A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (5 page)

“Where is Fadhadhi?” I ask.

“I have no idea. But I know that if I go there one day I will find family. Maybe not Abdullahi or AliYusuf people. Maybe they will be family on the maternal side. But Fadhadhi, wherever it is, is our place.”

And so two nomadic worlds lived side by side in his head. In one of them was the history of his family. In the other was a stupid and barbaric man who arrived in Afmadow with his cloth bag and caused Yindy to cry out in pain.

The old nomad came back unannounced about a month later with more cardboard, more sticks, and more rope. He cut the contraption off Yindy's leg and examined the wound, which was swollen and yellow. Then he placed a hand on either side of the wound and squeezed, and Yindy shrieked with all her might, and the yellowy liquid that had been discoloring her leg oozed to the surface and dripped off the sides of her calf. The old man replaced the contraption with another just like it and promptly left, his patient shedding tears of sheer agony.

As he tells the story of the old man's second visit, Asad's voice becomes testy again, and he begins speaking immediately of his and Yindy's departure from Afmadow, as if the two events occurred on the same day. There was fighting very close to the city. He does not know what it was about or whom it was between. The refugees began to move out. It was very rapid. One day, the rhythm of the city's movement was as it had always been. The next, there were boxes everywhere and trucks and people shouting at one another. By evening, Yindy's street was almost empty.

Yindy was put on a truck. Asad was given a large canvas bag and told to pack into it whatever would fit. He recalls wandering through Yindy's tiny house, folding cloth and clothing and putting them in the bag. He selected two of the pots Yindy used to make her customers' tea. He grabbed two cups. Then he took a last look at the yard and the
balbalo,
the place in which he had spent almost every waking moment of the last two, three, perhaps four months: the precise length of his stay in Afmadow is lost forever. Then he climbed into the truck and sat, Yindy by his one side, the canvas bag at his feet.

The truck journey, he recalls, lasted one very long day. By evening, they were in the town of Dhoobley. It was dark when they arrived. Yindy was unloaded from the truck, and they slept that night on the side of the road. Asad assumed that things would change the next day, that some accommodation had been made for the refugees. But as morning became afternoon, he realized that this was it. In Afmadow, the refugees had been integrated into the town center and lived under solid roofs and behind gates. Here, they were simply dumped on a sparsely wooded piece of land, side by side. The people around them were complete strangers. It dawned on Asad that Yindy's father's family was gone. He had assumed that they were on another truck, that he and Yindy would be reunited with them at their destination. Just as Yindy's injury had conjured them from nowhere, so the flight from Afmadow had caused them to vanish.

Yindy was placed under a tree with a blanket suspended in the branches above her head. Asad took out the assortment of things he had put in the canvas bag: the pots, the cups, the clothes. And that is how he and Yindy remained for the next few days. Around them, their neighbors were building makeshift homes. Once or twice a day, they would bring food. Otherwise, they left the injured woman and her child alone, under the stars, sheltered only by the blanket.

It was perhaps on day four or five—he is not sure—that, without warning, several neighbors descended upon Yindy and began building a house around her where she lay on the ground.

“It was a nomadic house,” he recalls. “Holes were dug in the shape of a circle. Thick sticks were placed in the holes. The sticks were then bent over, all coming together at the top, closing. Rolled wire and rope, made from trees, was then spun around the structure. Then an entrance was made. The whole thing took maybe two days.”

Their work done, the neighbors retreated, and now it was just Yindy and Asad and their house. For the first time since she was shot, they were alone together, an invalid and a small boy. It fell to Asad to look after her.

“I cared for her twenty-four hours,” Asad tells me. “The wound in her leg oozed pus, and I cleaned it. She started to stink, I washed her. She got her period and bled, I cleaned her.” He cocks his head, so that his face is turned from me. “I was a small boy,” he says quietly.

Then he turns to face me again and smiles, his mild embarrassment gone. He lifts his buttocks off my car seat and pats one of them.

“She could not go to the toilet. I wiped her.”

I try to press him on what it felt like to discover her body in this way. Indeed, if there is anything I want him to relive it is this nursing. But he recoils from the intimacy. “We became like brother and sister in Dhoobley,” he simply says.

It was one thing cleaning Yindy's body, quite another feeding her. For once they had erected the house, the neighbors stopped bringing food. Yet another of those unwritten rules of collective flight was taking shape: How much does one sacrifice to help an invalid who will never get well and care for herself? When does one cut ties and watch her sink or swim?

Each day, Asad went out to forage. He would cross into Kenya at the border post and hang around the soldiers until they gave him food. There was also an NGO setting up a base, and he would sometimes get cooked meals and water there. He would bring everything back to Yindy.

“I got to be so close to her during this time,” he says. “I would get home from the other side of the border, and from the minute I walked in I knew what she was feeling: either she was worried about me because I had been gone so long; or her leg had been very painful and she had been sitting with this pain for a long time; or she had wet herself because she could not wait for me to get back; or there had been no pain and she had been lying there dreaming about nice things, about better times, maybe. All this I knew the moment I walked in.”

Their time in Dhoobley turned out to be brief, far briefer than in Afmadow. For one evening word went around that the fighting was coming into town, and everybody began packing hurriedly. The neighbors came back, this time to carry Yindy out of her house and to take her across the border into Kenya, to a town called Liboi.

Liboi is a border town in the dust lands of the North Eastern Province of Kenya. Before the Somali war, it was home to some ten thousand people, the majority of them Somali speakers, the remainder an assortment of Kenyan military and civilian personnel. Many made a living, in one way or another, from the steady traffic of people and things that crossed the border post with Somalia.

When war broke out, people from across southern Somalia fled toward Liboi. Asad was one of countless numbers who massed on the Somali side of the border and waited. Realizing that the tide could not be turned and that its borders would have to open, a doubtful and ambivalent Kenyan government invited the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to hastily establish a refugee camp outside Liboi. Two nongovernm
ental organizations, Doctors Without Borders and CARE International, were contracted to hurry in to provide medicine and food.

When the camp at Liboi opened, people teamed across the border. In no time, the camp's population grew to more than forty thousand. And so the UNHCR set up another camp in a nearby town called Ifo, then another outside a town called Dagahaley, then a fourth camp at Hagadera. Collectively, they became known as the Dadaab camps, the name of the district in which they fell. Among them, they came to shelter about one hundred sixty thousand people.

Liboi is closed now and is thus perhaps the least well known of the four camps. But when one goes back to the reports written about it in the early 1990s, it feels as if one is reading in dry officialese a description of hell.

Water was perpetually in short supply. At one time during Asad's stay there, it was reported that refugees were dying at a rate of more than a hundred a month, many of them children under the age of five, many of them of thirst. Food, too, was scarce. Although each family was given a ration card, there was never enough to go around. Each family would send a member to queue at midnight to wait for a ration distribution that began at six o'clock the following morning.

If the UNHCR did not distribute enough food and water, neither did it provide adequate security for the thousands of strangers who had been thrown together. Report after report speaks of an epidemic of rape in Liboi and other camps. Some say that clan divisions determined who raped whom; others that when Bantu Somalis began arriving at Liboi in October 1992, their women were raped as punishment for coming to take scarce rations. Other reports complain that the UNHCR turned a blind eye to the obvious fact that the camp was awash with firearms. The popping of gunfire would ring in the night, it was said, and continue at regular intervals until morning. Anything was possible, it seems, no matter how diabolical, for whoever could gather sufficient force.

It is interesting to compare the reports of nongovernm
ental organizations and international newspapers with the memory of somebody who was a child there. It is not that Asad's recollections of Liboi contradict the official documentation. He confirms everything I have read. His presiding memory of Yindy during this time was her pervasive fear, especially at night, when the most terrible fate might befall one. But in the Liboi preserved in Asad's mind, these deprivations and anxieties are a background hum. He has instead taken with him from that time something else entirely.

Very early, perhaps on the day Yindy and Asad came to Liboi, a white woman who worked for Doctors Without Borders noticed the short, crippled woman and her young child. Yindy was taken away to the military hospital—Asad does not remember for how long—and when she returned her leg had shrunk back to its normal size, and it no longer oozed yellow pus.

Asad smiles at the memory of the white woman. It is, in part, a smile of gentle self-rebuke, for he tells me that he remembers neither her name nor her nationality.

“When I think of her,” he says, “the only word that comes to my mind is
gaal.
” In Somali,
gaal
means “white person.” “Whenever she came to our place, I would know long before she arrived, because a group of children would run up to me saying, ‘Your
gaal
is coming, your
gaal
is coming.' ”

Arranging for Yindy's medical care was the first of many things Asad's
gaal
did. She had a large
balbalo
built for Yindy, while the other refugees had only tents. A pipe was extended under the ground to provide water to the
balbalo,
when the other refugees had to form long lines at the water pump. Fresh food was brought to Yindy twice a week; the other refugees had to queue for their dry rations for six hours each day.

It was certainly a blessing, albeit a mixed one. Whether Asad could have kept foraging for himself and Yindy indefinitely, as he had during their time on the Somali side of the border, is doubtful. It is quite possible that the nameless
gaal
saved Asad's and Yindy's lives. And yet, their special treatment marked them: their piped water and fresh food made them objects of envy; their
balbalo
was an advertisement that they were just a disabled woman and a child and were thus defenseless. As sunset approached, Yindy's fear would rise. She was terrified of the night, and her terror, Asad recalls, did not abate for all of the two years that they lived in Liboi.

Not long after they arrived, Yindy sent a very reluctant Asad off to a madrassa that had been established just a two-minute walk from their tent. To his dismay, he was trapped there each day from eight o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon, another tyrant barking reams of holy text into his ears.

“The method was not the same as in Mogadishu,” Asad says. “There was no
loox,
no ink. We would all sit, and the teacher would come to each of us in turn. He would shout a passage out from the Koran once, then pause for a few moments, then shout it again. You would have to repeat it. He would count the mistakes you made and then beat you once for every mistake.”

Asad loathed school, but he also clung to it gratefully, for it marked him as a boy who was not an idiot.

“I do not remember when they began arriving,” he says, “but at some point, nomadic children from the countryside started coming into Liboi. You would get much-older children, people already well into their teens, who could not read Arabic or Somali or anything else, and who therefore could not go to school. These people were a laughingstock. We called them
reer baadiye
—‘from the bush.' Nobody wanted to be
reer baadiye,
and so children learned from other children how to read to save their dignity.”

The educational institutions that emerged at Liboi were a riot of fragments. Asad went to a makeshift madrassa that had no writing materials. But many of the kids he played with in the early evenings received a very different education. Into the vacuum left by the absence of schools in the camp stepped a host of entrepreneurs. Two men who claimed to have been math teachers in Mogadishu established classes to teach children basic arithmetic. Soon after that, piles of material arrived from UNICEF: alphabet books, storybooks, exercise books. Camp leaders assigned refugees who had lived clerical lives back home to use these books to teach.

“The majority of the children around me understood the Latin alphabet and could read basic Somali,” Asad tells me. “So I was somewhere between an educated child and
reer baadiye.
I had to make distance between myself and
reer baadiye.
It was a question of pride and shame. Whatever material was going around, I would look at, I would ask questions.

“It was not just me. It was a thing between children. A young child would ask an older child, a child a foot taller than him, ‘What is two times two?' The question would be asked with arrogance. It was like a challenge to a fight. If the older child could not answer, he was
reer baadiye.
”

It was thus that Asad, along with many other Liboi children, educated himself. He left Liboi in 1993 with basic numeracy and a capacity to recite the Latin alphabet. Soon, he would acquire the ability to put to paper any conversation he had conducted in his mother tongue. His grammar was shocking, his punctuation rudimentary. His phonetic spelling and oratory phrasing made the language he wrote a territory of its own, quite distinct from that of standard written Somali. But he could read and write, after a fashion; he could add and subtract, and he could multiply. These were the anvils and chisels with which he would fashion the rest of his life.

He learned something else at Liboi. In Mogadishu, the languages he knew were the Arabic of the madrassa and the Somali of the world. It had never crossed his mind that there might be other tongues. The first time he walked across the border post at Liboi to forage for himself and Yindy, he heard Kenyan soldiers talking to one another in Swahili. The shock was so great that the ground rushed up to meet his eyes. And when the soldiers spoke to him in their simple, practical Somali, he at first did not understand what they were saying. The moment he returned to Yindy in Dhoobley he asked her what it was he had heard, and she laughed and explained to him that here and now across this world human beings were chattering away in dozens upon dozens of languages.

In the camp at Liboi, there was the Somali of the refugees, the Swahili of the Kenyans, and the languages of those who staffed the UNHCR and the nongovernm
ental organizations. There was French and German and Danish. But more important than all the others combined was English, for that was the language in which the camp was run, and those who ran the camp knew not a jot of Somali. To learn English was thus to become useful to those with power.

The race to learn English began the day the camp opened its doors. All sorts of English schools appeared; the nongovernm
ental organizations provided them with blackboards, chalk, and learning materials. Refugees paid good money to send their children there. Perhaps people sensed even then, in the earliest days of the war, that the damage being wrought on their country was immense and that they would have to learn the skills of an exile. Among the reasons Asad so hated his madrassa was the knowledge, as he sat there listening to the endless recitations, that across the camp other people were learning a language that would take them upward.