Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

Out in the Mahikari parcel, pickup trucks delivered seedlings to donkey carts the group had managed to hire, which dispersed them further to pairs of boys with cloth slings, who were loaded up until their backs sagged and they lurched forward to the planting crews. “Arigato!” the planters cried when they arrived. Pape and I walked along beside them, gaping at the efficient supply lines, sweating in the sun. One woman, a leader, followed a few paces behind the advancing army. She stopped at each new seedling, aimed her open palm at its tiny leaves, and nodded beatifically as she beamed in invisible bursts of light energy.

  The jeep was silent on the way back to Widou, the officers still in shock that foreign amateurs—cultists!—could be better than their own. But after a few minutes it began to rain, and our windshield darkened as nearly a season’s worth of water began falling upon the dry Ferlo. The ground was so hard that it couldn’t soak it up, and everywhere puddles grew. The greater good came back into focus. “It is raining,” Pape proclaimed in English, and he smiled at the sky.

  • • •

  IT WAS CARNIVAL when I landed in Malta, and the island nation’s European population packed the streets of its walled capital, Valletta, parading and drinking before the onset of Lent. Confetti littered the cobblestoned streets, and fluorescent floats—cartoonish red hearts, giant white horses, cardboard kings, an apparent mashup of an octopus and the Statue of Liberty—careened past Baroque architecture, flanked by dance troupes. The dancers wore painted masks and angel wings and colors as bright as the floats, and some of the women had powdered their faces pure white. On the main tourist drag, all the shops were shuttered save for an appliance store. Nearby, I saw the first Africans. They stood in the shadows, clutching their new purchases—electric hot plates, phone chargers—and waited for the procession to pass.

  Outside Europe, Malta is known mostly for its Knights: a Catholic military order founded in Jerusalem around the time of the First Crusade, then transplanted here, where they repulsed the Ottoman Empire’s three-month siege in 1565. Six years later, Malta’s powerful fleet formed the backbone of the Holy League, which destroyed the Ottomans’ naval power in the Battle of Lepanto. The Mediterranean was becoming a Muslim sea before the Knights had their victory, and thereafter it was Catholic, Christian. Tiny Malta still commands a search-and-rescue zone far out of proportion to its size, which partly explains why its military intercepts so many migrant boats, so many of which happen to be filled with Muslims. Today, the Knights are headquartered in Rome, a chivalry with sovereignty but no territory, and Malta is traditional, homogeneous, and still Catholic, a near monoculture inhabiting an island almost as dense as Singapore.

  The reality of Malta’s population density—3,360 people per square mile, about one person every fifty feet—hit me when I got lost on a Sunday drive, stuck on a series of ever narrower country roads, but never once lost sight of hikers, farmers, or other cars. I ended up near the airport. The sun was setting, and at every pullout, every patch of gravel big enough to fit a Fiat, men and families had parked their cars. They were packed bumper to bumper, yet the doors were mostly closed, the windows mostly rolled up. Nobody talked or looked at one another, though some people ate fast food. Most were just staring into the distance—enjoying, or trying to enjoy, a private moment.

  Most of the island’s African population was also near the airport, in a cluster of jails and tent camps. I returned to the area one morning to meet with the commander of air, land, and sea operations for the Armed Forces of Malta (AFM). Lieutenant Colonel Emmanuel Mallia was younger than I expected, with slicked-back black hair and a widow’s peak. He wore horn-rimmed glasses that gave him an intellectual air and sat at a wooden desk, where he read off statistics from the screen of a silver Acer computer. It was only February, but the year had already seen 530 arrivals—four boatloads. Big boats. The previous year, 2,775 migrants came, but in eighty-four boats. Small boats. Most of the time, they were spotted before they landed. “It’s practically impossible for a boat to come here and not be seen by someone,” Colonel Mallia said. “If you think you are alone in Malta, think again.” Often, they were towed in by the AFM. The military had a force of seventeen hundred people and a maritime budget of almost $10 million, and among its many duties—defense, presidential protection, airport security—border control was now prime. Intercepting and managing boat people had become 80 percent of its work. Every time the members of the military approached a migrant vessel, it was a negotiation. “If they say they want to go on, they can go on,” Colonel Mallia said. “If they say, ‘We are lost. We need information,’ we give them the information they require. When it is bad weather, they want to be saved, but when it is not, they get picky. So if they don’t want a rescue, we give them life jackets. That’s a lot of life jackets, but it’s the least of our problems.” Whether life jackets emboldened some to push on to Italy in rickety ships, he didn’t speculate. “In summertime water temperatures, you can survive a few hours if you fall in,” he told me. “No more than ten. If you are fit and thin, you are the first to die. But if you are fat . . .” He paused. “Actually, we don’t get fat ones.”

  Of those who did land in Malta, 90 percent applied for asylum. The migrants who won it—about half of the new arrivals, especially those fleeing fighting in Somalia or Sudan—also won early release from detention and access to schools, health care, and other social services. But the rest were stuck. There is no asylum for those fleeing mere economic chaos, let alone environmental chaos. Under international law, there is still officially no such thing as an environmental or climate refugee. Migrants denied asylum when I was in Malta before the Arab Spring—Tunisians, Egyptians, Malians, Nigerians, Senegalese—went straight from eighteen months in jail to “open center” tent camps: halfway houses with canvas walls. They were free to come and go as they pleased—but not, of course, to leave Malta, not according to the EU. The open centers I saw looked rather like Sukyo Mahikari’s camp in the Ferlo, only surrounded by factories, and they seemed oddly permanent.

  Among native Maltese, xenophobia was bubbling up in the street and on Internet message boards. The island’s fear of being overrun had led to arson attacks on Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), which helps the migrants with asylum applications. JRS’s director, Joseph Cassar, told me how someone had set fire to their young lawyer’s front door, then her car. Other cars were scratched with keys and had their tires slashed, and inside the nonprofit’s compound, which was itself once attacked with Molotov cocktails, six vehicles were burned “until there was nothing left, just the metal shell.” A short-lived political party, Azzjoni Nazzjonali—National Action—was trying to channel the fear into electoral power by pledging to clean Malta of “dirt, corruption, and migrants.” The party’s co-founder Josie Muscat, a doctor who ran private clinics in Hungary and Libya, complained about the taxpayer money the migrants were wasting. “If they break something in the detention center, they should have to live with it,” he told me. “If we’re giving them food and water, they should do some kind of work—like fixing roads. I say we keep them in there and don’t let them out until they say they’re ready to go home.”

  Before leaving Malta, I had a tour of one of its “closed centers,” where migrants did time for their accidental arrival on the island. The Safi Barracks were inside a military base, and after I cleared security, I found myself staring at a field filled with dandelions and more than a hundred haphazardly stacked boats. Cookie-cutter wooden vessels perhaps twenty feet long and scarcely seaworthy enough for three passengers, let alone thirty, they were the previous year’s model from the human-smuggling syndicates of Libya. A soldier led me deeper into the base, to where the men he called “clandestini” were held.

  The two-story barracks, the site of periodic riots, had a new ring of chain-link fence, and I walked inside flanked by four guards. The biggest among them soon stopped to admonish the Africans in broken English: Using power strips, they had plugged seven hot plates and the floor�
��s only television set into a single electrical outlet. “You will burn the wire!” he yelled, but then the power shorted out anyway, and another soldier walked off to find the fuse box. At one end of the open-air hallway was a makeshift Ping-Pong table: a piece of plywood resting on a trash can, with a net made of a long strip of cardboard propped up by two milk cartons. Only the paddles and ball were real. When the TV came back on, it was playing Maury Povich, and a dozen men stood in the cold February air to watch, crossing their arms and hunching over to stay warm. Detainees often fought over television channels, I was told, but not today, and when I interrupted the show to ask where they were from, they proudly recited their home countries. Ivory Coast. Ghana. Nigeria. Mali. Guinea. There were no Somalis or Darfuris here—only West Africans, whose chances of winning asylum were slim. There were eighty-two men on this floor, and there were four rooms, which were kept warm mostly by body heat and the thin, military-issue wool blankets they hung over the windows. Inside the rooms were bunk beds, and some of the men had pulled mattresses onto the floor so they could sit and play cards or checkers, the latter using dried orange peels and a piece of cardboard. I was embarrassed to be reminded of my own first trips to Europe: The rooms looked and smelled like a youth hostel.

  When my French failed and the Ivorians drifted off, two Nigerians, Tony and Kelvin, became my guides. Tony told me he had traveled through Libya, where robberies and random beatings made it dangerous to be a black man out in public. (It would become more dangerous during the revolution against Gadhafi, when sub-Saharan Africans were assumed to all be mercenaries.) Tony was a mechanic and had spent 5,000 mostly borrowed dollars to go to Italy—only he’d ended up here instead. “We stay in detention for one year, and after we get no document,” he said. “Do you understand? No travel document. One year. Three hundred sixty-five days make a year. Do you understand?” He led me into his dorm, where graffiti covered a wall: “Jesus, have mercy, oh Lord” and “How long you keep us here?” The authorities provided a rough soccer pitch out back, Tony said, plus calling cards for his floor’s communal phone: 5 euros to every migrant every three months. The detention was survivable, just pointless. When it was over, he would be released on the streets, not sent back to Nigeria. He would just be older. “Everyone here, he has something,” he said. “Maybe he is a student, maybe a technician. I am a mechanic. Say I stay here one year. I lose some skills—I have to train three to four months just to be ready again. One year. Do you understand?”

  Tony and Kelvin and a growing crowd of men led me to the bathrooms, where they pointed out broken stalls and showerheads. “See, this is our bath,” Kelvin said. “Cold water. It is not good. It is not fair.” Another man tapped me on the shoulder. “Ten months,” he said. “Ten months I am here.” Another walked me to the sinks. “No hot water,” he said. I turned on a faucet and let it run for a minute, then I tested it with my hand. To be fair to Malta, it was lukewarm.

  The guards and I were walking out when one of the Ivorians stopped us. He was older than most of the others, a muscular man in his mid-thirties, and he asked me to look at his arms. “I was very strong before,” he said. “I want to work—not sleep. I do not want to sleep.” I looked at his arms. His voice rose, but he didn’t yell. “I work,” he said. “I work! I want to work.”

  • • •

  WHEN THE RAIN STOPPED in the Ferlo, it was covered with peach fuzz—green grass that briefly made everything seem alive. Local village youths and a crew from Senegal’s foresters’ union, who had often faced off in soccer matches in the red dirt and goat shit outside the research station, were suddenly combined to plant what Pape called la Grande Parcelle: the summer’s largest swath of Great Green Wall at 4,950 acres. Whether it was the rain or the competition with the Mahikaris, the leaders seemed energized. Pape mapped out supply lines. Mara, watching the workers sweat one sweltering afternoon in government-provided T-shirts—“We plant trees to fight the desert”—had an epiphany. “We should not give them shirts,” he declared. “We should give them hats.”

  The Mahikaris finished their parcel a day and a half early: 125 children planted 1,468 acres in five days. “Motivation—that’s what they have,” Mara said. “Discipline,” said Pape. He and a lieutenant were asked to give speeches at the group’s closing ceremony, which they gladly did, thanking Monsieur Président for bringing the first true international aid to the Great Green Wall. “One day you will be able to say to your children: I helped build the Great Green Wall!” said the lieutenant. “Thank you for your rigor, your courage, your discipline, your sacrifice,” yelled Pape. “You are valiant people. This is one part of a wall that will cross all of Africa. This is the first step!” The Mahikaris, who were standing in formation in their Sunday best—blue jackets, red kerchiefs, white skirts for the ladies, white pants for the men, and white tennis shoes for all—then broke into song about “a wall to Djibouti . . . ici au Sénégal.” They paraded around camp, goose-stepping past a crowd of Fulani villagers who had come for the send-off. We stayed long enough to watch them take down the tents. When a metal crossbeam fell on one girl’s head, her friends tried to put a compress on the resulting goose egg. One of the leaders pushed them away. With the friends looking anxiously on, the woman held her palm a few inches from the girl’s forehead, and in beamed more light energy.

  The Great Green Wall might have been futile against the Sahara, but that did not stop Pape from wanting to believe it could be done. Increasingly, I found myself wanting to believe it, too. When the trucks left early one morning for the Grande Parcelle, overloaded with trees and workers, I decided to ride along in one of the water tankers. Combined, the villagers and the foresters’ union youths formed a hundred-meter-wide army when we reached the parcel, and they attacked fifteen trenches at a time: diggers up front, followed by tree carriers, followed by the largest contingent, the planters. They marched forward in their sandals and disintegrating tennis shoes, advancing so quickly across the savanna that I had to jog to keep up. A green Toyota pickup with a bed full of seedlings drove between the trenches, and when it stopped, the tree carriers swarmed it, then dispersed: expand, contract, expand, contract, like a jellyfish.

  The Toyota was out of trees after little more than an hour, and we waited as the sun rose higher in the sky. Most of another hour passed before there was a resupply, and after twenty minutes we ran out again. The officers grimaced. We found refuge in a cluster of grown trees, fifteen groups in fifteen patches of shade, and the planters, who carried razor blades to remove the seedlings’ plastic wrappings, now clenched them in their teeth. They took turns examining my hiking boots, rubbing the leather and tapping at the Vibram soles. We had nothing to drink until the tanker truck arrived, nothing to do until the next load of trees arrived after a two-hour break. It was noon. It was hot. The hotter it got, the slower we went, and it was no one’s fault: the Grande Parcelle was too far from the nursery for an easy resupply, and there weren’t enough trucks, because there wasn’t enough money, because there weren’t enough people who cared to see the Great Green Wall become reality.

  Pape soon appeared in his jeep, and he still seemed hopeful. When the tanker truck started up again, preparing to head deeper into the parcel, one of the boys, barely a teenager, rushed over to get a final drink. He grabbed a big red plastic cup and filled it to the brim, but he got only one sip before Pape yelled over at him. “Eh, eh,” said the colonel, and he pointed at a newly planted row of Great Green Wall. The boy didn’t protest. He dumped the rest of the water on an acacia seedling, silently watching it pool around the base of the tree and sink into the earth.

  PART THREE

  THE DELUGE

  A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.

  —Jared Diamond

  NINE

  GREAT WALL OF INDIA

  WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE BANGLADESH PROBLEM

  Enamul Hoque was an Assamese lord, albei
t a minor one, and not long before we met, half his family’s land had been washed away when the Brahmaputra River changed course. In his lifetime, he had already been forced to move his home five times. He was thirty-seven. He had a mustache and a slight overbite, and at night, when he lit candles to deal with the frequent power outages, he showed a fondness for whiskey and cigarettes. He was soon to marry a beautiful young girl, a Muslim like him. Until then, he rented a small house near the law college in the northeastern Indian city of Dhubri, where he had a bathroom filled with enormous spiders, a servant with whom he proudly spoke the indigenous Goalpariya language, and a set of maps showing border emplacements, fences, boundary roads, and guard outposts. His life was dedicated to sealing off Dhubri and the rest of his home state of Assam from the people everyone here called “infiltrators”: Bangladeshis who snuck across the border for economic opportunity or to escape their own country’s host of natural and social disasters, including cyclones, overpopulation, seasonal famines, and especially rising waters that ate away at land and crops.

  By the time it crashes into India’s restive northeast, the Brahmaputra has cascaded almost seventeen thousand feet from its Himalayan headwaters. From Dhubri, it has just a hundred more feet to lose before reaching sea level—but it has to snake four hundred miles through neighboring Bangladesh before actually reaching the sea. This cannot be done quickly or directly. The formerly steep, clear river is at Dhubri flatter and broader and browner than ever before, and it carries more sediment than almost any other on the planet. It is five miles wide, and it is constantly jumping its banks. Considering its former location, Enamul’s ancestral land was surely carried downstream across the border, where it might well have become part of a new riverine island and been claimed by Bangladeshi farmers who had lost their own land—an irony he chose not to focus on.