Traveling to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria would mean a full week away from Declan and Rían. Because I wanted my children to feel safe, I was never sure how to discuss the darker aspects of my work. But, as with most matters, I tended to err on the side of disclosure. I pointed on the map to the parts of northwest Africa where I would be visiting and told Declan and Rían about a very nasty group of bandits who were preventing children from going to school and sometimes even taking kids away from their parents. Rían was just three, but was immediately saddened.
“Are they crying?” she asked of the kidnapped children. “Yes,” I answered, “lots of people are crying right now.”
Declan had a different focus. Just about to play his first official Little League game, he had laid out his new uniform on the dining room table: royal blue socks, white polyester elastic-waist pants, and a royal blue and orange jersey. The sight of his beaming face reminded me of my delight when my softball coach in Pittsburgh opened the trunk of his station wagon and handed me my first uniform. I had sprinted with my new gear to the car, shouting “Look, Mum!” in my Dublin accent. Nothing had made me feel more American than donning my “Oilers” pinstripes.
Even amid the craze of being US ambassador, I had always made time for baseball with Declan, whether taking him to Washington Nationals games when the team passed through New York, dropping him each morning at a summer baseball camp in Brooklyn, or simply stealing away for a Sunday game of catch in Central Park. He could not believe I was now going to miss his debut. I explained that I couldn’t control the timing of my trip and that Cass would attend in my stead.
“He will be on his phone the whole game,” Declan complained.
“Probably,” I answered, “because he will be messaging me updates on your game.”
This explanation seemed to put him at ease. But less than an hour before leaving for the airport, I realized that I did not have the ethernet cable I would need to connect my computer on our government plane (which could videoconference into the Situation Room but inexplicably lacked the basic cords to get online). Crestfallen, I rationalized that I would be better off poring over my briefing materials than hitting refresh on my email every fifteen seconds to follow Declan’s at-bats. Consumed by last-minute packing, I did not notice that Cass had slipped out of the apartment.
Just as I went looking for him to say goodbye, he burst through the front door, his light blue Oxford shirt drenched in sweat. He had sprinted eight blocks to the Apple Store and made it back just before I was scheduled to leave.
“Make two plans, God smiles,” he said, handing me a bag. “I got two cables in case one doesn’t work.”
I gave him a hug of gratitude, and as I held him, he repeated what he generally said before I traveled overseas: “Please don’t go.”
Because ISIS and its affiliates had begun attacking Western targets—murdering American journalists in Syria, shooting up hotels and tourist attractions in North Africa—I had spent a fair amount of time thinking about all that could go wrong on the trip. But I cheerfully proclaimed, “Feel the fear and do it anyway,” reminding Cass that I would be back home in time for Declan’s seventh birthday in a week.
Rían came running up to the door. No taller than my rolling suitcase, she sweetly demanded “five kisses and hugs.” In the midst of our final hug, I said I would talk to her every day and bring her back a new flavor of ChapStick, as I tried to do from all my trips.
As we flew, thanks to my airborne internet connection, I learned in real time that Declan had reached base four times (thanks to two line-drives and some clumsy fielding by the other team), and I ordered him a Nationals youth baseball jersey for his birthday, customized with “POWER” on the back. Then I turned my focus to preparing for what I expected would be a difficult visit.
OUR DELEGATION INCLUDED A HANDFUL of my staff from the US Mission, as well as senior officials from the State Department, USAID, and the Pentagon, among them the deputy commander of US armed forces in Africa. On our first full day in the region, we traveled to Maroua, the capital of Cameroon’s Far North Region, where people who had been attacked by Boko Haram were concentrated. I always tried to visit survivors of violence before meeting with heads of state. It allowed me to hear eyewitness perspectives that I could then relay to leaders, who usually lived far removed from their people.
When our plane landed, some three hundred Cameroonian special forces stood in full combat gear at the airport. Because Boko Haram attacks were recurrent in the area, and the group’s fighters could so easily melt into the local population, the security planning had been an elaborate affair. As we pulled out of the airport, the special forces stood guard about every five hundred feet. Passing by, I could see they were wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles and grenade launchers.
Cameroonian police and soldiers in camouflage set the pace and brought up the rear of our convoy. A team of US Navy SEALs, their faces shrouded in bandannas, distributed themselves among our vehicles, joining my usual security detail and an additional layer of diplomatic security from the US embassy. We had each been asked ahead of time to provide our blood type so that the ambulance in the convoy would have enough plasma in case of an emergency. A Cameroonian military helicopter flew overhead, and we were told that a US surveillance aircraft thousands of feet up in the air was also monitoring the area for approaching threats.
As a journalist, I had wandered around foreign lands with little more than a backpack, notebook, flashlight, and stash of $1 and $5 bills. When I saw American dignitaries zoom by in their ostentatious, armored convoys, I had often wondered how anybody in Washington thought such a display would enhance America’s prestige.
“Do we really need all this?” I asked Michael Hoza, the US Ambassador to Cameroon. He was adamant that we did.
“Can you imagine what it would do for Boko Haram’s standing around the world if they took out a cabinet official?” he asked.
Our convoy of fourteen armored vehicles rumbled along roads that the Cameroonian government had temporarily closed to civilian traffic. I looked out the bulletproof-glass window at the locals who lined the route—in some places, five people deep. Many waved and smiled. Young boys and girls peered out from behind the legs of their parents, and women in multicolored dresses carried enormous water jugs on their heads, waiting patiently for the spectacle to conclude so they could resume their routines.
The protection afforded to me and my team cast in relief the daily vulnerability of the people watching our convoy go by. Yet I knew that if I had second-guessed the security professionals, we might have been forced to cancel the visit north. Since the 2012 Benghazi attacks, the entire American security apparatus had grown even more averse to taking chances.*
Najat Rochdi, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Cameroon, was seated next to me in the armored car. A native of Morocco who had lived in Cameroon for three years, Najat demonstrated striking knowledge of the history, culture, and trauma of the place. On the plane ride over, I had scribbled down dozens of questions, and Najat now seemed to have answers for all of them. She gave me the strategic big picture, but also carried with her a list of thirty-seven children, some as young as eleven, who were languishing in a local Cameroonian jail, accused of being Boko Haram members despite an absence of evidence. I asked her to give me the list so I could show it to President Biya when I met with him the next day.
I also inquired about the Cameroonians who were being diverted from their livelihoods for the morning due to all the security closures.
“How upset are they about all this fuss and inconvenience?” I asked.
“Unfortunately,” Najat said, “they have no experience of the government looking out for them, so this is just another day.”
After a ninety-minute drive, we reached the town of Mokolo. Drummers in traditional garb gave us an energetic, celebratory welcome, and we paid a courtesy call to the head of the local administration. In our short meeting, he spoke proudly about Cameroon’s se
lf-appointed neighborhood guardians, or “vigilance committees,” which were trying to rid the area of Boko Haram. He described a recent incident in which one group of locals had used stones and bows and arrows to kill a twenty-five-year-old woman who entered a market wearing a suicide belt under her clothes. In that instance, it seemed, the woman was indeed a threat, but I had read reports of these same “guardians” attacking people as “Boko Haram” so they could steal their livestock. When I steered the conversation toward this problem, the official dismissed my concerns, denying that abuses against civilians were taking place.
After I bade the man farewell, my deputy chief of staff, Gideon Maltz, intercepted me before I could head back to the car. I rolled my eyes in frustration with the just-concluded meeting, which he had skipped. Gideon had planned the trip, and I liked to tease him that all the productive meetings were my idea and all the useless ones were his fault. However, his face looked pale, his eyes dull. Something was wrong.
“What is it?” I said.
“We need to talk to you,” he replied, motioning me away from a media scrum to a small, darkened room down the hall. Colin, my Africa adviser, was waiting there, his eyes filled with tears, while Kurtis, my spokesman, and Becca Wexler, my special assistant, looked at the ground.
“What?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry. “What?”
My mind leaped immediately to all the catastrophes that could have befallen Mum, Eddie, Cass, and the kids, but I did a quick calculation on the time difference with New York and reassured myself that they were likely still sleeping.
Colin spoke, barely able to piece a sentence together.
“As we were driving here,” he said, “our car hit a young boy.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
My vehicle had been seven cars in front of theirs, and I had heard nothing. “Oh my God,” I said again. “Is he going to be ok?”
The looks on Gideon’s and Colin’s faces—and the fact that the boy had been hit by an armored vehicle traveling forty-five miles per hour—told me everything.
“We don’t know yet,” Gideon mustered.
Colin was beside himself. The father of a young daughter, he had dedicated his life to efforts to end Africa’s most intractable wars. “We stopped after we hit him,” he exclaimed. “But then they made us drive on.”
He did not have to tell me who “they” referred to. I knew how US security officials would react in a situation like that. Along with the risk of a Boko Haram attack on stationary Americans, the officials would have immediately worried about the possibility of mob violence against Gideon, Colin, the Cameroonian driver, and the other US diplomat who was in the vehicle.
“We have to go back,” I said.
Colin clarified that, though their car had been told to drive on, the ambulance in the motorcade stopped to treat the boy.
I asked if they knew how the accident had happened. “I thought that pedestrians were blocked from accessing the road,” I said, uselessly.
Gideon thought the child had been looking off into the distance when he ran onto the road. Others later speculated that he had been focused on the Cameroonian helicopter shadowing the convoy.
As we each struggled to process what had happened, we discussed what to do next. Knowing that a group of survivors of Boko Haram violence had already been assembled to meet with us, Gideon and Colin recommended we follow through. Since we were awaiting word on the child’s fate and could do nothing to help him, I agreed.
“But,” I said, “no matter what, I am going to go see the boy’s family.”
On the short drive to our destination, I felt as though my insides had congealed and an intense wave of nausea came over me. Closing my eyes, I prayed that, against all odds, he would survive.
We arrived at a large dirt courtyard where small clusters of Cameroonians had gathered. Najat and I were led to a heavyset Cameroonian woman dressed in light purple, who held a toddler in her lap. We sat across from her and I asked Najat, who was translating, to begin by asking the woman where she and her daughter were from.
After Najat asked my question, the woman shook her head. “This girl is not mine,” she said, caressing the child.
Najat probed in French and then suddenly broke off, saying, “Oh God. They took everybody from her. Her two kids, her husband. They killed them all. She has nobody left.” The woman started to sob. A Cameroonian man who had joined our circle told her to stop crying. I cut him off.
“She can cry,” I said. “We should all cry.”
Each of the half dozen Cameroonians we met with over the next hour shared similar stories. They heard a “boom boom boom” when Boko Haram arrived in their village. Their attackers offered them impossible choices: leave your home or be killed; give us your daughter or we will murder your mother. One Cameroonian woman told us she had fled with her five-month-old baby, one-year-old, and three other young kids, and managed to survive a walk of several hundred miles. The woman did not say what had happened to her husband, but I had been briefed in advance that he had been set on fire in front of her.
After I finished speaking with the survivors, Becca pulled me aside. “The boy didn’t make it,” she told me, her voice shaking.
I had been expecting this news. But still, I felt as though my knees were wilting beneath me. Kurtis joined Najat and me in our vehicle, and for a long while none of us spoke.
Over and over in my mind, I heard, “First, do no harm. First. Do. No. Harm.”
We had brought $40 million and the promise of high-level American attention. We were pledging enhanced information-sharing and military training. And we had invited journalists from outlets like ABC News, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and the New York Times, whose coverage would call attention to the plight of Boko Haram’s victims, almost certainly bringing more money to buy medicine and food.
But whatever good we managed to do, I thought, could never compensate for what had just happened. Had we not come, a six-year-old boy would still be alive.
Kurtis, who was trying to pull himself together to talk to the media, reminded me that the Cameroonian authorities were responsible for security precautions like setting the pace of our drive, erecting the barriers by the road, and keeping people off the streets. The vehicle that hit the boy belonged to the United Nations, and the driver had been a Cameroonian UN employee.
None of these details mattered. Kurtis’s comments melded together, as the same four words kept blaring in my brain: First. Do. No. Harm.
When I told Najat that I wanted to go and see the boy’s family, she tried to dissuade me, saying it was impossible to know how the family’s village would react to our visit. Carlos Johnson, the head of my New York–based security detail, chimed in to agree. But I think no decision in my life up to that juncture seemed like less of a choice than the question of whether to pay our respects.
“This is not negotiable,” I said. “We can’t not do this.”
After a pause, Najat admitted that she would probably make the same call. Carlos said he would “work it” with the Navy SEALs and Cameroonian security officials, but that they would need some time to “secure the site.” Colin joined Carlos in getting the embassy’s top security officer to quickly develop a plan for my vehicle to stop at the boy’s home while keeping the rest of our large, heavily armed convoy at a respectful distance.
As Cameroonian and US security officials mapped out the new itinerary, we stuck with the next part of our original plan, driving nearly an hour to the Minawao refugee camp, home to some 60,000 Nigerians who had poured across the border in search of safety from Boko Haram.
I called Cass to tell him what had happened, asking him to tell Mum. I did not want her to hear about the accident on the news. We could not talk long because the line was bad. But he just kept repeating, “I’m so, so, sorry Samantha.” For the next several hours, every time we drove back into cell phone range, I would receive a flurry of one-line emails from my husband—simple messages such as, �
�Heartbroken here as well.”
Judging from the number and tempo of the emails he was sending, I could tell he could not concentrate on his work. This was the first time I had known him to be unable to focus.
When we arrived at the camp, we were greeted warmly by refugees gathered at the entrance. As television cameras rolled, I waved inertly, forcing a smile and eye contact with the children along our path. I told Najat I needed to use the restroom before we began our meetings. I had not been alone since I had heard about “the boy”—whose name, we had finally learned, was Toussaint Birwe.
I was escorted to a small plastic portable hut that encased a hole in the ground. I knew that this was the only place in the camp where I could find solitude—the only place I could escape the probing gaze of the media and the anguished looks on the faces of my team members, themselves in desperate need of consolation. I lifted the latch on the fiberglass door, ignored the overwhelming stench, and stepped inside.
I looked at the time on my phone and gave myself two minutes.
I imagined Toussaint’s smile, as he pointed eagerly to the motorcade. I imagined his small body lying on the road. And I imagined someone running to tell his parents and his siblings. I heard their searing cries upon learning what had happened. I thought of them in that moment, praying as they prepared for his burial. I let go of all the emotion I had been suppressing and sobbed with abandon. For two whole minutes, I did not have to appear strong or be strong for others.
When my allotted two minutes were up, I took a few wet wipes from my bag—the smell of which would always remind me of changing my own kids’ diapers—and attempted to remove the traces of my meltdown. Then I opened the door of the toilet and walked out into the harsh sunlight.
The Education of an Idealist Page 51
