A House in the Sky (16 page)

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 intervals—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.

I
n 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.

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.