia was a former Somali refugee who had made it to London and started recording songs that Somalis loved. Aleey turned it up loud; there were no Islamists to cut off his hand.
All the shops were closed, and the streets were empty. I was afraid there would be no place to buy a SIM card. But Aleey pulled up in front of a darkened store and banged on the door. A sleepy Somali opened the gate and started yelling at him.
“Why are you waking me up after midnight? I just went to sleep, man!”
It was Aleey’s brother and this was his shop, so it was okay. Minutes later I had a Uganda SIM card that would also work in Kenya, and five dollars of talk time. “Now you can call your friends,” he said. “Where are you staying?”
“It’s called the Shalom Guest House.”
“Oh! What? No, no, that is not possible! What do you do, my friend?”
He explained that he had driven many rich white people to this hotel but never a Somali. Then again he had never heard a Somali speak English like me. He felt sure I must have just flown in from London, and he refused to believe my story. I understood. I could hardly believe it myself.
On the way to the hotel I called Hassan, then Ben, Sharon, Cori, Paul, and Dick. Everyone was so relieved that I had made it safely to Uganda. Aleey dropped me at the guesthouse, and we exchanged phone numbers. He waved good-bye. “I will come for you tomorrow to show you around town,” he said.
I walked up to the receptionist, who handed me the key to my room. She said they had been expecting me much earlier. She knew nothing about my struggles. My room had big glass windows and a huge TV screen. There was a freshly made king-size bed, bigger than my mom’s entire hut in the camp. And a shower. On a desk was a sealed envelope with my name on it. Inside was a bus ticket to Nairobi and three hundred dollars in cash. Ben had a friend in Kampala who had dropped it at the hotel.
I was so tired, but I felt I needed to get clean before I could sleep. I stood there in the shower wondering why there was no bucket, and what all the knobs did. I turned one and was surprised when water dropped from a nozzle like a stream, cold and scary. I went down to ask the receptionist for a bucket. She laughed. “You don’t need a bucket,” she said. “I will show you.”
Back in the room, the lady showed me how to work the knobs and make the water come out nice and warm. Hot water without starting a fire! I felt kind of stupid but I thanked her and she left. Then I stripped and stood under that water and turned the knob until it was steaming hot. I stood there for a long time, in a trance, washing away the dirt and blood and pain of Mogadishu. I stood there until all that hot water was gone.