Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Somaliland Recap

As the months have gone on since getting home from Africa I've been meaning to write some sort of post-mortem of my experiences there, more so I don't forget what all went on there than for any other reason. I didn't keep a travel journal this time around and already find myself forgetting interesting moments.

For the first few months after I got back from Africa I was too angry to write; after that I was too apathetic. The continent as a whole was a wash for me and, as I mentioned in my previous post, for the first time in almost a decade I wasn't thinking about some grand return.

That in itself was distressing, as Africa for years been firmly lodged in my dreams as one of my true loves. Of course it still existed how it always had to me - a beautiful, complicated place where anything can happen - but I wanted no part in it. The place was an adventure, to be sure, but an adventure I was content to no longer experience.

Whenever I thought of the continent I didn't think of the the beautiful sights I had have been lucky enough to experience. I didn’t think of the giddy nervousness at crossing a border or the mild jubilation at having done so successfully. Nor the taste of a goat stew after a day without food or the inevitable stranger who would approach me on every bus ride that would always help me find transport and lodging at my next destination. I didn't think of getting chased down the banks of the Zambezi River by an angry elephant or having my chicken wing snatched from me by a swooping eagle in the Serengeti. And I didn't think of the pure excitement I had in just waking up every day.

I was thinking a while back that maybe the explanation as to where I went wrong lies partially in a passage from Michella Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. She writes of her travels to Zaire in the final days of Mobutu's Zaire that "for those, like myself, curious to know what transpired when the normal rules of society were suspended, the purity appealed almost as much as it appalled. Why bother with pale imitations, diluted versions, after all, when you could drench yourself in the essence, the original?"

Realizing that, I have to acknowledge that the very adventure I sought led to my undoing last year. I was over-confident.

This hit home in Burao. It was the only time in my life where those safety precautions I had read about in the memoirs of a war correspondent or heard from some NGO worker on leave from Juba - "Take a different route every time you're out walking, always keep an eye over your shoulder, change rooms every night, always look for an escape route where ever you are" - became a reality.

Once, having a tea with the owner of my hotel, I nearly flipped over the table when I jumped up after a guy I had never seen before entered the room quickly with his hand in his pocket. The hotel owner just laughed though, and, sharing my safety concerns, said "Good instinct." The next day I began to barricade my door in a way that allowed me enough time get out the window opposite if trouble came.

By the time five or six days had gone by in my excruciatingly boring - yet equally nerve-wracking - stay there I realized that I was not going to get into the desert. Increasingly anxious warnings from friends in Hargeisa and acquaintances in Burao convinced me to get out of the city as soon as possible, telling me the presence and wide-based support for unfriendly factions in the city. It was conventional wisdom that I stuck out like a sore thumb and was trying my luck by over-staying the generally agreed upon number of three days in Burao.

Still, I wanted to walk out on foot and thought I could talk my way out of my problems even though I knew that getting through the red tape was more difficult than in Hargeisa because of my lack of contacts here and my inability to stumble the streets in order to find people who could support me.

It was the regional governor, in all of his wisdom, who wouldn't let me leave by foot or camel even after his deputy had personally assured me I had clearance and sent me to purchase a camel. His main worry appeared to to be a familiar one; I was a liability and he didn't want to risk something happening to me in his jurisdiction.

Having been in Burao for seven days by that point, though reason he still wouldn't let me leave without a guard and, in a beautiful catch-22, also refused to release a guard to me. It took another two days to get a one who would go with me back to Berbera and Hargeisa.

Meanwhile, I ended up spending nine days pretty much locked in my hotel. It was a cheap one I had chosen because it was lower profile and had more exit routes but it had no television and I had only brought three books with me. I read them each two or three times and had little else to fascinate myself with.

For safety's sake the manager insisted meals be delivered to me, but every breakfast was Somali pancakes cooked (soaked) in a lard, every lunch was watery rice and boiled goat, and every dinner was bloated spaghetti flavored with a slight spice and, all-too often, a horse fly or two that had wandered into the pot. In unsurprisingly short order I grew weary and then revolted by that menu. Additionally, I had a bad touch of food poisoning so any food I ate simply meant more trips to the bathroom. In time I pretty much gave up on eating for the first time in my life. The thought of any food, even my favorites, just repelled me for the last two or three days.

Out of shear boredom I had to leave the hotel some moments to head to the internet cafe in an effort to occupy my mind. Other than that my time was in the little hotel. I tried to leave without a guard on the seventh day and drive back to Berbera but was stopped at the first checkpoint and turned back.

Finally, on the ninth day I got an SPU army guard and took off as quickly as I could, thanking for hotel manager profusely for his hospitality and exiting as soon as I could.

An amusing interlude occurred right before I was about to leave. Having already purchased my camel a week and a half before, I was now in the uncomfortable position of having to quickly unload it before taking off.

I had purchased it for $400 and the previous owner only wanted to give $200 back for it. I could hardly have beaten that number with anyone else, being a white American who didn't speak Somali trying to quickly unload a pack camel in the middle of Somaliland’s largest livestock city. But still, I had nothing to lose by trying to get a little more

The governor was clearly tired of me by then but he was all-in-all a good man who truly did seem to care about what happened to me, so I came back to him one last time for help time. Through his translator, I launched into a monologue of my woes, saying that I had only purchased the camel after his deputy had told me to do so and now, after nine days of mild food poisoning and endless waiting, I was selling it back to the original owner who had never even lost physical possession of the camel for half that price because of the governor's waiting games. (Somalis, for all of their passionate arguing, seem to enjoy irony and dry humor being interjected and often use it to diffuse a sticky situation.)

Bursting into laughter when the translator was finished, he asked for a phone. He called the previous camel owner and convinced him to raise the price to $325, a price I'm guessing that probably should have been the real one to begin with anyway. The owner caught a ride over and personally handed me most of the exact same dollar bills I had handed him.

Happy with only a minimal monetary loss and aching to leave, I wasn't going to argue this price. But my new guard heard this number and lost his temper, storming back into the governor's office with me following in toe, a bit confused. Arguing in passionately Somali with a group that eventually grew to eight people, I just sat back and watched. My guess that it was on my behalf instead of against me, but I wasn't positive.

After ten minutes everyone broke up – in laughter, of course - and my guard drove me, even more bewildered and without having gotten a translation of what just happened, with two security personnel to a government fueling station which was filled with soldiers heading east to the tension-filled Sool and Sanaag regions.
One of the guys with me ran inside and came back soon after holding $75 which he gave to me with a handshake that seemed to say "we got your back". And so somehow I ended up getting all of my camel money back, even with everything else happening. Big props to the governor and my guard for helping me get that back.

On the way back to Hargeisa I was detained by the regional authorities in Berbera because I happened to be the controversy de jour for the ministries in Hargeisa. It turned out that my government fixer, a character named Solomon from one of the lesser-ministries whom I never should have trusted, had failed to work the proper channels in order to secure permission for my presence in the unstable eastern regions.

This was something I had had only begun to guess at in Burao but became radically clear to me when I was hauled into the regional immigration center and placed in a room with the ranking regional representatives from Immigration, Security, and the Ministry of the Interior. None of these men seemed terribly aware of anything about me besides the fact that I was a white guy coming back from a region I (technically) had not gotten permission to be in, and it soon became clear they were acting on orders from their superiors back in Hargesia. Those orders seemed to simply be to figure out just what in the hell I was doing without correct permission in the Togdheer.

I tried to be honest with them but I'm sure my half-coherent babbling of "I want to build a school!" and "I just LOVE the Somali desert!" only made the situation more confusing. They understandably assumed that someone like me does not make it a point to walk into the Somali bush without an ulterior motive and appeared to think I was either somehow looking for oil/minerals or attempting to make contact with one of the more nefarious groups in the region.

Fortunately I managed after a stint of questioning to convince them that I was not the rabble-rouser that both they and the authorities back in Hargeisa had somehow convinced themselves I was after Steve, the Brit who runs the dive shop in town, showed up to vouch for me. Even then it took another 45 minutes for them to let me go.

And so I finally got back to Hargeisa where I stayed for more than a month, trying and failing to get permission to get back into the desert.
--------------------------

With a year behind me I still look back on the two months in Somaliland as my greatest personal and professional failure. It was clear, by the time I came home, that there wasn't much of an open door. Had I stayed, I may have succeeded in setting up a trekking business as I was hoping to do in order to finance my time to build the school but I doubt very much I would have been at all successful in creating an educational institution at all as I imagined. And, as one of the most exposed outsiders in the region, had the trekking idea gone through I have no expectations that my safety would have been assured.

Part of it may have been institutional, but I'm quite sure that a very good part of it was that my patience was far lower and expectations far higher than they should have been. I'm not as familiar with Somali culture as I should be, I tried to move too quickly on everything, and I need to learn more about non-profits. I'll try to be better if I give this another shot someday.

Before I sign off on Africa, however, I 'd like to write down a few more memories for my own sake. They're in no particular order, just simply moments in Somaliland and Ethiopia that my mind occasionally tends to wander towards.

The first is of Saint Patrick's Day in Hargeisa, a memorable one not for one event but more because of how well it epitomized my stay.

Saint Patty's Day took place in the final couple weeks in Somaliland when I was to the point of overload. Unsurprisingly, Somalis take little heed of any holiday that celebrates Catholics knocking a bunch of pagans around, but I woke up determined to celebrate on my own little way.

A friend had some whiskey and we rounded up the few other western travelers in the city center - a Danish reporter, an Irish reporter, an American backpacker, and Canadian aid worker on vacation from Ethiopia - and we tipped back on our various sorrows we had been lamenting about since meeting up over the previous weeks. We planned our camel turducken for when we came back the next year even though we knew none of us would return, we got a little drunk, and we relaxed in a real feeling of comradeship that I always tend to feel with westerners in the real dusty outposts of Africa.

Upon leaving the hotel lobby we had been drinking in I wandered over to a friend of mine who made his living as a khat-seller on the street. The two of us rarely went a day without spending some time together, as situated on the main thoroughfare he was between my hotel and any ministries I wanted to get to and it was fun sitting with him and feeling comfortable with the small group of vendors and khat sellers who normally set up around him. When curious onlookers got too intense with me the regulars would shoo them away, while at the same time I drove up his business a little with those who stayed to have conversations with me.

Soon after I joined him today, however, two fellows with wild eyes wearing white who I understood to be from Djibouti showed up. Now, I have always been wary of Djiboutians because they have never treated me particularly well, but I was used to curious pedestrians approaching me on the street and I felt protected by my surrounding friends so I didn't give it much of a thought when one started in on the virtues on Allah. I was used to religious discussions here and, while I've found it surprisingly easy to discourage and upset Somalilanders in these talks – and they take perhaps a titch too much liberty in trying to convert me – my friends and acquaintances have for the most part always been able to quickly forgive what they view as my heretical beliefs and I had quickly learned to stay away from ontroversial subjects anyway.

Upon my general statement that I view service to humanity to be greater in importance to worship and obedience of God, however, instead of the usual disapproving look I got extreme shouts of anger from both of these Djiboutians. The English-speaking one in particularly started hollering at me and while I don't remember what exactly he said the general tone appeared to be: convert now or you're in trouble.

I assumed he was talking in metaphors so I started in on a spiel on local hospitality, something I've found tends to diffuse these situations by telling whoever is yelling at me that the locals treat me very well and implying that they're making themselves look bad. I was surprised, however, when my friend interrupted me and suggested that they both come back tomorrow and told them I would listen to everything they had to say. Annoyed, I asked him as soon as the pair left why he interrupted me and committed to something like that.

"You will not be here tomorrow," he replied. "Those two, they have the look of very bad men. They are not like us here; they are missionaries and if you see them go the other way. You can say nothing to appease them. And they could hurt you if they wanted."

The others around us agreed; the paired looked like fanatics. Having worked only just down the street from a trio of infamous suicide bombings by al Shabab radicals in October 2008, the people I was surrounded with had no sympathy for extremists. Few in Hargeisa did. So when they told me to avoid that pair, I listened. Fortunately, that was the last time we I saw the two.

Wired from that encounter, I wandered the streets still a bit knockered from the bourbon for a couple more hours and then went to the telephone shop to call Ashley, who today was being placed today for her medical residency. While I was looking forward to having a chat with her I was nervous of her being placed in a difficult location but as soon as she picked up she said "Baby, you'll never guess where I 've been placed - Boston!" It was the best news I could have gotten and finally had a reason for having been drinking.

I finished the day wandered the streets of Hargeisa long after it had been deserted, dwelling on the previous weeks. The city, for all of its bustle, gets completely abandoned around 10 or 11 PM and I can wander at will, free for the only time to walk without the constant stream of good-natured but exhausting greetings from strangers. The near-complete desolation of the normally quick-moving city may be a bit eerie, but I always enjoyed the walks.

Eventually I was picked up by an SPU army truck. While polite, he was curious as to what I was up to at 2 in the morning and rather adamant that I should stay in my hotel and not in the deserted city outskirts. I had to laugh when he insisted on giving me a ride back, as it brought a comforting sense of deja vu from my first day in Haegeisa in 2008 when a similar situation had occurred. Full circle, I guess.

Another memorable moment was from Harar, Ethiopia, on my way back home. A drying sock had fallen off my window sill to the wooden area behind my hotel and with the permission of the property owner I jumped the fence to retrieve it. Coming back the same direction, and realizing that the fence just ended a couple yards past where I had jumped, I detoured and found myself staring at a grinning truck driver, leaning against his rig.
He gestured into the woods and I looked, not seeing anything. He gestured again, and I thought he was saying he lost something there so I started in the words to look for whatever it was. He spoke sharply this time though, gesturing into the woods and walking towards me.

Still not getting it I turned back when he caught up with me and grabbed my arm, grinning even wider now. Slowly, he raised his other hand and pointed to a shape three yards away, standing motionless in the thicket.

It was a hyena. Possibly even one of the semi-wild hyenas that were fed every night by the famous Hyena Man every night outside the walls of the city. But I wasn't rational enough to remember some hyenas are treated different here than other areas I've been to. Really, my only thought at the moment was that I was staring face-to-face with straight-up hunter . . . maybe the only animal in Africa that gives me the chills.

The driver's laugh as he casually walked back to his right rather comforted me and the hyena - fortunately - appeared more nervous about the situation than I. He gave no indication of wanting to tussle. He did betray a glimpse of apprehension in its posture but after I backed up a bit towards the parking lot he settled down. We engaged in a stare-off for two or three minutes before he lost interest and wandered off back into the trees.

My final set of memories would have to be my final hours in Africa.

The anger, still high upon getting ready to leave, was slightly blunted by three events in succession on the day I left for America. The first was, after packing and while waiting for a cab, the small troop of backpackers I had been chilling with for the previous days in the hostel all showed up to wish me adieu. I was particularly touched because I guess I just didn’t expect them to take the time; backpackers meet and say goodbye to so many people - especially the ones you often find in Addis Ababa who have been traveling for many months or years – that it rarely matters. That they changed their plans to bid me farewell touched me.

One of the guys pulled out a small bottle of scotch and toasted me to better days ahead and happy travels for all. With that, we parted ways.

After we dissipated I decided to walk the streets for just a few more minutes. Almost immediately a Rastafarian, probably from the south Ethiopian enclave of Shashamane, came up to me on the street, grabbed my arm, and proclaimed his love for both me and humanity. Startled, and wondering if it was perhaps simply part of a scam of some kind, I just stared at him as he continued his spiel on how we are all “interconnected through love”. But after only a minute he simply shook my hand, saying “we part, my friend, but we will always be brothers.”

I walked away bemused but charmed.

And finally, in the airport, trying to get rid of my leftover currency, I was trolling the over-priced airport stores when I came across some incense burners, small woven baskets typically used to hold frankincense. Counting my cash, I saw I had enough money for just two small burners.

The shopkeeper, noticing my counting, asked me how much I had. “29 birr,” I answered. “I’ll take these two.”

He motioned me up a shelf with larger burners of the same weave that were marked as nearly twice the price and said “You can take those if you could prefer. And you can take four instead, if you wish. 29 birr.”

That was almost street price for them and I thanked him profusely, knowing he didn’t realized how kind of a final gesture I found that.

No comments: