Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  I was surprised to learn that our plane would first stop briefly in Nairobi, which made me excited and anxious. Excited because my brother lived there, and soon I hoped to be there myself, even though I knew I could not leave the airport that day. Anxious because some other passengers were telling stories of Somalis being taken off their flights in Nairobi and interrogated inside the airport. Some disappeared forever. To be young and from Somalia was like being a drug dealer who is being watched constantly by law enforcement.

  After two hours we landed in Nairobi. I could tell this airport was very different from Mogadishu. It was much bigger, and there were airplanes from all over the world—Air France, British Airways, EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines, many others. The runway was not pocked with bomb holes. From the windows of the transit hall I could see airport shops and men dressed in suits hurrying to flights. “Maybe someday I would wear a suit,” I thought. I could not wait to get to this city.

  I tried making some calls to Team Abdi, but my Somalia SIM card turned out to be useless in Kenya, and soon I was back on the plane, headed for Kampala. I found out later that the team was extremely worried. Al-Shabaab had recently targeted Kampala with twin bombings that killed nearly a hundred people at a soccer match. The attacks were revenge for the Ugandan military presence in Somalia, and Uganda had been on the alert since then. While I was flying, Team Abdi was working behind the scenes to ensure I would not be arrested at Entebbe Airport or turned away from the Kenyan border, but no official in either country seemed able to guarantee my passage.

  The sun was just dipping below the horizon as the plane banked over Lake Victoria and descended to Entebbe Airport. Below me was the source of the Nile, the river that flowed all the way to the Mediterranean—the gateway to Europe and beyond. Somehow this was comforting and made me feel closer to safety and freedom. In fact I was a long way from either.

  * * *

  —

  All the Somalis on the flight were directed to go into one of the waiting halls. There were no seats. Pregnant women, crying children, elderly people who seemed sick and weak, we all sat on the hard airport floor. Again my phone had no service. I paced back and forth wondering what was happening. Every now and then an officer would walk up to me and say, “You! Sit down.”

  Hours passed. No one came. Other passengers, wearing nice clothes and transiting to other countries in Europe and North America, walked past us. None of us cared, we were Somalis and used to this. At least we were lying on a floor made of tiles, not a dusty road with dogs and graves. I was so tired I fell asleep on the floor with a bunch of other Somalis. It was past midnight when an officer with a cell phone in his hand stood above us and spoke. I was only half awake and thought I was dreaming when he said, “Who is Abdi Iftin?”

  Everyone woke up. And every man raised his hand. Everyone was Abdi Iftin. It was like the movie Spartacus. Of course I raised my hand too. But the officer, who didn’t much care who was Abdi Iftin, turned to someone else. “Are you Abdi Iftin? Come with me.”

  The young man and the officer were leaving when I dashed after them.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I am Abdi Iftin.”

  The officer scowled, then demanded to see our tickets and passports. When he determined I was the right one, I followed him into a tiny room. Without saying anything, he handed me a phone.

  “Hey, Abdi. How are you?”

  It was Ben Bellows in Nairobi. He had called the airport to assure the authorities that I had a place to stay for the night and that I had a bus ticket for Kenya in the morning. Somalis were being held at the airport because the Ugandan government could not determine if they were leaving Uganda within twenty-four hours; indeed, many of my fellow passengers had told me they had no intention of leaving Uganda. They were essentially being imprisoned at the airport. Ben said Team Abdi had made me a reservation to spend the night at a Kampala hotel, and my bus ticket to Nairobi was waiting for me there. Someone from the hotel had been waiting for hours outside the airport, holding a sign with my name on it. She had finally left, said Ben.

  “Fifty dollars, please!” the officer said to me.

  I paid for the visa, which probably included a bribe to the officer. At one in the morning, my passport stamped for a twenty-four-hour visit, I walked out of the airport into the dark night. I shivered in the strange cold, something I had never felt; even though Entebbe Airport lies almost exactly on the equator, it is four thousand feet above sea level. Immediately, I was surrounded by a scrum of taxi drivers shouting at me in Swahili and English. I was so cold and hungry I just felt frozen in place.

  Then came another piece of good luck. At that moment a middle-aged man shoved his way through the crowd of drivers and spoke to me in Somali.

  “Are you Abdi Iftin?”

  “Yes!”

  He grabbed my hand and dragged me out, yelling to the drivers in Swahili, “Get away from him! He’s my friend!”

  I had never met this friend, but he was Somali and also spoke Swahili, so I went along as he whispered in my ear: “They will charge you a lot of money. Don’t listen to them. They want to rip you off.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “There was a beautiful woman who was standing here with your name on a sign. She left. I figured it must be you.” He kept talking as we walked to his own taxi. “What do you do? Are you a businessman?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Apparently, he had never seen a Somali with his name on a sign held by a beautiful woman at the airport. He thought I was someone with a lot of money. We got in his car and he pushed a cassette tape into the player—Somali music! I had not heard it in so long. He told me his name was Aleey and he had left Somalia ten years earlier. He had crossed into Kenya, then moved to Kampala, where life was more hospitable for Somalis, though that was changing with the recent al-Shabaab attacks.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Let’s eat here.”

  He pulled over at a small late-night kiosk and ordered a soda and a mandazi, a type of fried bread. I ordered the same thing. He asked me to pay for it. I pulled out my last ten-dollar bill.

  “Oh, you have to change the money,” he said. He took me to a nearby exchange center where I converted the American bill into Ugandan shillings.

  “I need a SIM card,” I told him as we ate. “Do you know a place where I can buy one?”

  “I will take you there.”

  As we drove to the Somali neighborhood in Kampala called Kisenyi, he put on some brand-new Somali music: Farhia Fiska’s “Desire for Love.” Farhia was a former Somali refugee who had made it to London and started recording songs that Somalis loved. Aleey turned it up loud; there were no Islamists to cut off his hand.

  All the shops were closed, and the streets were empty. I was afraid there would be no place to buy a SIM card. But Aleey pulled up in front of a darkened store and banged on the door. A sleepy Somali opened the gate and started yelling at him.

  “Why are you waking me up after midnight? I just went to sleep, man!”

  It was Aleey’s brother and this was his shop, so it was okay. Minutes later I had a Uganda SIM card that would also work in Kenya, and five dollars of talk time. “Now you can call your friends,” he said. “Where are you staying?”

  “It’s called the Shalom Guest House.”

  “Oh! What? No, no, that is not possible! What do you do, my friend?”

  He explained that he had driven many rich white people to this hotel but never a Somali. Then again he had never heard a Somali speak English like me. He felt sure I must have just flown in from London, and he refused to believe my story. I understood. I could hardly believe it myself.

  On the way to the hotel I called Hassan, then Ben, Sharon, Cori, Paul, and Dick. Everyone was so relieved that I had made it safely to Uganda. Aleey dropped me at the guesthouse, and
we exchanged phone numbers. He waved good-bye. “I will come for you tomorrow to show you around town,” he said.

  I walked up to the receptionist, who handed me the key to my room. She said they had been expecting me much earlier. She knew nothing about my struggles. My room had big glass windows and a huge TV screen. There was a freshly made king-size bed, bigger than my mom’s entire hut in the camp. And a shower. On a desk was a sealed envelope with my name on it. Inside was a bus ticket to Nairobi and three hundred dollars in cash. Ben had a friend in Kampala who had dropped it at the hotel.

  I was so tired, but I felt I needed to get clean before I could sleep. I stood there in the shower wondering why there was no bucket, and what all the knobs did. I turned one and was surprised when water dropped from a nozzle like a stream, cold and scary. I went down to ask the receptionist for a bucket. She laughed. “You don’t need a bucket,” she said. “I will show you.”

  Back in the room, the lady showed me how to work the knobs and make the water come out nice and warm. Hot water without starting a fire! I felt kind of stupid but I thanked her and she left. Then I stripped and stood under that water and turned the knob until it was steaming hot. I stood there for a long time, in a trance, washing away the dirt and blood and pain of Mogadishu. I stood there until all that hot water was gone.

  13

  Little Mogadishu

  I woke up late with the TV remote still in my hand. I must have fallen asleep watching movies. There were many missed calls on my phone from Team Abdi. Time was running short. I had to leave Uganda that night for Kenya. Everyone was still worried.

  I called Aleey, the taxi driver. He said he was already waiting for me at the hotel reception. I threw on my clothes—no bag to pack—and went downstairs. There were several white people getting ready for their day of tourism in Uganda. They had fancy backpacks, and they were stuffing them with hats, sunscreen, lunches, and water bottles. We got into Aleey’s taxi, and I told him to take me to the bus station. He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Don’t take the bus!” he said. “It’s a trap! They will find you at the border and send you back to Uganda, and then Uganda will put you on a flight to Mogadishu. They have done this to so many people I know.”

  By now I felt I could trust Aleey, but I said I had no other options.

  “I know a better way,” he said. “You can catch a ride on a tanker truck to the border. There after nightfall you can take a boda-boda across the bush into Kenya and meet the truckers on the other side.”

  A boda-boda was a motorcycle taxi. Aleey told me that along the Uganda-Kenya border young men earned money by smuggling Somalis into Kenya on their motorcycles, avoiding the road crossings.

  “It’s the best way,” said Aleey.

  I called Hassan.

  “I think he’s right,” said my brother. “If they check for visas on the bus, you will not be allowed into Kenya.”

  We drove back to Kisenyi and parked at a gas station where a tanker truck was filling up. The two Ugandan drivers were eating mandazi and drinking tea. Aleey spoke to them. They approached me and said it would cost a hundred dollars for the ride. I handed them the cash, and they waved me into the cab. I said good-bye to my new friend, Aleey, wondering if I would ever see him again.

  “Hide here,” one of the men said in English, pointing to the tiny sleeper bunk behind the seats. “Don’t make any move. Stay still.”

  “Don’t worry, my friend,” said the other. “You will be in Kenya soon.”

  We lurched off down the road. Soon darkness fell, but it mattered little from where I was curled up in the bunk because I could see nothing anyway. “Turn off your phone,” said one of the men. “We don’t want any attention. There are police everywhere.”

  The road was bad and I kept banging around in that bunk. Hours passed, and we were still in Uganda. The two men played rap music all the way. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning, we were a few miles from the border. The tanker truck pulled slowly in to a side street, parked, and opened the doors.

  “Come. Come. Come,” one whispered to me. “Go there, catch a boda-boda.”

  I hopped out of the truck and ran across the street into a dark narrow alley. I could not see anything except the dim light of a motorcycle.

  “Lete,” the motorbike man said in Swahili. Let’s go.

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  “No. Five dollars,” I replied. I was getting better at bargaining for my various forms of illegal transport.

  “Okay. Lete.”

  I handed him the cash and climbed onto the bike behind him. We took off through the forest and in five minutes were in Kenya. The truck was there waiting for me. It was still dark when we rolled into Kisumu, a big junction town on the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria. It was still more than 150 miles to Nairobi. We pulled in to a parking lot; the drivers said they were too tired to go on. “Let’s sleep here and proceed in the morning,” one said. They spread a piece of a cloth under the truck to sleep on. The night was dead quiet. I quickly fell asleep while the two men were smoking a cigarette. When the sun rose, I woke up under the truck to the sound of Kenyans coming to work. The place we had parked was an outdoor repair shop with many junk cars and components sitting everywhere. The two drivers were gone.

  “Wewe amka!” A shirtless man was telling me to move on in Swahili. He needed to work on the truck and I was under it. I asked where the drivers were, but no one knew. I waited for an hour, two hours, three hours, but they never returned. I called Hassan; he was worried and so was everyone else on the team. By now it was obvious the drivers had betrayed me. I had paid them for a ride all the way to Nairobi, but I was hours away and on my own. I checked my pockets and was glad to find I still had money hidden in my pants. I was going to need it.

  I walked around the muddy streets of town, past market stalls where traders were selling hay, long spikes of sugarcane, and pyramids of fruits. Women carried huge baskets on their heads, and people were running to catch matatus. Street kids in filthy alleys were sniffing glue from plastic bottles. I did not know where to go. Then I heard a voice calling: “Nairobi, Nairobi, Nairobi!”

  It was a matatu conductor shouting out to passengers. I hopped on. The bus had fourteen seats, but by the time we left for Nairobi, the conductor had jammed more than twenty people on board. Passengers were literally on top of each other. Someone was sitting on my shoulders, while I leaned on someone’s back. The stereo was blasting Bob Marley when the conductor in the front passenger seat stretched out his hand to collect the fare. “Five hundred shillings,” he said in English.

  I knew that was about five dollars. I had no Kenyan money so I handed him my last twenty-dollar bill. He gave me back some change in Kenyan shillings but not nearly enough. When I argued with him in English, he replied angrily in a native dialect I couldn’t understand, so I let it go.

  “My friend, are you Somali?” asked a man sitting next to me, in English. He was middle-aged and wore eyeglasses, and he smiled all the time despite the discomfort of the journey.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Oh, I love the Somali people! But I hate al-Shabaab. I have seen them on TV. Very bad.”

  We became instant friends, and he acted like a tour guide. I kept asking him the names of towns we were passing. Everything was very green like I had never seen; corn and hay grew everywhere. The road to Nairobi was so clean and smooth. Sleek cars, their tinted windows rolled up, sped past us. We stopped at a police checkpoint and my heart was beating fast, but the officer said something to the conductor and waved us on. It was not Mogadishu, they didn’t care where women sat or if we had beards. The afternoon turned to dusk, and as we came around a final turn into the city, the setting sun reflected off the skyscrapers of downtown Nairobi. It was so beautiful! The streetlights were switching on everywhere. I had never seen so many lights. I
felt like a caveman dropped into the modern world. People outside were standing in groups talking, laughing, enjoying the evening. I texted Hassan, my heart pounding with excitement. Our bus inched through traffic, passing market stalls, banks, government buildings, and Christian churches. Everything was a wonder to me, but I thought we would never arrive. Passengers in a hurry were jumping out of the bus as it slowed down. Finally we pulled in to the chaotic Accra Road matatu station, and I descended in a daze.

  The station was so busy, people shouting and bumping into each other. It was like watching bees. I strained to see Hassan in the crowd. Then someone tapped my shoulder.

  “Abdi!” he said in a deep voice I did not recognize. I turned and felt I was looking into a mirror. It was my brother, Hassan, but in adulthood he had become just like me—tall, thin, the same long face and wide brow. When did we become twins? We hugged and held each other for several minutes. Both our phones were ringing from Team Abdi trying to find out if we had met. We ignored the phones and just hugged.

  “Let’s go eat,” Hassan said. We turned a corner from the bus depot and entered a restaurant. The sign, with a white man in glasses and a white beard, said “KFC.” “It is American owned,” Hassan said, knowing how much I liked anything American. The fried chicken, French fries, and Coca-Cola tasted amazing to me.

  “Do you eat here every day?” I asked my brother.

  “No! This place is only for rich people. But we are celebrating.”

  After dinner we jumped into a matatu headed for Eastleigh, the neighborhood also known as Little Mogadishu. We arrived around nine at night, but the place was as bright and busy as day. Every stall, every kiosk, and every shop was run by Somalis. Somali music and American rap were blasting from everywhere. The streets were filthy like Mogadishu, smelling of shit and piss. As we got off the bus, we had to jump over rank water onto a small patch of dry earth. I didn’t care about the filth. I just stood there and marveled at all the stuff for sale—shoes, clothes, belts, milk, candy, chewing gum, soccer balls. Anything you wanted. I smelled fried samosas and saw steam rising from teapots. Restaurants were selling goat, camel, and cow meat with rice. It was like being in Mogadishu but with merchandise and no bombs.