Today or Yesterday?

[Complicated]

Dadaab Town. Sunday 17th July 2011. 2.30 pm

 

All five of us sit in the shade of a tree. I stare at a sign that says ‘Silence’, right above Matt’s head. I wonder, does it mean we should eat in silence? Is it a reminder to talk less and swallow more food for thought?

The team is down in the dumps. We have been delayed at the DC’s office for hours.

 

Abdisalim’s face scrunches into deep furrows. He squints as a gust of warm wind hits his face.

“This is our winter,” the DC had said earlier on.

 

As I watch Abdisalim’s face, I am thankful that we came here in ‘winter’, then, when the wind was only warm instead of furnace-hot. Abdisalim takes out his notebook. He begins to write scraps of an intro script for the documentary we shall be doing. “Why don’t things ever go according to plan,” he grumbles, stabbing the paper with his pen. “It’s always this or that.”

 

He is referring to the massive delays we have been facing along the way. We seem to be always waiting for something. Right now, we are waiting for the food to be brought. Before then, we were waiting for the mechanic to fix the car, and before then, we were waiting for the DC to organise security for us (from Dadaab town onwards we have to be accompanied by soldiers).

 

It’s a quick meal; camel meat with rice. We have to be on our way; we can’t waste the entire day.

We go back to the DC’s office. To our dismay, more waiting awaits us. This time, we have to wait for the soldiers to join us. News comes that the soldiers are missing. More waiting.

 

We are waiting for two things; the car and the soldiers. We discuss the possibilities of hiring a new car. Ahmed makes a few calls. His face falls. “Can you believe this? They won’t hire their cars to us because the NGOs will pay tens of thousands of shillings per day for them. This is crazy. People are dying, and others are living off the fact that people dying!” “Suffering is a commodity, Ahmed,” Abdisalim says.

 

He is right. Here, the suffering industry is booming. The prices of things have gone up by 200%. Everyone here is some sort of warlord over their own little empire of scraps broken off of the Somalia conflict.

The SUV owners will rent you their SUVs only if you pay them 20,000ksh per day like the NGOs pay them, instead of the 8,000 ksh they would ordinarily charge. The police, the soldiers, the UNHCR officers, the hoteliers, they all demand their chunk of the suffering pie.

 

Don’t forget that there is always someone that gives the orders, someone that demands an even bigger chunk of the suffering pie. Like, right now, Ahmed is in talks with a bunch of fat cats. They want their whiskers drowned in a bowl of milk before they can let us go through.

 

These fat cats are from a bunch of local NGOs. They are the middlemen that stand between the journalists and other visitors, and the refugees. They are the top crust of the suffering industry.

And they are not pleased that we are here.

 

Our presence here means that we may expose them. It means that we may see beyond their smokescreens. We are not here as journalists per se; we do not have the limitations that journalists have. This means that we may get to see the real Dadaab, not the staged and acted one. Not the Dadaab showed to you with a timer to your face, to remind you that you have to leave before the stage props crumble.

The fat cats are also worried that we may be a new NGO. The fat cats are not fond of sharing; they are terrified of it.

 

Thankfully, Abdisalim has identification on him. Whatever that identification reveals about Abdisalim, the fat cats wither upon seeing it. They tumble off their pedestals, apologise and let us through.

 

Next stop: Liboi.

 

http://aduunyo.com/2011/07/update-global-somali-emergency-response-sunday/

[Complicated]

Liboi town: 8.30 am, Monday 18th July 2011.

 

The waiting is so intense, it’s as if we are waiting to start waiting.

 

We sit in the car at Arif Centre, by a structure that reads: Peponi Hotel- For Quick Snacks. A bus is docked a few metres away and veiled women, in single file, climb into it. Mashaallah, the front of the bus reads.

 

A pick-up truck speeds down the road. It has the same sign on it. Mashaallah. An SUV parked across the street reads the same. The people in this town may be poor but everyone has old money stocked up in spiritual currency; they are always hurling God’s blessings at you.

 

Directly across from Peponi Hotel- For Quick Snacks is Tamaz Communications. The Safaricom logo on it looks almost doodled in place, as though painted there as a school project by the little children we saw playing in the fields yesterday.

 

Today, the little children are gone. I only hope they are in the classrooms at the nearby Liboi Primary School. Yesterday, dozens and dozens of them pushed and shoved each other, huddling over our cameras.

 

One woman yielded a long gnarled stick over their heads, herding them off the cameras.

 

“How dare you interrupt important business?” she demanded, slapping the ground with the stick, threatening them with dire consequences should they not leave us alone.

 

Most of the children cowered and ran off. One little boy did not. He staggered on his feet, launched himself at the woman and tore away at her arms with his little hands. His eyes were sunken inside their sockets. They were tiny eyes, jaded by tales I did not know, tales I would never hear.

 

Those little boy’s eyes weren’t just fearless; they were piercing, terrifying. I wondered what would make a nine year old so vicious he would try to beat up an old woman in the street.

 

Deeq stood between the little boy and the woman, turned him away, gently shoved him towards the other children.

 

The children followed us all the way to the field of death. Right then when we stood on it, we didn’t know it was a real graveyard; we thought it was only a place where cows went to surrender their spirits to the cow gods.

 

The field was littered with cows lying in repose on the sand, their flesh long gone. Their rubbery skin, the only thing the marabou storks couldn’t eat, stretched gaunt over the ripples of their spinal discs.

 

The children hijacked Deeq, tossed a soccer ball at him. I wondered what about this renegade soccer player sold him out to the children. He once played for both the Dutch and the Somali soccer teams.

 

Deeq dribbled the ball, wove through the children. They laughed and chased him, laughed and chased.

 

A woman interrupted their squeals of delight. She thought Matt was a doctor. She stood inside the fence of her house, a fence made of thorns and twigs. The sun cast a poignant shadow over her face, and the thorns appeared to be pricking her skin, to be tearing it apart, shredding it.

 

“Please come,” she begged. “They cut off my sister’s breast.”

 

Her sister sat outside their twig house, on a traditional mat. Her chest was half bare, revealing a dark crust that looked like someone had melted several plastic bags on her skin. At her feet was a pair of paper scissors. As she talked to us, she squeezed her fingers beneath the dark crust and cleaned out what remained of her breast.

 

She told us that back in Somalia, she had had a tumour. Everyone advised her to visit a traditional doctor. The traditional doctor cut off her breast and told her to go home. She walked to Kenya to seek treatment but has never been to see a doctor.

 

The dark crust on her chest haunted us. We argued amongst ourselves about what it could be. Was it a tumour? Was it a home-made bandage? Later, Daud explained that it was a concoction of ginger and other home remedies, to stop the tumour from spreading.

 

At breakfast today morning, over very sweet chai and dry bread, Abdisalim told us that he had dreamt of the dark crust on the woman’s chest. None of us said anything. Evidently, we were still haunted by thoughts of that woman, of the mental images of her dark crust. We saw these images even when were not looking, saw them even in the privacy of our thoughts.

 

Liboi is awaking. The driver is here. Today, we hope to drive out all the way to Somalia. Let’s see how much waiting still awaits us.

 

MORE TO COME…

 

http://aduunyo.com/2011/07/gser-trip-monday-830am/

[Complicated]

 

Liboi Town 11 am, Monday 18th July 2011

 

The five of us clutch onto our tools of trade; cameras, pens, paper, mental snapshots. We are desperate to document the things we see, desperate to scratch them with a stick onto the sands of time.

 

What I’ve been seeing seems too big for my eyes, and I tussle back and forth in my mind, trying to find words to put it down. The nomad ahead of us seems to have the same problem with his camels.

 

He tugs and tugs, begging his camels to take the few remaining steps to the water pump. The nomad and his camels have walked all the way from Somalia. They are here to have a drink of water before they take the long walk back. But a few metres from the water pump, the camels decide that they have had it. Enough is enough.

 

Ahmed looks out into the distance, his eyes a chasm through which bits of the past slink. This airfield holds a lot of heavy memories for him. It was once a refugee camp. When he first fled Somalia, the young Ahmed was received here. Now, nineteen years later, he is back, a successful filmmaker eager to see what he can do to help the refugees.

 

Beyond, a group of refugees emerge from the horizon. The little ones are perched on donkeys, the older ones urge the donkeys on. Most are barefoot. The skin over their soles has burst and sand nestles in those crevices, burning, edging closer and closer to their bones.

 

There is no energy to do things abruptly; even drawing to a stop requires deliberate effort. We offer them water, biscuits, some milk for the little ones.

 

They continue to stare at us with their piercing eyes. I wonder, is there a problem? Why won’t they eat or drink? Have they no idea how to open the packaging, or have they simply no energy to do so?

 

We reach over to do it for them, even lift the bottles to the little ones’ lips. A little girl closes her eyes when the drops touch her tongue, screams when I remove the bottle from her lips. Another little girl laughs. She is so happy to see us.

 

The oldest woman in the group holds onto a shrub for support. She can’t stand on her feet anymore. She arches downwards, slowly, slowly. When she sits, she doesn’t seem to feel the thorny twigs digging into her flesh.

 

We ask how old she is. She doesn’t know. What she knows is that they have walked for 22 days. What she knows is that the woman next to her left Somalia with six children. She abandoned two children of them on the road to Kenya; they were weak and she was weak. They were about to die and she couldn’t carry them anymore. Two more children died. She now remains with just two of them.

 

She struggles with the water cork. Abdisalam opens it for her. The little bottle shakes in her hand.

 

“For 22 days we avoided walking on the main roads,” the old woman says. “Today we were desperate. We thought we were all going to die. We walked on the main road and prayed that we would meet someone to give us water.”

 

The sound of car tyres crashing sand grabs our attention. A white SUV zooms towards us. It belongs to an NGO. It slows down. There is surprise in their eyes at the sight of us with the refugees. They are thinking, are these people actually talking to them?

 

The driver hoots in greeting. The passenger waves a hello. They rev up the engine, hoot again and disappear inside a cloud of dust. A truckful of soldiers slows down. The soldiers raise their guns in greeting. They belong to the Transitional Federal Government Forces. They also rev up, disappear into the interior of Kenya. Another truck of Kenyan soldiers greets us and rushes towards the border with Somalia.

 

“Don’t they see these dying people? Why won’t any of them stop?” Matt asks.

 

Deeq always plays the devil’s advocate. He says, “Well, the soldiers are also hungry.”

 

One of the girls stares unflinchingly at me. I look away. When I look back, she’s still staring. Her eyes grip mine like a vice; her gaze jerks me against the donkey cart. I pry my eyes away, look down at the sand.

 

She won’t make it. She is too weak and Dadaab is too far.

 

“Can’t we give her a ride there?” I ask Daud.

 

He shakes his head. “That is smuggling. It is illegal in Kenya.”

 

“But she’ll die!”

 

“Why do all the NGOs focus on Dadaab only?” Deeq asks. “Most people die on the stretch between Somalia and Kenya, before they reach Dadaab. We need to save these people here!”

 

He places his hand over his eyes, looks towards Somalia.

 

“We need to get there,” he says. “There are more of them in Dhobley; we need to reach them.”

 

http://aduunyo.com/2011/07/gser-update-3-on-our-way-to-somalia/

[N.O.R.F]

Allah ha u sahlo.

[Valenteenah.]

Complicated, are you part of the group? I've been following GSER on FB and I think they're doing a grand job in documenting dhibaatada dadka haysata.

[Complicated]

Val, I am not part of the group sis, I don't even know them, but I admire what they are doing hence my posts.

 

http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/survival-backpacks-for-somali-refugees-in-kenya/

[Taleexi]

Please help in any way or shape possible.

[Alpha Blondy]

ok..... so what know? these voyeuristic pathetic fools are making a mockery of the suffering of our people.

[Taleexi]

Nin buka boqol u talisay Soomaali iyadaa halkaa is dhigtay markaa koleyba in lagugu yare madadaasho ka fursan maysid. Please, help.

[Som@li]

Eebe ha u sahlo,