by Ben Rawlence
Fish had to skip the meeting with Mr Komon to go to work, but Tawane and the others waited in the reception area, dressed up for the occasion. Immaculately groomed as ever, Tawane was proud and he was hopeful. He looked tired – running up and down fundraising was exhausting and expensive – but determined. He was a fighter, a striver, he would make the best of whatever straits he encountered and he would pull up those around him, inject them with confidence and set them to work. His tragic flaw, if he had one, was the breadth of his own horizons: ‘What if I had had the chance? What could I have achieved?’ he said wistfully. ‘If I was free of the camp, outside, in the world … I could have accomplished so much more.’
But UNYPAD had already had some success. The small print of the funding applications for USAID, the UN and Oxfam had been a trial, but after writing up policies on corporate accountability, health and safety, gender balance and so on, they had won their first contract as an implementing partner. It was a project just over the border in Dhobley, promoting reconciliation between two warring clans there and equipping the primary schools with footballs and stationery. When Tawane arrived with the money and the supplies, the little border town received him like a prodigal son. The mayor, the teachers, the children lined up singing songs. He was shocked at the peace and relative prosperity he saw. ‘One could live here freely,’ he thought.
It was his first trip back to Somalia since he had fled on his father’s back, aged seven, in 1992. The bus had taken him out onto the plain and, at the border, after he presented his documents and was assured of his right to come back again, he walked across the shadow of the roadblock on the sand, kneeled down and kissed the white dust of his homeland.
‘Long time!’ he murmured to himself. ‘Long time.’
The female members of the ’92 group were less sentimental about their homeland. For them, a future in Somalia was a nastier prospect. ‘If al-Shabaab see me walking around without a man, me, an educated woman,’ Kheyro said, ‘they can slaughter me.’ She preferred the Dadaab that she knew. ‘I grew up here, it is home, I trust it,’ she said.
Her incentive work had kept the family insulated from the ration cut, even though she had recently had to resign from teaching because she had been doing another job at the same time: working as a rape counsellor at the Danish Refugee Council. The UN had made an announcement threatening anyone working two incentive jobs with blacklisting and Kheyro had been afraid. The school was sorry to see her go, she was the only teacher who had finished high school, but they understood. The counselling paid 9,000 shillings ($110) a month. And she preferred it. Talking for an hour at a time to clients instead of the consuming work of teaching, although ‘I see a lot of distress,’ Kheyro said of her new job. ‘The men of Dadaab are very traumatized. They want to be violent towards women.’
But Kheyro needed the money more than ever. Her mother was sick and her younger sister had dropped out of school to get married. For several months now, Rukia had been complaining of pains in her back and in her chest and she spent most days at home lying down in block A2. The years of wood gathering had exacted a toll.
With her savings, Kheyro had acquired a second-hand laptop. She wistfully browsed the webpages of universities abroad but her plans for higher education were on hold. ‘I would love to study,’ she said. ‘The dilemma is, who will look after my mum?’
In the neighbouring block, A6, White Eyes’ new wife, Fatuma, was enjoying her confinement after giving birth, well supplied with food by her doting husband, unaffected by the ration cut. White Eyes had escaped the ill omens of the season – Nasib smiled for him once again. His nose for gossip and his loquacity had landed him a coveted job as one of two refugee reporters for the local radio station, Dadaab FM, at about the same time that Fatuma got pregnant. He had, he said, ‘done a lot of work’, so that ‘she become fully charged’, and had taken her urine to the clinic at the earliest sign.
The radio station gave White Eyes a room in a converted container parked among the scrub next to a tall steel antenna on the outskirts of Dadaab town. On the wall was the station’s motto: ‘seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently’. The station managers were Somali Kenyans and they flouted the rules governing incentive workers and paid everyone the same. White Eyes had a computer which he used ‘to enter Google to do my research’, although without glasses, he suffered from what he called ‘screen friction’.
He roamed the camp collecting stories: about malnutrition from the ration cut, and its other effects, a couple who claimed they were too weak to have sex and wanted to sue WFP for their impending divorce. And he had a talk show every afternoon called Xogwaran, which meant, literally, many stories. He had found the perfect job. ‘Now, in the camps, people respect me, they greet me.’ Professor White Eyes had been transformed into DJ White Eyes; he had become famous overnight: ‘All my dreams are coming true at the same time,’ he said.
In mid-November, the day after his wife Fatuma had given birth to a healthy baby boy, White Eyes got a call from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. His case had been called: they told him to prepare to go for a resettlement interview. Dadaab is deemed too dangerous for officials to visit, so the US government built a centre at Kenya’s other refugee camp Kakuma, the one near the Sudanese border, far from al-Shabaab.
White Eyes was euphoric. ‘Back in Action in Africa!’ he exclaimed to a bemused Fatuma lying on a plastic mat in the shade of her mud house, tenderly stroking their mewling day-old child. Beside her was a cup of orange juice – her husband was insistent about the benefits of fruit. She worried about missing him, but in reality, even once called to prepare for Kakuma, it can take years for the US to send a bus to come and collect you, and in the meantime you must wait in Dadaab. There are over 15,000 refugees in the pipeline for resettlement to the US. At the current rate, it will take over fifteen years before all of them make their way there.
For now, though, that thought didn’t spoil White Eyes’ excitement or his sense of vindication. He had chosen well, at last. ‘This wife is a lucky person,’ he said. Not like the other one. She had borne him the son that he had longed for, and for whom he now had, by God’s grace, the means to provide. He bent to pick up the little bundle wrapped in several cloths and held him gingerly in one hand. ‘Although I have seen a lot of life, this is new for me,’ he said. ‘His name is Moulid’ – it meant ‘the prophet’s birthday’ – ‘and he is the one who will save us.’
∗
A few weeks later, another baby arrived in Dadaab. It should not have been born there at all. Muna and Monday’s case for urgent resettlement to Australia should have been completed years ago but by December 2014 they were still waiting. They had waited so long in fact, that they had got back together and were expecting another Christian-Muslim child.
The reconciliation had come during the hot season. Muna had left the sinful corner of Grufor and moved back to Monday’s compound in the Sudanese block. Monday believed she had come back to him because of his sweet words and the promise of money. She, on the other hand, claimed it was because of rising harassment in block E1. Other kids had kicked Christine and knocked her unconscious for over an hour. Their reunion was a question of safety. Monday beamed at her return but Muna looked downcast: the fighting and grief of the last three years had wasted her.
At first, Monday was upbeat about the delay in the Australian bureaucracy: ‘They say now it is the time of Syria, and then they will come back to us.’ But since they had been promised an imminent departure, an election had returned a new Australian government with a very hard line on immigration that was going slow on all resettlement cases. This they didn’t know.
When Monday learned of Muna’s pregnancy, he became more impatient. The scandal spread fast. Fearing the shock would kill their mother, Muna’s brothers had evacuated her to Somalia before she found out. Muna’s sister in Nairobi went too, out of shame. Again, the blocks were on fire with gossip and Monday moved his family back to Tr
ansit for their safety. That June, Christine had her third birthday in a plastic UNHCR tent.
As the months wore on, their enquiries to the UN about their case became more and more frantic and less and less polite. By early December, the impending birth brought matters to a head. Last time, the mob had threatened to infiltrate the hospital and Muna’s extremist relatives still worked there. Monday was insistent his wife give birth away from the camp, in Nairobi or in Dadaab town. But Monday was so angry with UNHCR he could not speak to them without exploding so Muna went to the office instead. In a stroke of luck, the head of protection at UNHCR, the fierce but fair Leonard Zulu, came to hear about the case and demanded to know the cause of the delay. Finally, seventeen months since the medical had cleared them to go, a UNHCR official sent an email to the Australian embassy asking what had happened. The Australians had forgotten about the case: there had been a change of government, a rotation of personnel, they were full of apologies. For want of an email, Muna and Monday’s life had slipped through the cracks.
Sweetee had gone to America earlier in the year in a much faster process. But she worked as a cleaner in the UN compound. When she started coming late to work or broke down crying on the job, a kind supervisor asked her what the matter was. Instantly, the staff who had refused to believe her stories of harassment and attempted rape by the police and G4S security guards, were ordered to spring into action and she was whisked away from the camp. Muna was not so well connected.
By the time Leonard Zulu intervened it was too late to move the heavily pregnant Muna to Nairobi and on Sunday 7 December she bore another girl in the health centre in Dadaab. After a week, the family were promised, once the new addition was registered with the UN field office, they could be relocated to Nairobi and then onwards, at last, to Australia: to a new life far away, alien, but safe.
‘I don’t trust them, these people … they’re just trying to confuse me!’ said Monday. Paranoia had overtaken him. He smoked even in the mornings now, in the tent, in front of the kids. He went to work with yellow eyes, stumbling like a madman. He was convinced the UN was trying to sell his only, hard-won, slot of freedom. It was Muna instead who cooled him down, serene with motherly hormones. ‘We have no option,’ she told him, gently. ‘We just have to be patient.’ She felt calm, believing that her wait was nearly at an end.
‘You’ll miss Dadaab when you go there,’ her friend said. ‘They all do.’
‘Really?’ Muna smiled. ‘I don’t think so.’
Guled’s mind, too, was racing away from him, over the globe. Looking out from the little shop made of wooden spars on the corner of the main street in Hawa Jube where they had moved the khat business after Auntie had returned to Mogadishu, he watched the rain coming down. A puddle slowly threatened at the door. The 50 per cent ration cut and the rains had arrived at the same time. Beside him, on sacks on the floor, sat Maryam wrapped in folds of black polyester. Behind, the children stood playing with the damp cloth that covered the little bundles of green khat wrapped with strips of banana leaf. Maryam had proved an adept saleswoman and, for a while, life in the camp had looked up; they had even managed to send for their daughter Sadr from Mogadishu. But even Maryam could not magic a profit from khat in the rainy season; the market was flooded. The roads too – so that often the ordered stock arrived too late, and spoiled. An 8,000 shilling ($90) debt had crushed them.
For several weeks now they had eaten only sorghum. Tasteless porridge for breakfast and the same for dinner. They rarely had the money for the oil and sugar to make it palatable. Maryam was angry, hungry and pregnant. She was close to quitting the camp again.
Her mother had heard about the ration cut on the BBC and phoned Maryam: ‘What are you doing there? There’s no food! Do you want to deliver there? We know your husband is broke, do you want to die of malnutrition?’ Now she sat in the shop, quiet except to talk of going back to Mogadishu. Guled had abandoned trying to reason with her.
He was thin. His stomach ached. Every day he gave his share of the food to Maryam and the kids. Malnourishment showed in his face which was even more gaunt than usual, and in his eyes, which bulged, looming white. The anxiety made him thinner still. And on his head, right in the middle of his twenty-three-year-old crown was a single snow-white hair. He was soon to be a father of three. In a matter of years, he had passed from childhood to middle age and it seemed as if his body had suffered through all the years in between. Two phrases played in a frantic loop in his mind, ‘If I had money …’ and ‘Tahrib’.
Tahrib is the Somali word for ‘migration’ but it has come to mean more than that. It is the term for the long journey and illegal entry into Europe, usually overland, via the Mediterranean sea. At a loss for how to generate money in Dadaab, with neither capital nor connections, his brain kept returning, like a moth flying in ellipses around a flame, to tahrib.
Mogadishu was not an option. ‘Never,’ he said to himself. ‘The security situation is bad, government officials are being killed every day, what about a normal person like me?’ And even if Maryam returned, he could not stay in Ifo camp. He would need to provide. ‘I will go to a better place and work,’ he decided. Even though, rationally, the odds of surviving and finding work were probably better in Mogadishu, the traumatic past, the perilous future, and the present humiliation of being unable to provide for his family were too much.
But even tahrib needed money. It was mostly the well-off youth who made the trip. ‘I can do it step by step,’ Guled thought. He knew drivers who drove trucks from the port at Mombasa bringing the food for the World Food Programme to Dadaab. They had promised him a lift to Mombasa. From there, he could find a ride to Nairobi and then on up to Sudan. After that? He knew the journey was hard, but it was better than this.
As he stared ahead, out the door, at the rain, and at his children playing quietly on the floor of the shop, the tears came then in a rush. For the first time since he had come to the camp, since he could remember, he cried. He covered his face with his Manchester United T-shirt and pushed the red cloth into his sockets and walked away, his body shuddering with great heaving sobs through which he struggled to breathe.
He talked to his friends, he went through his options, he asked around for work. And as the days ticked by, he got thinner. The pressure from Maryam increased. Every day she started and didn’t stop. It was three months to go before she gave birth to their third child. Guled wanted her to deliver in the camp – the hospital was better than those in Mogadishu – but she was determined to return. It was a tragedy. They had come through so much. Only to be torn apart at the last. ‘Any day now, I can go,’ Maryam warned. ‘Anytime! As soon as the rains slow and the road clears …’
Tahrib. The word repeated in his head like the throb of blood in his temple. It was a risky and expensive thing to do but it at least had the virtue of action; it was something, a decision, an honourable effort, even if he died trying: a kind of kamikaze mission, a noble suicide. ‘The life we are in today, it is better for me to die in the Sahara or in the sea,’ he said. On the day the UN return convoy departed for Kismayo, Maryam gave him a look. It meant the roads were drying. Soon, it meant. Soon she would go back to Somalia. And when she did, Guled resolved, he would begin another journey: the first step on that harsh lonely trek, the treacherous road to Africa’s northern shore.
Epilogue
May 2015
I was on my final research trip to the camps. On successive days I invited Nisho and Mahat, Kheyro and Guled for a meal in the best restaurant in Dadaab town, a pink concrete structure with a pretty garden in a courtyard called the Hanshi Palace. I wanted to read to them what I had written, to show them what I had done with the stories they had shared with me. For various reasons, the others I met elsewhere. Meeting in Dadaab was difficult for the refugees: they had to take a taxi or a bus. But it gave us more time. The kidnap risk for foreigners remained elevated throughout my time researching in the camp and the UN security office kept reducing the rec
ommended period of time for staying in one place: from two hours to one and, by the end, to thirty minutes. Plus it allowed me to avoid the annoyance of travelling with police escorts. No one appreciated me turning up at their house with a police pick-up truck loaded with the four heavily armed men that the UN security office required.
Nisho and Mahat came first. At the gate to the restaurant, the security guard wouldn’t let them in and the owner demanded to know what business had these two dusty refugee boys in his establishment. I was called to the entrance to vouch for them. After some hurt pride and a few barbed comments from Nisho, the owner apologized and soon the boys were watching the television on the wall and sipping juice.
It was a struggle to turn their attention from the TV to the sound of my reading voice but once we got going they were hooked. They hooted at my descriptions of them and punctuated each sentence with ‘Sa!’ to indicate that what I had written was accurate. They had, strangely, no anxiety about whether something was flattering or no: their only concern was with the truth.
At the buffet, they piled their plates high with as much chicken, rice and vegetables as they could carry and polished off the lot. Catching sight of the bill, Nisho was horrified. He was shocked that someone could pay 500 shillings ($6) for a meal. ‘It can bring conflict!’ he said. ‘In Ifo a plate is 80 shillings [$1], everyone the same.’ Poverty is a powerful social leveller.
When it was Kheyro’s turn, she arrived in a gold dress with a full niqab veil covering her face. ‘People talk!’ she said, in explanation. As we spoke, she looked around suspiciously at the other men in the restaurant; they were all watching us. She wouldn’t eat. ‘I only eat at home,’ she said; a demure woman eats in private. Kheyro read her own story on the computer screen in concentrated silence as I watched with rising apprehension.
