A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  The airplane was packed with about a hundred Somali men and women, plus a few kids who clambered over the ripped canvas seats. The walk across the hot tarmac, coupled with a sense of foreboding I couldn’t quite shake, had combined to make me feel light-headed and a little bit sick. I noticed many of the women wore a conservative form of hijab, heavy dresses with long veils. A number of them were wearing niqabs, their faces fully covered except for the eyes. A few had stuffed their feet into white plastic bags before putting on their sandals, an effort to cover every last millimeter of skin out in public.

  Everyone seemed to be chattering loudly while loading what seemed to be an insane amount of carry-on luggage—plastic bags of every color, packed with clothes and books and food, knotted tightly to stay closed. The walls of the plane were streaked with dirt. The door to the bathroom hung partially off its hinges. In the waiting area, I’d exchanged a few words with what appeared to be the only other non-African on the flight, an older Italian man who spoke English. He said he worked for a Christian NGO and was headed for the northern city of Hargeisa, the capital of the independent province of Somaliland, which would be the plane’s second stop after Mogadishu.

  Hearing that we were disembarking in the south, he raised his eyebrows and made a dramatic poof with his lips, a gesture of disbelief. “Be very careful in Mogadishu,” he said. “Your head”—he tapped his own head—“is worth a half million dollars there. And that’s just for your head.”

  I knew what he was saying. Westerners were a useful commodity in Somalia, even dead ones. A body was a trophy; living hostages could be sold back to their home countries. The notorious 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident, in which a failed raid by American commandos on a Mogadishu warlord had resulted in Somali militiamen proudly dragging the corpses of two American soldiers through the streets. More recently, in the Gulf of Aden to the north, Somali pirates were getting rich, holding foreign ships captive until seven-figure ransoms were paid. I knew exactly what the Italian NGO worker was trying to tell me, but I didn’t appreciate hearing it.

  Nigel and I were sitting at the back of the plane. Around us, people talked on cell phones, appearing agitated, standing up to shout out what sounded like news to others in neighboring rows. A Somali woman who’d been raised in America and now worked in Hargeisa translated for us. “They’re saying the war has broken out at the airport in Mogadishu,” she said. “There is fighting on the road. Maybe it will be closed. Maybe we can’t fly.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly—the war has broken out—especially against the backdrop of a war that had been going on for almost two decades, but in the plane, among the Somalis, it appeared to be causing a stir. We waited for some sort of announcement. The blood seemed to be pumping with extra force through my veins. For a second, I allowed myself to feel relieved by the prospect of being ordered off the plane and back into the Nairobi airport, to have the matter taken entirely out of our hands.

  But after a few minutes, the plane’s engines kicked on. A flight attendant pulled the door shut, vacuum-sealing us off from the morning heat of Nairobi before taking to the loudspeaker to order people off their cell phones. War at the airport be damned, we were flying.

  Sitting beside me, Nigel looked almost gray. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he said. “I can’t help it. I feel like something bad’s going to happen.”

  I reached over and squeezed his arm. In my mind, I ran through the reasons we should be feeling good and not bad. I’d arranged to have us met at the airport. Ajoos had told me that an armed security crew would escort us to the hotel. He’d mentioned other foreign journalists were staying there. How bad could it be? If the fighting around the airport was a problem, I figured the pilot would continue to Hargeisa with us on board. Everything was more or less settled. We’d be okay.

  I looked at Nigel. “This is just what it feels like to fly into a war zone,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “It’s totally normal. You’ll feel better when we get there.”

  On cue, the plane began to roll, rattling over the asphalt like an old jalopy, until it picked up speed, tilted, and took off. I felt my stomach press against my spine. Nairobi fell away beneath us, an expanse of glinting shantytowns and flat brown plains. I sat looking numbly out the window as we lifted through the clouds.

  The Italian man was sitting just across the aisle. He had removed a Bible and a pair of black-framed eyeglasses from his bag and was reading quietly.

  I powered up my laptop, plugged a headset into the jack, and hit play on a meditation audio file I kept stored on my hard drive. It was something I’d listened to in the evenings in Baghdad, in my room at the Hamra as I tried to fall asleep. The recording had been made by a woman I knew from home who ran a meditation group that Jamie and I had gone to when we lived together. On it, in a sonorous maternal voice over a backdrop of piano music, she gave instructions to breathe, long and slow, again and again, adding words to feed through the mind as a mantra: “With this breath, I choose freedom. With this breath, I choose peace.”

  I sat with my eyes closed and I breathed, the words pattering through my mind, more rhythmic than meaningful. Freedom, peace, freedom, peace. I did this for maybe half an hour, cooling my nerves. When I opened my eyes again, I felt better, more even. I stowed my laptop and noticed that the Italian man had shut his Bible and was looking at me. “Were you praying?” he said.

  “Sort of,” I answered. Then I amended it. “Yes.” The man smiled and said nothing. “I was trying to ground myself,” I said. I wondered if he was a missionary or a priest.

  The man nodded. He was old, maybe the age of my grandfather, his eyebrows overgrown and tufted, his eyes a little watery. He leaned in my direction. “It’s good you are going to Mogadishu,” he said. “I respect it. I hope you are careful.” This was possibly an apology for having scared me earlier, for raising the specter of my head on some warlord’s plate. In any event, it was as close as I’d get to a blessing for what we were about to do.

  *

  Ninety minutes after leaving Nairobi, we began to descend. Out the window, I caught my first glimpse of the Somali coastline—thickets of deep green vegetation hemmed by a highway of white sand, all of it pressed against a foaming mint-colored sea. It had to be one of the most astonishingly beautiful places on earth. There was no sign of roads or beachfront hotels, no sign of humanity whatsoever. There was only land—thick jungle, abundant and unshorn, like a tropical paradise spotted through the spyglass of an old-time explorer. The city of Mogadishu, when it came into view, was also stunning—a hive of whitewashed colonial buildings built around a crescent-shaped harbor.

  Everyone on the plane had swiveled toward the sight of it. In front of me, the Somali woman who’d grown up in America had her face pressed against the window. “This is the only beautiful thing about Mogadishu, right here,” she said, directing her words back toward me and Nigel.

  Nigel, for his part, didn’t seem ready to look. He’d gone rigid in his seat, his body a brick fortress inside of which, somewhere, lived the merry guy who’d once taught me Aussie pub songs from the back of a camel. I felt a pang of culpability. I’d asked too much of him, probably. Somalia was hardly a starter war zone.

  *

  Off the plane, the air was damp and fishy. The landing strip ran right alongside a wide beach with crashing sapphire waves. The terminal at the Aden Abdulle International Airport of Mogadishu was a washed-out aqua-colored building. Nigel and I waited in line to get our passports stamped. Once on the ground, he had come back to life a bit, swinging his red backpack over his shoulder with a faint smile. The airport was poorly lit and teeming with people.

  A slim young Somali man standing by the passport booth jumped forward at us. He held a sign that read AMANDA, SHAMO HOTEL.

  I felt a wash of relief. We’d been received. I gratefully pumped the man’s hand. “Are you Ajoos?”

  He wasn’t Ajoos. He was the cameraman Ajoos had hired to work with me d
uring my stay. Abdifatah Elmi was his name. He had an arresting, handsome face, the sharp curves of his cheeks set off by a thin goatee. We could call him Abdi, he said. Ajoos would meet us at the hotel. There had been fighting only a couple of hours earlier, but we’d gotten lucky: The road that led to the city center had been reopened. “Come, come with me,” he said.

  We followed Abdi through the crowd in the arrivals hall. I was wearing jeans and a long shirt. Abdi had brought a thick green and purple scarf for me to wear draped over my head and shoulders, which did little to hide my foreignness. Nigel and I were jostled and shoved. Nobody smiled. The airport crowd seemed to be regarding us with a could-give-a-shit weariness. We pushed our way through a frenzy of touts, taxi drivers, and freelance luggage handlers, seemingly governed by a group of African Union soldiers—Ethiopians and Ugandans—dressed in forest-green camouflage uniforms and bearing Kalashnikovs. I’d landed in plenty of chaotic places before, but this one was different: The chaos here felt edgy, dangerous, as if we couldn’t keep ourselves outside of it and were breathing it in, as if it sat already in the lungs of every last person in that airport, the cyanide edge of a nasty war.

  Maybe I was just imagining it. I ordered myself to stop freaking out.

  A pack of would-be porters surrounded a heap of baggage that had been unloaded from our plane. Many of them were shirtless and bony, their chests shiny with sweat. I handed my claim ticket to the first one to reach me, a young man as tall as a pole.

  Something hissed in the air past my head, moving with a crackling speed. I turned to see a portly Ethiopian soldier holding a whip made from a tree switch. Catching my gaze, he smiled and waggled it teasingly at me. With his wrist, he flicked it back and then unleashed it again, over the pile of luggage and the fumbling, overeager porters. If he were trying to separate legitimate porters from potential thieves, I couldn’t see how. Whiiii-tah. The soldier brushed aside a man with a humped back. Whiiii-tah. He landed a blow on the tall youth who held my ticket, catching his bare shoulder just as, with a look of triumph, he’d hoisted my dirty black backpack over his head.

  The idea, in Mogadishu, seemed to be that you never lingered. Safety came from moving quickly, as if every second spent standing in one place compounded the risks. Abdi rushed us toward a waiting Mitsubishi SUV, parked in an area surrounded by more African Union soldiers. Ignoring his brush with the whip, the tall porter quickly loaded my luggage and Nigel’s into the back. I hastily handed him a five-dollar bill, a small fortune in a country where the average adult lived on the equivalent of about twenty U.S. dollars per month. I had never seen a human being whip another human being. Already, I felt confounded by Somalia. We peeled out of the airport with me wondering whether I should have given the guy a twenty instead.

  Along with Abdi, three men had piled into the car with us—one driver and two grim-faced guys in uniforms riding beneath the back hatch, each carrying a weapon. These were guards from Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, or TFG, as it was known, who would escort us any time we left the hotel. From what I understood, government soldiers—Somalis, all of them—were officially charged with the job of protecting visitors, but they also needed paying off on the side to ensure their loyalty, so they wouldn’t sell us out to some money-hungry criminal gang. All this was wrapped into the daily security fee charged by Ajoos.

  Seeing Mogadishu from the ground, I realized that it wasn’t nearly as quaint as it had appeared from the air. Or that it could be quaint only if you squinted to blur the lines, to notice the bougainvillea blossoms tumbling in bright fuchsia over old whitewashed walls but not the bombed-out buildings or the fact that many of the homes appeared to be vacant, the windows closed up. Bullet holes pocked nearly every structure, walls had been crushed into rubble, rooftops had collapsed as if some apocalypse had come and gone. We drove at high speed, slowing only for split-second stops at a couple of TFG checkpoints. We passed a pickup truck with four lanky teenage boys riding in its bed, their arms clamped over a mounted machine gun that pointed like a spear out the back.

  I leaned forward in my seat and asked Abdi what he knew about the violence that had gone on around the airport earlier in the day, the news that had made the Somalis on our flight so panicky.

  Abdi shook his head with the grizzled forbearance of an on-the-ground Somali, not, like the people on the plane, someone coming back for a visit, someone who’d grown accustomed to the comparative safety of Nairobi. “It was just some fighting,” he said, adding that militias often exchanged fire with the soldiers guarding the airport road.

  “Did anyone die?”

  He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Every day in Somalia people die,” he said, his voice impassive. “Maybe five or six got killed.”

  *

  A number of hours later, Nigel and I stood on the rooftop of the Shamo Hotel, breathing the humid sea air. As the sun set, the view was expansive. Mogadishu lay in front of us like an exotic beach town, bathed in the late-day light. There were endless narrow lanes lined by low buildings painted in pastel shades of pink and blue, seeming almost to glow in the dusk. Great big trees grew between the houses, making the landscape green and lush. In the distance, we could see the rolling blue ocean. The city was beautiful despite itself.

  Arriving from the airport, we’d checked in to the hotel and talked briefly with the owner—Mr. Shamo, a round-bellied man, who came from what appeared to be a wealthy family. He had homes in Tanzania and Dubai, where he and his brothers also owned some sort of factory. Mr. Shamo’s fortunes as a hotelier had shifted in 1992, when Dan Rather from CBS News—the hurricane hero himself—had shown up in Mogadishu, along with a dozen colleagues, to report on a growing famine and the impending arrival of U.S. troops in Somalia. Someone had called Mr. Shamo, asking if he could make room for them in his modest guesthouse, even if people had to sleep on the floor. The profits from the CBS crew’s stay had helped Mr. Shamo convert his residence into a full-fledged five-story hotel with high, fortified walls and armed guards manning its gates.

  Although the Shamo once netted a small fortune by Somali standards, now that Mogadishu was tattered by war, unpromising for foreign businesses, and openly hostile to journalists and aid workers, the hotel was faltering. Mr. Shamo said he came and went from Somalia. Two of his children lived in the U.S., one in Atlanta, one in North Carolina. He was friendly and accustomed to foreigners.

  He had given us keys to a room with a king bed, a giant wardrobe, and a bathtub. Nigel and I were sharing the room in order to save money, but Ajoos had said we’d have to pretend we were married. “Otherwise, it makes the staff uncomfortable,” he’d told me over the phone. “In Islam, something like this is haram.”

  Haram was the Arabic word used to describe anything that was forbidden. I’d learned that in my travels, but in Mogadishu, where Muslim insurgents had seized control of many neighborhoods and were imposing a strict form of sharia law—outlawing music, television, and sports, among other things—the concept of haram was more widely applied and severely enforced. I’d read that under the rules of Al-Shabaab, one of the dominant extremist groups, men were required to grow beards and women were forbidden to walk the streets alone.

  From the rooftop, Nigel and I watched darkness slowly fall over the city, lost in our own thoughts. In the distance, I saw lights blinking on. This surprised me. Parts of Mogadishu had electricity, which seemed to suggest that it was more stable than Baghdad. Baghdad, at night, went almost entirely black.

  “Can you believe,” I said to Nigel, “that we’re here?”

  “Hardly,” he said.

  I watched him light a cigarette, then tuck the pack in the pocket of his jeans. The moist air made his hair stand up a little higher on his head. He seemed worn out by the journey but no longer fretful. I felt almost tranquilized by fatigue.

  “This is so different than Baghdad,” I said.

  In Baghdad, almost every night, you heard bombs, gunfire, sirens happening at irregular interv
als—just loud enough to be jarring, just close enough to feel threatening. When I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t slept well in months. By contrast, Mogadishu had gone eerily silent. We couldn’t hear a single vehicle on the street. There was no sign of human activity. I could hear tree branches swaying in the sea breeze, with nothing but stillness beneath it.

  Mogadishu wasn’t Baghdad. It was different. It looked peaceful, not at all like the place so often described in the foreign newspapers as “hell on earth.” I was glad we’d come to see it for ourselves. What I didn’t realize was that I was mistaking the quiet for something it wasn’t.

  15

  My Hurricane

  In all my years of studying National Geographic, in all the fantasizing I’d done about making my way in journalism, I’d somehow never managed to imagine, let alone meet, anyone who actually worked for the magazine. Here they were, in Mogadishu—a writer-and-photographer team, two guys, one American, one French—and in addition to me and Nigel, the only other guests occupying the forty-eight-room Shamo Hotel. Robert Draper was an established Washington, D.C.–based reporter. He had a dramatic sweep of blond hair, a slight Texas accent, and a seen-everything confidence. Pascal Maître was a gentlemanly veteran photojournalist who lived in Paris with his family but spent much of his time on the road. He’d covered stories all over Africa and had been to Somalia several times before. The two men had arrived in Mogadishu three days ahead of us, having hired Ajoos in advance as their fixer.