by Hawa Abdi
“I can’t leave these people,” I said. “I’m praying to my God that we will all be safe.” I hung up the phone and walked back up the stairs to search the horizon. I stayed, stayed, stayed, until I couldn’t see the ships anymore.
There is a Somali saying that one wrong decision is worse than seven years of dry season. In what seemed like a moment, there were no more jobs in Mogadishu, no visitors to ask me what I needed, no one to appreciate what I was doing. The Americans had given me a paper recognizing what I had done for my country, but they were no longer interested in helping. Even the journalists turned their heads, traveling out with the aid convoys toward Rwanda, to cover the genocide. The people left inside Somalia knew only how to destroy it.
Some mornings, Aidid came out in a technical car, with two or three others following; he’d stop at the rival militia’s checkpoint and shoot all the people standing there. Anti-American, anti-Western demonstrations continued, and many of the people in the area turned against me, burning tires along the Afgoye Road, shouting, “We don’t want Americans, we don’t want Bush, we don’t want Hawa Abdi!”
“Say that!” they told their children. “Say it!”
One day, when a few of my guards were in Mogadishu, they saw Aidid’s men shoot a car that looked just like mine, killing a woman inside. When I returned to the camp from a meeting, I saw people crying, saying, “Oh, Hawa died, Hawa died.” I ran to Amina and some of the other children, who were in shock, to tell them that it was a mistake.
God is great. These hooligans never harassed me, and the warlords never entered my camp, never told me anything bad. I continued to make my own rules and to sit outside with the elders, discussing the situation in the camp and making decisions by consensus. Our own security was qualified to defend the area and settle small arguments that would otherwise grow into the same violent clashes happening on the outside.
In some ways, life improved: The rain returned, and we were able to once again cultivate the land. The UN-organized Somalia Aid Coordination Body developed an agriculture plan, instructing each farm in the area to grow maize, beans, and sesame. The river rose, which helped all of us, especially the farmers in the low-lying areas. As the crops grew, so did our optimism.
An Italian fruit company came to me and to some of the other farms in the area, offering to invest in us, paying for fuel, fertilizer, and even some of our labor so we could produce bananas. In exchange, we would sell our yield at $3 per 14-kilo carton, they said. An American fruit company followed close behind, for bananas grow dramatically. The opportunity was clear.
While I was wary of taking too much from any one organization, I did welcome the chance to hire more people; we began to produce between 200 and 300 cartons, and sometimes even 500 cartons a month. It was nothing when compared to some of our neighbors, who were producing as many as 100,000 cartons a month. The ships were coming twice a month, the farms were thriving, and the income allowed us to cultivate the crops we really needed to eat, like maize and beans. Aidid’s men caught on, demanding three cents for each carton; this was a small enough fee, compared to what we were earning. People were receiving salaries; they had money to buy food and some, even, to pay for medical treatment. It was a small taste of the good life again.
But by this time, Aidid’s group had once again divided in two. One of his top officials united with a rival clan, becoming a new, powerful group that wanted the contracts. They threatened the fruit companies; if the companies wouldn’t pay, the warlords shot at their ships from the port, sending them back. The Somali farmers kept growing, growing, growing—enough to fill about 200,000 cartons a month—but we had to watch our harvest rot when the ships couldn’t come.
Our group of farmers all wrote letters to the warlords. We were ready to pay them more, we said; we needed the ships to return, so we could sell what we had already grown. We had expected to sell these bananas, we said.
“Then eat them yourself,” said the warlords.
Oh, the waste. The farmers who had produced the most became the most despairing; many lost the means to produce maize and other essential crops, and one ran mad and died. Again the United Nations World Food Programme intervened, transporting sacks of grain from the other side of the world and giving it away for free. While the aid did help to ensure that people would not starve, it devastated our economy. There was no market for the farmers’ few remaining crops, people became poor once more, and many did whatever they could to find cash.
We heard more and more stories of bandits shooting at buses that were passing in the road as a way to rob all the people inside. People died every day from the indiscriminate shootings, and many travelers lost all they had. It was the same story every time: When the driver would stop, these evil men would lay a cloth in the sand and tell everyone, “Put whatever you have right here.” They took money, watches, and jewelry. If they discovered you’d left something in your clothes, they would kill you on the spot and take what they’d demanded in the first place.
These broken families came to us, including one young widow who’d lost her husband that way. She’d brought six young children to care for—the oldest was about thirteen. Since there was no one else to watch her children, she often left them all together in their hut while she took the bus to Mogadishu in search of some small meat—some protein—to feed them. On her way back one day, her bus was shot and the bullet went straight through her heart. Someone stole her food, and someone else brought her dead body to me. We dressed her wounds and kept her in a room, hoping that we could find her sisters and brothers before we were forced to bury her.
Late that afternoon, one of my assistants came in to say that there was a thirteen-year-old girl waiting outside for me. I walked out to meet her, and I saw immediately that she was the child of the poor woman. She carried one of her younger siblings; another two were with her, by her side. “We are searching for our mother,” she told me. “They said that you would know.” I asked her to describe her mother to me, and when she did, I had no choice but to tell her the truth. I said I would bring her to see, if that was what she wanted.
When the girl saw her mother’s face, she stepped back, putting her hands over her ears and squeezing her eyes shut. The younger daughters came forward, nudging and shaking the body. “Mama, we are hungry,” said one as I hid my tears. “Mama.” We brought together food to give them, but they refused it. How could they eat?
Our poor Somalia continued to bleed, mostly from the wounds we inflicted on one another. On my way from the hospital to the farm one day, I passed the Ministry of Agriculture, remembering the beautiful building, the state-of-the-art laboratory that experimented with crossing genes. When I was young, people came here from all over the world, meeting with Somali farming experts to figure out how to increase maize production, or how to make new fruits—crosses between grapefruits and lemons, or lemons and limes. Aden had gone there to rent our tractor, in the farm’s earliest days.
Looters had long ago taken the Ministry of Agriculture’s windows, doors, and pipes; for years, the grounds had been empty. So I was surprised to see the figure of a strong, well-nourished woman standing in the clearing, and next to her two strong, young men carrying saws. I asked the driver to pull over. “Why are you cutting there?” I asked one of the men.
“This lady ordered us,” he said. “We are cutting them for her.”
I called to the lady, who was walking over to the car. “My sister, why are you cutting these trees? It took many years for them to grow this long and straight. Why?”
“I will use them to build my home,” she said.
“Please,” I said, “are these your trees?”
“They’re our trees.”
“But the beautiful view here is yours and mine, please don’t cut it down.”
“I’m cutting,” she said. “If you don’t like it, do whatever you want.”
To argue was foolish—maybe her clan was more powerful than I was. Without law and order, she could not
be arrested, could not even be stopped. The next time I came back, all the trees in the area were gone; they had been loaded up in the men’s waiting donkey carts to take to her home.
Such behavior began from the day Siad Barre fled, when people were so angry they destroyed the chairs, the tables—entire sitting rooms. In their narrow minds was only the thought of punishing one person—not about the rights of the Somali people, or the idea that another president might one day sit in his chair. With no education, this destruction was our country’s only philosophy. If it’s public, people think, it’s ours, which means that everyone has a right to destroy it.
When I was a child, Faduma Ali and I once argued over the last chapati, and Ayeyo ordered us to clean up the food quickly and to follow her into the clearing near our house. She gave us a rope. “You take this end,” she’d told Faduma Ali, “and Hawa, you take this end. Then tug! Tug! It is yours!”
Confused and frustrated, we’d pulled with our small hands, the grass-made rope rough and slippery. Faduma Ali would tire, and I would yank, and then, as I had to adjust my feet in the dirt, she would yank, sending me stumbling forward. We’d tugged and tugged, both thinking, I have the advantage.
“Hawa, drop it!” Ayeyo yelled suddenly.
I did, confused, and Faduma Ali staggered back and fell down, laughing, thank goodness.
“If you are two people fighting because of something you both want, it is best to leave,” Ayeyo had said. “Fighting with all your force only means that someday you will fall down. You will never succeed. God is great—if you want something, he will give it to you.”
This is our family’s way. There is no proving “I’m right, I’m right, I have to have.” Ayeyo taught my mother, my mother taught me, and now I struggled to teach my children in a world that had run mad. When I saw someone in Bakara Market selling material from the roofs he had pulled from other people’s homes, I knew that I had made a mistake about bringing my children back.
I reached out to our friends for help, and Swedish Church Relief provided a flight to Nairobi. We found another small apartment in Eastleigh, where we could have, in one room, two triple bunk beds and a mattress on the floor for Asha. “Please, sister,” I begged her. “Stay here.” Now I can see how naïve I was, but I had no choice, and I had my natural weaknesses: Even now, when someone says okay, I trust her. I trusted that my family would be together, to study together, to be in a safe place, as I was risking my life in Somalia.
I stayed for just five days, knowing that at the camp people were lined up, waiting to tell me, “I want food,” “I want money,” “I want a job,” “I want clothes,” “Someone died—give me a karfan.” Maybe I should have stayed in Nairobi, protecting my children instead of risking my life and leaving in my place some small money for safety and comfort. When I think of it now, I sometimes regret it. I went back, knowing that when I could help someone, I was happy. But what about my children’s lives—and my own?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Fourth Container
We received any bit of news about the political situation with doubt at best, and at worst, with suspicion and anger. Aidid was killed in August 1996, but his son took over, and our land remained under their clan’s control. While people came to me with hot, hot tempers, I insisted on keeping a politically neutral position: What was most important was that no person inside our place stole, fought, or killed. So long as that was true, I treated the wives and daughters of every warlord. Most people recognized me for this, and we were left alone.
From time to time the political and economic situation improved, and some women were able to pay for my consultations. That money covered some of the hospital expenses, including a small salary for some of our dedicated staff, who worked most often for food or for education—learning how to handle a normal delivery, how to do injections, how to draw blood. We also used the money to order medicine for the hospital and distribute it in our small pharmacy; Aden, who had returned to the camp, was overseeing the project. With him there, I was able to travel back and forth to Nairobi every month or two, to see after the children.
When a local telephone company installed a line and donated a phone, it opened up a new world for our family. This way, I could hear everything: Amina was reaching the end of secondary school, and Ahmed, the last year of primary school, Standard 8. By this time, Khadija had left the camp and had moved in with Asha and the children, hoping to find some work in Nairobi. Each time I went to see my sisters there, I dreamed that they would be polite, that we would sit together and drink tea and talk about what we had seen and what we wanted to reach. Reality was different, however, so I never stayed long.
Thanks to the phone, I knew whenever one of the children was sick; I also knew that their money was almost gone. When two women who sold gold in India came to the camp, I reached back into my store. I divided their profit in two—half for the rent for the apartment in Eastleigh, and half for our own stall at a market nearby, where Khadija could sell fabrics to pay for the children’s food and clothing.
More than a thousand kilometers away, in Somalia, all I could do for my children was make sure that the situation in the camp was peaceful, so I’d be able to bring them back. We tried to give struggling families—men and women—small jobs on the farm. Thanks to their hard work, we yielded about six hundred sacks of maize each harvest. When it was time to reap, the laborers and the hospital’s patients were the first to benefit.
I didn’t often stop and think about how much time had passed since we began living this way, but every once in a while, when someone who had been away for years returned, I could hear their shock, fear, and pity. They did not believe me when I said that I still felt as I did when my sister Amina and I strolled through Mogadishu twenty-five years earlier, back when Somalia was thriving. I knew that other places had safety and order, I said, but for me, home was still the best.
I answered the phone one day and heard Amina’s tearful voice. “My daughter!” I said, surprised. “What is the problem?”
“Mama Asha slapped me,” she moaned.
“Why?” I hated the distance between us, hated my sister.
Amina confessed that she had taken money from Asha. “I want Ahmed to go to school, Mama,” she said. Although some of the other cousins had failed Standard 8, Ahmed had passed and was ready to begin secondary school. Fearing that Asha would not enroll Ahmed without the others, Amina took money from Asha’s hiding place, sold her own small gold earrings, and brought the money to our cousin. “Please, please, Uncle,” she had said, addressing him with our term of endearment. “We have to go today to bring Ahmed to school. Mama Asha doesn’t have time.”
Amina called me from that cousin’s house now. She had been successful—they’d enrolled Ahmed in school—but when she’d come back to the apartment that night, the children had warned her that Asha had been shouting. She’d run away in fear.
My cousin took the phone, his angry voice loud against my ear. “I told Asha, ‘How can you touch her? She’s our daughter, too, and this house is rented by her parents, not by you.’ ” He had fed Amina, he said, and when she’d return home, she’d carry food back to Ahmed as well. The way he talked, I feared that the children were not getting enough to eat.
Before I hung up the phone, I spoke with Amina once more. “You have to be strong,” I said. “Your father will come to you soon.” For the next several days, I thought only about what could have happened when my cousin had brought Amina back to the apartment. Somali elders—parents, aunts, cousins—never apologize to children, even when they know they themselves are in the wrong.
Aden returned to Nairobi to see after the children, and Asha returned to the camp. I sold a piece of land that would pay for Amina’s university preparatory course in Moscow; she and Deqo could protect each other there. When I was next able to return to Nairobi, to prepare Amina for her journey, it was the end of the rainy season there. While the children greeted me as usual, something seemed different:
The small place was crowded and tense, and Amina and Ahmed seemed very thin.
I was lying in the small sitting room, trying to sleep, when around ten o’clock that evening, Aden and Khadija came home. They turned on the overhead light. “I’m here,” I called from the floor. “Please turn it off. I’m so tired.”
“Sleep if you want,” said Aden. “It’s up to you.” I was surprised when he didn’t turn off the light and didn’t walk over to greet me, but after a while, I pretended that he was not there.
The next morning the children and I went to the market, buying a goat to cook along with rice. Later that afternoon, they invited all their friends to come eat, and I lay down plastic sheets and a carpet in the courtyard to accommodate everyone. The children ate well, and the breeze was on my shoulders, cool and welcoming. I enjoyed the day, even if Aden and Khadija were not with us to share in any of it.
The next day, I asked Khadija about the shop—about how much profit she had, how much she lost, how much she had been able to give to the children. “I don’t have time now,” she said. Later, Aden told me that he had also tried to discuss the business, and how the money was divided, with Khadija. “I tried to argue with her once,” he said, “but when I came into the store, she wouldn’t talk.” We shook our heads together, laughing uncomfortably, as we had when Khadija was a teenager.
But when I finally confronted her, she refused to hear my side. “You have your own land, your own farm—you are rich,” she said. “This shop is mine. I don’t owe you anything.”
The next day, I took the children to Uhuru Park for a picnic. As we ate, they told me that they wanted to go to the zoo park, to see some of the wild animals. I promised that we’d go during my next visit. “Can’t you stay?” asked Ahmed.