A House in the Sky (17 page)

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 deadline. 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.

L
ater, 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.

Now approaching the city limits, we were passing refugees loping along the road—families hauling themselves westward, away from the besieged urban streets. I could see sprawling encampments, dwellings made of tarps stretched over tree boughs that had been bent like hoops, looking like a fleet of ragtag, rigged sailboats. Minibuses running between Afgoye and Mogadishu traveled both lanes of the highway. A haze of yellow dust hung in the air. We pulled up at the final government checkpoint, where several dozen uniformed soldiers sat in the shade under a large tent. Someone lifted the hatch on the car. Our TFG guards wordlessly climbed out. Our driver rolled down his window and called out something in Somali to the departing soldiers, and within seconds we were moving again, headed into a short stretch of no-man’s-land that separated the government area from the militia area.

The road curved away from the checkpoint. In the front seat, Abdi was talking into his cell phone. I was looking at more photos—a series I’d taken of Nigel, sweetly kicking a ball with some children in the Old City—when I felt the car slow. I assumed we were meeting our new set of guards. I didn’t bother to lift my head. Sitting next to me, Nigel was absorbed with his own camera. But the energy inside the car shifted; the air seemed suddenly tinged with electricity. The three Somali men in the front seat were muttering. I looked up and saw a dark blue Suzuki station wagon parked on the opposite side of the road. I then saw someone standing in front of our car, a man with a gun, his head, nose, and mouth swaddled in a red-checkered scarf, the kind favored by mujahideen fighters around the world. His dark eyes bulged. The gun was pointed directly at our windshield.