by Simon Reeve
She was absolutely desperate. My heart broke for her.
‘We were attacked,’ she went on. ‘I lost them in the fighting. I don’t know what happened to them. I had to flee. I brought my other children but I don’t know where those two are. I had no choice but to leave.’
She told me her group had walked for almost three full weeks to get to the camp. Along the way their meagre supply of food ran out and there was nothing to survive on but rainwater. I had been to Somalia. I had some small sense of the violence they had fled. I knew the world had largely forgotten them. They were victims of a conflict that the region, let alone the West, no longer had any time for. I wondered how long they would remain there, on the edge of nowhere, with no way out, no hope and nothing to look forward to.
And then I met Fatima, a young Somali woman, aged twenty-three, who had been in the camp for an astonishing seventeen years. I was instantly reminded of the families and children living in railway boxcars near the border of unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh. Both prisons, in their own way. Fatima was calm, assured and gentle. She appeared to be so worldly it was hard to believe she had never lived anywhere but this desert camp. She led me to her home, a simple hut made from saplings of acacia with a roughly fenced yard, and we sat down together to talk.
‘Fatima,’ I said, ‘have you really been here for most of your life?’
‘That’s right.’
I asked her if she thought she would ever go home to Somalia. She replied clearly: no.
Would you want to? I wondered.
No, she said, never. ‘Because I know the problems, I know that my people have been killed there.’
Fatima and thousands of other refugees in the camp did not want to return to Somalia, they wanted to integrate into Kenya. But the Kenyan government was concerned their presence would destabilise communities near the Somali border and as a consequence would not let them move deeper into the country to settle or work.
What that meant, Fatima explained, was that no one from the camp was allowed to travel more than twelve miles from the perimeter. They were stuck there. Fatima was literate, well educated, fluent in English and bursting with capability and promise. It was a positive camp run by caring aid workers, but it was also a forgotten prison. She was trapped in the desert, unable to go home because of conflict and chronic instability in her home country and forbidden from travelling more than a few miles from the camp by the Kenyan government.
While she was stuck, I was moving on, the fundamental difference between us just the place and circumstances of our birth. Backpack over my shoulder, I walked with her to the edge of the camp.
‘This feels so wrong,’ I told her. ‘I’m leaving. I have a British passport which gifts me freedom and a chance to travel. I’m on a journey that will take me around the world and yet you’re stuck here.’
Fatima gazed out across the empty landscape.
‘We call this an open prison, that’s what we normally tell people,’ she said, ‘where we’re free to go just so far and no further. The nearest town is 90 kilometres away and to get there you have to have a vehicle. We don’t have cars and, even if we did, the police would stop us and ask to see our ID cards. We don’t have ID cards so they would know we came from the camp and we’d be sent straight back.’
Fatima had only left the camp twice. Once for a meeting of youth leaders in the town, and once for a volleyball game, of all things. Apart from that, for nearly two decades, she had been stuck out in the desert.
Meeting Fatima hit me like a bolt. I had spent the last couple of months being treated and recovering from malaria and then pondering whether to continue the journey of a lifetime. Yet here was someone denied the most basic freedom of movement. Unable to go home because of conflict in Somalia, Fatima had spent almost her entire life trapped in a tiny patch of desert. Her story haunts me. I remember her every single time I reach for my passport.
Before we met I had felt the compelling joy of travel, but Fatima was tangible proof that travel was still an extraordinary luxury, and an intense privilege. Those of us who can fly must never forget how lucky we are, and that travel is still the preserve of a fortunate minority. Standing with Fatima I thought back to my own dear grandmother, who first sparked my love of discovery with her magical mystery tours in her adapted car. Both women had been trapped by circumstance, while my renewed health and passport now gifted me a licence to explore.
In that moment, I knew I never wanted to stop travelling, and discovering. I knew that for as long as I could I needed to use each journey to enrich my mind, heart and life. I would take chances, go to strange places, and dive into the culture of the world. And I would never take it for granted.
‘Thank you for showing us around,’ I said to Fatima.
‘You’re very welcome,’ she said. ‘Thank you to you and your team. I really appreciate you coming and seeing my home.’
We both smiled. I had a lump in my throat.
My travels along the equator in Africa were coming to an end. But my journeys around the world were just beginning.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robert Kirby and Rosemary Scoular, my lovely agents at United Agents, who encouraged me to put fingers to keyboard to make this book a reality. Rupert Lancaster, the charitable publisher at Hodder and Stoughton, has been badgering me for years to tell a few more tales about my life and travels, so must also share some of the credit and the responsibility. Huge thanks also to Cameron Myers at Hodder, and Natalia Lucas and Kate Walsh at UA.
Jeff Gulvin helped tease out and structure my stories and did much of the initial heavy-lifting for the book. Friends and family carried me along the way, as they have done through so much of life, especially my mum Cindy and my brother James, who both racked their brains to recall and discuss events and moments from what initially felt like a distant past.
This book covers more than three decades of my life, and sadly I cannot express gratitude to everyone who has guided me along the way. You would be reading a phone directory. But to all who have nudged, inspired and encouraged me I thank you from the depths of my heart. Most of all my thanks go to Anya, my wife and partner in life, who has tolerated, supported and inspired me since the day we met, and to our wonderful son Jake, who fills us both with joy and purpose, and to whom I dedicate this book. Love you son.