Touch the Sun

by Emily Conolan

  What is the point of having something so beautiful in a place like this? you think bitterly. It just makes everything else look uglier.

  YOU’VE BEEN IN Dadaab for months, learning how to survive and get by. Sometimes you hear rumours that al-Shabaab agents are mixed in among the camp’s population – plotting, spying, and recruiting – so you don’t tell anyone the story of why you’re here. When you tell the UNHCR your story, you simply say that you were fleeing the famine.

  You and Jamilah keep your heads down and blend in, and you feel safer here than anywhere else you’ve been so far. However, you still often lie awake at night, filled with a restless frustration. I can’t stay in Dadaab forever, you think. I have to get in touch with Aadan; I have to investigate Bright Dream.

  But you know now, from talking to people around the camp, that most people simply run out of options and never leave Dadaab. There are people of your parents’ generation who were born here, Somalis who’ve never set foot in Somalia. The only way to get from here to a truly safe place is to wait for the UNHCR to resettle you in an overseas country, but getting a resettlement place is like winning the lottery.

  If only you could call Sampson, or use a computer to contact Aadan. But the only computers and phones here in Dadaab are impossibly expensive to use.

  Some people starve themselves and sell their rations in the marketplace as a way of making money. Maybe you will have to try doing that. I have the pen, you always think, but I can’t sell that.

  One day an idea occurs to you, so simple you can’t believe you haven’t thought of it before now: I could sell half the pen – the writing half – and keep the part with the ruby and the memory stick!

  You send Jamilah off to school the next morning but skip class yourself. You don’t want to tell her about your plan until it works and you have some really good news for her.

  Dadaab’s central market, nicknamed ‘Bosnia’, is a sprawling labyrinth of dirt footpaths and trestle tables piled high with goods, from tomatoes to baby clothes to glistening lumps of camel meat. It buzzes with the voices of stallholders hawking their wares, the squawking of chickens destined for the chop, the clunking of vans being unloaded, and the occasional trill of a bicycle bell as a rider weaves through the crowd.

  Most of the market has a makeshift ceiling of plastic bags and rags to keep out the desert sun, and you very quickly become disoriented in the maze of crowded tunnels. You have no idea who would be a trustworthy person to approach about selling your half-pen.

  A mountain of potatoes atop a wildly weaving wheelbarrow charges towards you. The load is so huge that you can’t even see the person pushing it.

  You jump out of the way just in time, and a wiry, sweating man in a red T-shirt shouts, ‘Make way, make way!’ as he throws his full bodyweight into the load.

  You watch, amazed by the spectacle. Just at that moment, the wheelbarrow-pusher swerves violently and only just manages to right his load in time. He shouts angrily at a man with a huge sack who got in his way – then, to your horror, he smacks the man across the face, making him drop his sack, before charging on.

  You run to the man who was hit. ‘Are you all right?’ you ask in Somali.

  But then you realise he isn’t Somali – his skin is pitch-black and he has tribal scars on his forehead. Maybe he’s Sudanese, you think, and try asking again in Arabic.

  He smiles. ‘I’m all right, thanks kid,’ he replies, in accented Arabic. ‘That’ll teach me for getting in the way of a stampeding herd of potatoes.’

  You laugh and begin to help him pick up the contents of his sack: used cans, bottles and other bits of rubbish. Then you notice that he reaches for the rubbish with only one hand: the other arm ends in a gum-pink stump at the wrist. You gasp in horror, then feel embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, kid,’ he says kindly. ‘I’m Jok.’ He offers you his left hand, and you shake it awkwardly. Jok picks up the now-full sack at its neck, and swings it over his shoulder.

  ‘You ever see any cans or bottles lying around here, you bring them right to me, okay?’ he grins.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because I’m Scavenger Jok, that’s why. I collect stuff. Everything in my sack gets used again or sold. That’s how I get by. I’ll give you a coin if you bring me something good.’

  A coin! you think. Maybe I won’t have to sell half the pen after all.

  You spend the rest of the day running all over the camp hunting down anything that could be reused or recycled: tin, string, screws, half a plastic thong, the tough blue tape from around the food supply boxes.

  ‘You have a good eye for scavenging,’ Jok tells you at the end of the day when you find him again. He hands you a Kenyan five-shilling coin: not nearly enough to make a phone call, but a good start. ‘Still, I think you should have been in school today, no?’ You shrug. ‘I have more important things to do.’

  ‘Ha!’ Jok shouts. ‘Nothing is more important than getting an education, kid – d’you hear me?’

  He squeezes your hand strongly with his good one.

  ‘Come back and find me at Bosnia over the weekend, if you want to make more money. But don’t you show up during school time, or I’ll put you in my sack and carry you there myself!’

  Smiling, you promise.

  AFTER SCHOOL AND on weekends over the next couple of months, you and Jamilah become Scavenger Jok’s sidekicks. Your aim is to make three hundred Kenyan shillings for phone calls and computer access, and you’re steadily getting there.

  Jamilah is even faster and sharper-eyed than you are at finding rubbish for Jok, and in your wanderings, you see a lot of the camp. Doing this work for Jok makes you feel like nothing is wasted: everything has a purpose. Jok sometimes tells you stories of life in his home county, or Sudanese folktales, but you’re too shy to ask how he lost his hand.

  Dadaab will always be dusty, and dry, and crowded, but now you begin to see how hard people here try to get ahead – how resourceful they are. You begin to admire the mothers lugging babies on their hips, the porters from Bosnia market bent double under sacks of charcoal, the imam whose mosque is a tin shed but who carries on blessing the newly born and the dying every day.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ you say to Jok one day. ‘Everyone here lives in tents and huts with no windows. It isn’t safe to cut a hole in the wall or canvas to let in light, and there isn’t any glass to make a window that you can open and close. So it’s always dark and dingy inside.’

  ‘That’s true,’ agrees Jok.

  ‘What if we use some of these bottles to make a light?’ you say, holding up a plastic bottle half full of water. You’ve been throwing and catching it as you walk, noticing how the light sparkles from it. ‘If you had one of these water bottles in your ceiling, it would catch the light and beam it all over your hut.’

  ‘Wow – good idea!’ Jok exclaims. ‘Let’s try it on my hut first.’

  You, Jok and Jamilah rush back to Jok’s hut to try it out. His wife, a curvy, brightly dressed woman called Adut who is always kind to you, is very sceptical about cutting a hole in their roof, but Jok convinces her.

  Together, you and Jok carefully use a rusty pair of tin-snips to cut a hole the right size in Jok’s roof. Jok tips more water into the bottle until it’s full, and Adut thinks to add some soap powder to keep the water from stagnating. Jok then tightens the lid, and inserts the upright bottle into the hole. Jamilah squeals happily. ‘It works, it works!’

  ‘This is amazing!’ exclaims Jok. Light is filtering through the bottle and now illuminates the inside of his hut. ‘It’s so simple!’

  You climb onto his roof, seal around the edges of the hole with some melted plastic, and the job is done.

  ‘Everyone should have one of these!’ says Adut. ‘I know my friends will all want one.’

  And she’s right. Some people copy the idea and make their own bottle lights for free, but many more pay you and Jok to provide the bottle and install it for them.
>
  By the end of that week, you have enough money to use a phone and a computer.

  I’ve done it, you think triumphantly. And I still have the whole pen. I’ll call Sampson tomorrow after school.

  The thought that you might be talking to Sampson, and then Aadan in Australia, by the end of tomorrow makes your stomach dance.

  That night, you dig in the dirt in the corner of your tent and take out the pen. There’s just enough moonlight coming through the tent’s doorway to write with, and there’s a piece of paper in your pocket – a label from one of the bottles you picked up earlier.

  You write with the pen for the first time. A poem that has been forming in your mind these last few days now flows like quicksilver onto the back of the label.

  I HAVE A DREAM

  A dream that will never fail.

  Wasn’t every successful person

  Once a dreamer like me?

  Wasn’t every great tree that the wind blows

  Once a tiny seed?

  My dreams are just like a seed

  Fallen on a rocky path.

  My journey is long

  But I do not waver.

  Every day of my life is a page of my history.

  Every day the seed spreads its roots.

  Every step that I take is a move

  Towards my glorious destiny.

  As the seed becomes a tree

  It’s not where I am

  But how I’m growing that matters.

  Now listen carefully to these words of wisdom:

  Stop watching your dreams fall.

  Fight.

  Fight.

  Fight for your dreams.

  Fall down seven times and get up eight times.

  Wasn’t every successful person once a dreamer like me?

  Wasn’t every great tree that the wind blows

  Once a tiny seed?

  To read an interview with Hani Abdile, the young Somali woman who really wrote this poem, click here.

  To read a fact file on bottle-lights and other great inventions, and find out who really invented the plastic bottle-light, click here.

  To continue with the story, go to scene 18.

  The next morning, you leave for school in high spirits, knowing that by the afternoon, you’ll at least be talking to Sampson, if not Aadan in Australia too.

  Because Jamilah is young, she finishes school before you do, so you’ve told her you’ll meet her back at the tent that afternoon, then you’ll go together to make the call.

  You’re tempted to skip school and call right now, but you promised Jok you wouldn’t skip class for any reason. You and Jamilah feel like part of his family now, so you take that promise seriously. Jok and Adut had their own children, six of them, but they were all out collecting water when Sudanese terrorists – the Janjaweed – rode into their village and torched it. Adut and Jok had no choice but to run, and they never saw their children again. They don’t know if they are dead or alive.

  Unfortunately, not everyone thinks as highly of Jok as you do: his one hand, his distinctive looks, his job picking up rubbish, and his Sudanese background in a mainly Somali camp have all marked him as an outsider.

  There’s a group of four boys in your class, the rudest and cockiest ones, who think they’re better than everyone else, because they were born here in Dadaab. They have noticed your friendship with Jok, and they tease you for it, calling him One-hand Jok and you Jok’s Other Hand, or just Stink Boy. They hold their noses when you enter the room, and pick on you any chance they get.

  Today, you’re dismayed to see when you arrive that the only spot left to sit on the concrete floor is right next to them. The tallest boy, Yasir, tries to trip you as you walk past him, and the others snigger.

  As the lesson begins, Dayib, who always wears a yellow baseball hat that says ‘Michigan General Motors’ on it, drops a note in your lap. It has a poem scrawled on it.

  One-hand Jok, One-hand Jok,

  smells like the rubbish that’s in his sack.

  One-hand Jok, One-hand Jok,

  ugliest of ugly and blackest of the black.

  Jok’s Other Hand also smells like poo.

  We guess his mummy must have crapped him out, too.

  You hate how these boys are racist towards Jok like that. But if they want you to get upset at a stupid prejudiced poem about poo, of all things, they have another think coming.

  ‘At least call it by its real name,’ you whisper, and you cross out ‘poo’ and scribble a really foul Somali swearword for diarrhoea over the top. After all you’ve been through, it’s not like you’re going to fall apart and cry over a rude poem.

  But it gets worse. The teacher sees you pass the note and gives both you and General Motors a strong smack across the palm with a bamboo cane, in front of the whole class. The humiliation hurts more than the cane.

  The four boys corner you after class that day, just as you’re in a desperate rush to get away and make the phone call.

  ‘Did you leave Somalia because of the famine, Stink Boy? No wonder you’ve got legs like sticks and your brain rattles around in your head!’

  ‘Is that why you walk around picking up rubbish? You think it will be good to eat? Num num num!’

  ‘Here, eat this, Stink Boy!’ A shower of pebbles and dirt patters over you.

  ‘Eat this!’ A larger stone strikes your shin.

  Their nasty taunts make you ball up your fists, and a fire is growing in your belly – you want to crush them like bugs! But you really can’t afford to be held up today.

  Then you remember you have a pocketful of the coins you’ve been saving for the phone calls. Instead of fighting them, you could throw one on the ground – they would all dive for it, and you could get away. But that would leave you short for the calls …

  To fight the gang, go to scene 19.

  To try to distract the boys with money, go to scene 22.

  The sparks in your belly are leaping higher and higher, now fuelled by a bonfire of rage. You won’t risk your hard-earned money. You’re ready for a fight. But you have something to say first.

  ‘You think you’re better than me somehow because you were born here?’ you shout. ‘Think that makes you special? Big deal! It doesn’t!’

  ‘Shut up, Stink Boy,’ sneers Yasir. ‘You have nothing. No family, no girlfriend, no future.’

  You don’t let it show, but the taunt about your family cuts you inside. The loss of Aunty Rahama is still a raw, aching hole that never goes away. Then you think of Jamilah, and a fierce, protective love burns even brighter than the fire inside you.

  ‘I have more than you could ever dream of! I have my sister, and we’re going to Australia! You know nothing about me! You think I’m some useless kid, but I escaped from al-Shabaab! They killed my Aunty Rahama because she was an awesome journalist who knew secrets that could destroy them! What does your mum do?’

  ‘Don’t you talk about my mum, you little piece of crap,’ snarls General Motors, advancing towards you. His three friends also raise their fists.

  You fly at them, and you’re soon tangled in a net of fists and yells. In no time you’re down on the ground, sand in your eyes.

  You feel some of your coins tumble out of your pocket onto the ground and hope desperately that they don’t notice them, but they do. All five of you are now scrabbling in the dirt, trying to grab as many coins as you can.

  Then Yasir shouts, ‘Teacher!’ and they all leap up and scatter, leaving you alone in the dust.

  You sit up and take juddering breaths until you can breathe easily again. You managed to grab most of the coins, but you’re about a hundred shillings down now – a third of all your and Jamilah’s hard work. You put your hand to your face and feel a puffy warm lump around one eye.

  Jamilah looks scared when you get home and she takes in the sight of you. You fill her in on what happened in a dull voice. Then you lie down and close your eyes, your mess of disappointment and anger fading into a bone-heavy
tiredness, and you don’t wake again until after dark.

  When you wake, the first thing you see is Jamilah’s small shoulders under her blanket next to you. She hears you stir and sits up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asks in a little voice.

  ‘I feel fine,’ you lie. ‘What about you? It’s late, did you eat dinner?’

  ‘I had it at Aunty’s,’ she replies. Jamilah has found a friend – a Somali woman who lives several tents down from yours, who Jamilah calls Aunty. Aunty’s children died in the famine, and she seems very attached to Jamilah. She sings her songs and gives her little treats, like a pencil for school, a piece of dried fruit, or a shiny bangle. Jamilah adores her.

  ‘Okay then,’ you say. You lie back down and think about the fact that your shirt is now crusty with dirt. It’s your only one. You will have to miss a morning of school tomorrow to try to wash it properly with the little water you have in your tent.

  You manage to make it to school by the next afternoon, in a clean-ish shirt. You take a seat on the other side of the room from the boys, and you ignore each other. After school, you rush out to avoid them, going straight to Jok’s hut and making a start on working through the long list of people waiting for one of your bottle-lamps.

  When you get back to your tent around dinnertime, Jamilah isn’t there. She must be at Aunty’s. You walk down to get her.

  Sure enough, there’s Aunty, braiding Jamilah’s hair and singing a soothing song. Jamilah looks worried. Her little brow is furrowed, and she’s twisting her fingers around her skirt. There are thin lines of dried-up tears on her cheeks.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ you ask.

  She doesn’t reply. Aunty does. ‘Tsk, you should have been home this afternoon. Poor little Jamilah needed you.’