A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Encountering them in the Shamo dining room, I was both starstruck and a little miffed. Ajoos, it became clear, would be working primarily for the Geographic guys, spending his days accompanying them as they did their reporting, leaving Nigel and me with the mild-mannered, not terribly experienced Abdi. It turned out that Ajoos had hired another man to work with Abdi and serve as translator for us, but just hours before our arrival, the guy had quit, saying it was too dangerous to be seen with white people in Mogadishu. Abdi thus had been thrust into the triple role of cameraman, translator, and junior fixer.

  When I asked Pascal, the photographer, for a rundown on what they’d done during their time in Somalia, thinking it might give us some ideas, he declined to tell me. He was kind but firm. “I am sorry,” he said in a thick French accent. “If I told you where we went and then you went there yourselves, you would be running a huge risk. In Somalia, you can’t do the same thing twice. They will catch you.” By “you,” he meant foreigners. By “they,” he meant both Al-Shabaab and the roving, less organized militias, all of whom might want to snatch us.

  I liked Pascal for his straightforwardness. He was guarding his own stories, but he seemed sincere in his worries about our safety, too. He and Robert struck me as hardworking journalists intent on doing their jobs and wasting no time. They were in Somalia for ten days. Next to them, I was certain that we appeared inexperienced, underfunded, and a bit directionless. If that was their opinion, though, they kindly kept it to themselves.

  “Keep your wits about you,” Pascal told us before he headed to bed that first night. “And listen to what Ajoos tells you.”

  *

  Ajoos Sanura had dark skin, rectangular glasses, and a serious manner. He was constantly on his cell phone, seeming to have friends all over the city, people whom he plied continuously for news. Somalis, he explained, loved to talk, to trade gossip. In a city with no infrastructure, where impromptu street battles went on almost daily and allegiances were always shifting, the mobile phone was, for its citizens, something of a lifeline. News spread rapidly and informally, traveling over vast family networks, cousin to cousin to cousin. “Don’t go to Bakaara Market today,” they’d say. Or “There was gunfire near the K-4 intersection just now. Two women died and one soldier was hurt.”

  Ajoos made it his business to tap in to as many of these networks as possible. He kept his pockets stuffed with cash, passing out tips, bribes, and favors at will, cultivating contacts among rival militias, inside the government, and outside the city limits. He had friends from every faction. Al-Shabaab friends. Ethiopian military friends. Friends in the transitional government and in various clans. The idea being that when he had journalists in town, he could secure interviews, track down news, or arrange for safe passage over roads patrolled by violent militias. On his left wrist, he wore a heavy gold watch.

  Ajoos, who was about forty, had a wife and ten children. He lived with his family in a house in a different part of the city, but when he worked with foreigners, he stayed in a room at the Shamo Hotel. Meeting me and Nigel for breakfast the following morning, he addressed our worries, speaking fluid English, assuring us that he would take good care of us from afar, that he would remain in constant touch with Abdi while he himself went off to work with the Geographic guys. All the while his phone rang, his legion of unseen informants checking in one after another, with their morning reports.

  Working with white people in Somalia was a risky but profitable undertaking. Nobody took it lightly. Ajoos had gotten his start in 1993, when he was hired to help a visiting BBC cameraman carry his tripod around town. Before that, he’d been eking out a living waiting tables at the restaurant in the Shamo. Since then, he’d done well financially as a fixer, though his business, like that of the hotel, was tailing off drastically due to the rising danger. Two journalists he’d worked with had been killed—both times, he said, because they’d failed to heed his advice. A female producer with the BBC had been shot in 2005 while waiting outside—ill-advisedly, Ajoos said—for her car to pull up in front of the Hotel Sahafi. The second death happened in 2006, when a Swedish cameraman ignored Ajoos’s warnings, wandered into a crowd at a political demonstration, and was promptly shot in the back by a teenage boy. The losses seemed to weigh heavily on Ajoos.

  True to his word, Ajoos issued strident orders about where we could and couldn’t go around Mogadishu, based on his incoming phone calls. On our second morning, when we wanted to visit a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) west of the city, his sources told him it wasn’t a good time to travel that particular road. He offered no details on why, but we understood that his judgment was not to be questioned. The city and its roads, after all, were a patchwork of competing fiefdoms.

  Moving around with Abdi and our two armed government guards, I felt continually on edge. Shamo guests were transported in the hotel’s fleet of gleaming Mitsubishi Pajeros—big, dark-windowed SUVs that sped conspicuously through the streets, hiding our faces but announcing our presence not just to everyone we passed but to every cousin and cousin’s cousin who subsequently might get a phone call: There are foreigners living at the Shamo.

  On the second day, we visited two feeding centers run by the World Food Programme in Mogadishu. Nigel and I both took photographs. Abdi toted a rented video camera and filmed my interviews with Somalis who’d left their homes due to the fighting or the scarcity of food or often a combination of both. This was the first time I’d seen true desperation—people who were not just hungry but starving. Inside the gates of the feeding center, the WFP staff stirred giant vats of steaming lentil soup and a thin millet porridge while about a thousand people waited in disorderly lines outside, the men in one line, the women in another. Each person held an empty tin or plastic pail. I noticed listless, knob-kneed children sitting at the feet of many of the women, their bald heads looking too large for their bodies. A few kids clustered in the shade provided by the wheel well of a rusted-out, stripped-down car body that looked as if it had been marooned in the sand for years. Because of the fighting, because of the pirates on the ocean and the bandits on the roads, food shipments came sporadically. There were days when people turned up only to be sent away.

  When the gates opened, those who’d been waiting rushed forward. The noise amplified. Government soldiers used batons and tree switches to hold back the crowd. Children wailed. The men pushed and brawled their way toward the front, while the women in line remained poised in single file.

  Once they reached the feeding vats, the men were given three ladlefuls of food; the women got two; the children one. Their pails loaded, many of them dropped to their knees on the spot and started shoveling food into their mouths, fueling themselves for the walk home. Most weren’t headed back to their own neighborhoods, explained the WFP staffer who was hosting us, but rather to makeshift squatter settlements that had sprung up along roadsides where the fighting was less intense, where their access to food was better.

  I’d say it was like watching a movie, or standing at the side of something so fast-moving and incomprehensible that it didn’t seem real. But it wasn’t quite that way. It was a toe dipped in the river of other people’s misery. It was upsetting, confusing. I was removed from it, but I was also there. I was taking notes, writing a script in my head as Abdi filmed it, thinking—believing—that I could help do something about it.

  *

  Back in our room at the Shamo, I wrote up my weekly column for the Red Deer Advocate. It was not National Geographic or even France 24. It was a newspaper with a circulation of about thirteen thousand, read by people on the faraway Canadian flatlands. I don’t know if my column meant anything to anyone besides my dad and Perry, who sent me e-mails after each one ran in the Saturday paper, but it meant something to me. I had turned in seven hundred new words and a handful of fresh photos every Friday from March right through August, like clockwork. I’d sent columns from Baghdad, from Addis, and from Nairobi. I loved the discipline imposed by the regular deadli
ne. I loved learning how to write. I was getting better at translating what I saw into words. Going through my notes and the research file on my laptop, I worked up a story that described Mogadishu’s beauty and its desolation. I wrote about how a combination of war, lack of rain, and inflation had made food expensive and difficult to come by. I described the crowds lined up outside the feeding center and the danger that families faced just navigating the streets. I described a woman I’d interviewed, named Haliimo, who’d walked with her family to Mogadishu from central Somalia after one of her children died of starvation.

  I wrote the story in a frenzy, weaving in the official statistics I’d written down during my interviews with the World Food Programme employees. The magnitude of the numbers was hard to grasp, even as I’d seen some of the living proof. More than three million Somalis going hungry. One in six children malnourished. Sitting on the bed, propped up with pillows, I finished the column, revised it a few times, and then picked a few photos from the feeding center to upload along with it.

  The Wi-Fi connection at the Shamo was slow and spotty. About ten minutes into the upload, the signal dropped and I got a failure message. I tried again, then another time, and still again, each time watching the bar on the screen creep upward and abruptly freeze. I heaved a loud sigh. It was now Friday evening. Back in Canada, the newspaper was soon to go to press.

  Nigel and I were served a feast for dinner that night. In the hotel restaurant, a handsome young waiter delivered bowls of creamy fish soup, followed by a plate holding a whole grilled fish for us to share, followed by fresh lobster juiced with lime. We ate as much and as long as we could, drinking glasses of mango juice as we went. The waiter brought spaghetti. He brought a plate of goat meat, a bunch of bananas, and a basket of bread rolls. When at last we waved him off, he carried out a last plate of sliced papaya spears and offered to pour tea. Afterward, while Nigel settled in the lounge area and watched the Beijing Olympics on television with some of the hotel staff, I returned to our room and tried another time to send my e-mail and attachments. Another failure message popped up on the screen. I hit the send button again and again. Late that night, knowing the deadline had passed, I made one last effort. This time the connection held. I watched the loading bar on the computer screen tick forward until, after about fifteen minutes, it showed 100 percent transmission—my column and photographs lifted out into the world.

  The story would be published a couple of days later, in Monday’s Advocate, under the headline NOWHERE IS A PERSON SAFE IN SOMALIA. At that point, I myself would be walking proof of this. By Monday, nobody would know where I was.

  16

  Taken

  Later, they would tell me they’d been watching the hotel. They knew we were there. They didn’t know who exactly they’d catch, but they were aware there were foreigners at the hotel. What happened was planned, to the extent anything like this can be planned. Guns had been marshaled, men hired, a place to take us afterward had been secured. Knowing we were coming, they’d laid their trap. Maybe it was a cousin’s cousin who tipped them off. Maybe it was the sight of our freshly washed SUV ripping around the Old City that caused people to ask questions, to wonder if we could make them rich. Most assuredly, there was cash promised to somebody—a driver, a hotel employee, a guard—in exchange for word of where the foreigners were headed that day. Somebody—we don’t know who—sold us out.

  Nigel woke up that morning—Saturday, the twenty-third of August—and put on a pink paisley shirt and a pair of designer jeans. We’d been sleeping on the far edges of our king-sized bed at the Shamo. We were both testy. He was sending e-mails to his girlfriend in Scotland. I’d had a call from the American bureau chief in Baghdad with whom I’d had the affair. Though Nigel and I were most definitely not a couple, we hadn’t figured out how to be friends, either.

  As colleagues, we were at least trying. During our first two and a half days in Somalia, we’d seen only a little of what we’d hoped to, hampered by the safety concerns, waiting for the Canadian Navy to arrive with the food shipment. We’d visited the Old City, one of the few relatively secure parts of Mogadishu, where abandoned Italian colonial villas sat moldering in the heat, their drained swimming pools suggestive of a better past. We’d gone to a hospital whose rooms were crowded with gunshot victims and amputees. Every step we took, any time we got out of the car, our hired guards trailed behind us, Kalashnikovs strapped over their shoulders, not entirely uninterested but not exactly vigilant.

  With a strong sun already blasting through the window and roosters crowing from outside, I watched Nigel wind a purple scarf around his neck and reach for his oversized silver aviator-style sunglasses with blue lenses. He was about to head off to meet a Ugandan minesweeping unit with Abdi. I had decided to stay back. Every so often we heard the sizzle and boom of a mortar blast coming from pretty close by.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “You can’t go out dressed like that, Nige. Not with African soldiers. You just can’t.”

  I once appreciated Nigel’s love of bright colors and designer jeans, but what he wore now seemed like a mark of his inexperience. Shooting me a withering look, he took off the scarf and set down the sunglasses but left the rest of his outfit in place.

  Downstairs, Ajoos clicked off a phone call and informed us that the mortars were landing near the Ugandan base by the airport. He deemed minesweeping with the Ugandan soldiers “not a good idea” for Nigel that morning, but he promised to make more calls to see if we could visit the IDP camp outside the city, the one where we’d been hoping to go a day earlier. The camp was run by a well-known Somali doctor named Hawa Abdi, a gynecologist in her sixties who had opened a small women’s health clinic on her family’s farmland back in the 1980s. When the civil war started in 1991, she began allowing people displaced by the fighting to stay on her land and now had something like ninety thousand Somalis living at and around her place. Dr. Hawa was a hero. Despite harassment and threats from Al-Shabaab, she’d expanded her clinic until it was a three-hundred-bed hospital; she also ran health education programs for women. Her two daughters had left Somalia to attend medical school and returned to help her do her work. The prospect of interviewing them excited me.

  “I will tell you in thirty minutes whether it’s safe to go,” Ajoos told us, turning back to his phone. “Please wait.”

  Dr. Hawa’s land lay about twenty kilometers to the west of where we were staying, just outside the city limits, along what was called the Afgoye Road. The first thirteen kilometers of the Afgoye Road sat inside the boundaries of Mogadishu proper and were protected, as much as anything in the city could be protected, by government troops. Neither the Transitional Federal Government nor the African Union peacekeepers had any influence or backup beyond the city. Leaving Mogadishu, we’d be entering the Wild West of militia-controlled Somalia. The two TFG soldiers who’d been acting as our bodyguards for the last few days, Ajoos explained, would be willing to accompany us to the city limits, to the edge of their territory, but no farther. After that, we’d need to hire new guards who weren’t affiliated with the government. This would cost us another $150.

  A few phone calls later, Ajoos had everything set up. He’d arranged for replacement guards to meet us on the road a few kilometers after the last TFG checkpoint. In addition to Abdi and our driver, we would have an extra escort for the day, he said—the head of security for Dr. Hawa’s camp, who was on his way to the Shamo to meet us.

  The logistics sounded fine. Besides, what did we have to compare them to? It wasn’t like I could say, Well, last time I drove across the line where the Islamic militias battled the uniformed soldiers, here’s how we did it . . .

  I loaded my backpack for the outing. My camera. A wide-angle lens. An extra memory card. My iPod. A small notebook. Two pens. Some lip balm. A hairbrush. A couple bottles of water. I wore a pair of jeans, a green tank top, and some leather sandals I’d bought in Kenya.
Over that I layered the heavy Somali-style abaya that Ajoos had borrowed for me from his sister-in-law—polyester and black, like a long choir robe—along with a somber black head scarf to cover my hair, which was what I had worn each day when stepping outside the hotel.

  Leaving the lobby about twenty minutes ahead of us, Robert and Pascal from National Geographic climbed into a different SUV with their own hired TFG soldiers. As usual, Ajoos was traveling with them. They, too, were headed west on the Afgoye Road, going off on a drive more dangerous than ours—traversing the same road but continuing on through militia-held territory to visit the coastal city of Merka. They’d taken extra precautions, hiring a second security vehicle with additional guards.

  I wasn’t paying attention when we rolled out of the Shamo gates. I felt that morning almost like I was in a trance. I’d learned this about reporting work: You switched on and off. There were so many hours spent upright and fretful, navigating all the small things, looking for advantageous viewpoints, asking questions, taking notes, trying always to think ahead. By contrast, time spent sitting in cars, for me, was time off.

  Our vehicle ferried us through streets that were more familiar, less jarring, than they’d been two days earlier. The guy who’d come to escort us from Dr. Hawa’s camp—an older man in a white shirt and a Somali-style sarong who spoke no English—had insisted on driving. Our regular driver sat wedged in the middle up front while Abdi rode shotgun. Nigel and I had the backseat to ourselves, while the two TFG soldiers occupied the rear.

  The road heading out of Mogadishu was wide and paved. We bumped over potholes and past shelled-out gray buildings. We passed women selling bananas and mangoes and men dragging carts loaded with cooking oil and firewood. We rounded a traffic circle and cruised through a couple of government checkpoints. The traffic thinned. The sky streamed alongside us. My mind flitted away from where I was. I thought about my mother, who had relocated to British Columbia and found a job in a bakery. She’d sounded happy in our last phone call. It was summertime in Canada. People were grilling hamburgers and swimming in cool lakes. Home was a pleasant thought. In order to get back for a visit, I’d have to sell some stories. I pulled my camera from the backpack, turned it on, and started shuttling through images from the previous days. There were some good shots of the scenery, including some of a stone Catholic cathedral, built by the Italians in the 1920s, more recently gutted by bomb blasts. I’d taken a series of photos from inside one of the African Union tanks, showing both the Ethiopian soldiers and their view of the streets below.