A Man of Good Hope

by Jonny Steinberg

  His memory clouds. He no longer distinguishes the hours from the days. What he does recall becomes very abstract. He remembers one network of people fading and another coming into focus. The cafeteria women disappeared. Their alliance was not one designed for emergencies. Their mutual business was survival, and a woman down did not help at all. The network that appeared, as if from nowhere, was kin: Yindy’s father’s kin. Asad had not seen any of them around when Yindy was well. He did not know that they existed. It was a matter of life and death that drew them. From deep within the lives of the refugees, it seemed, a set of unwritten rules of conduct was rising, rules that nobody had thought out or said aloud but that took shape around each new moment. The prospect of Yindy’s death had summoned them from nowhere. They arrived and took control.

  There was no doctor to be found, and so the search became one for antibiotics. Some were located, and they were duly fed to Yindy at intervals, but it was not long before she had swallowed them all. And so another search was convened. It was said that in the countryside around Afmadow were nomads. They had never had Western medicine, but they had always had deep wounds, and so they would know what to do.

  Some days after Yindy was shot, an old man appeared and took command of the patient. He stank something terrible, a stale, fetid smell that made Asad want to retch. His bag was made from the same cloth as the clothes he was wearing. Such were the ways of the nomads, people who made all their possessions from the same material and who knew nothing of baths and soap.

  The old man unfolded his bag until it was a flat square laid out on the ground. It had many different compartments. From one of them he took a knife, from another several sticks. From a third emerged a long piece of rope. He put a flame to the knife and held it there a moment or two. Then he ran it down each side of Yindy’s damaged leg, leaving two long stripes of bright red blood.

  There were as many as half a dozen people around her body, and all Asad could see of her were her legs. It dawned on him that these people were waiting; they were waiting until Yindy’s pain was so great that they would have to press her down. Would it take six people to keep Yindy still? Is that how badly this old man was going to hurt her?

  As if on cue, the old man instructed everyone to hold Yindy tight. His voice was high-pitched like a bird’s, but nonetheless commanding. He lifted Yindy’s leg a little, took her toe in his hand, and pulled it hard. She screamed.

  “It was very cruel,” Asad recalls. “He was handling her roughly. He was not treating her like an injured person. I could not see her face, but her cries were terrible, terrible. The old man was trying everything. He massaged her leg. He tapped it with his stick. Eventually, he put a piece of cardboard on either side of her calf, then put a stick up against each piece of cardboard. Then he bound the whole thing together with ropes.”

  He instructed that nobody touch the contraption until he returned. He folded up his bag, tucked it under his arm, and walked briskly into the street. He did not say when he would be back. Asad stared at the material that the old man had left on Yindy’s leg—the cardboard, the sticks, the rope. In the things that the nomad left behind were traces of his smell. Now Yindy would be stuck with it. Whenever she breathed, she would take into her nose and mouth the memory of this awful man.

  The tone of Asad’s voice brings into my car the anger his younger self had felt. He was a boy from Mogadishu, an urban boy; between himself and those who lived in the countryside he wanted to draw a bold line. And yet, among the memories he took with him from Mogadishu was a fragment from a family poem. He does not remember it well. It went something like this: “We were tired of wandering, wandering, wandering. And so we settled. We settled in one place to farm. It was a place called Fadhadhi.”

  “The poem refers to my grandfather’s time,” Asad tells me. “It was my grandfather Abdullahi who settled at this place called Fadhadhi. He was the first member of the family who was not a nomad. He was therefore the beginning, the beginning of what we are now.”

  “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, t
hey 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

  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 nongovernmental 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 nongovernmental 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.

&
nbsp; “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.