The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (17 page)

The bicycle glided along, the generator headlamp flickered bright in the warm August night, the wind was fresh against my face, the bicycle glided along some more.

Really nice.

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

 

W
HEN I DESCRIBE
what happened to me on August 23, 2008, I say that I was taken.
O
n an empty stretch of road outside of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, out of the back seat of a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi by a dozen or so men whose faces were swaddled in checkered scarves. Each one of them carried an AK-47.

The truth of it dawned slowly on me, as the men seemed to rise up out of the sand, circling the car with their guns hefted, as they shouted a few words at our driver, as someone tugged open a door. We—me, my traveling companion Nigel Brennan, and the three Somali men helping us with our work—were headed that day to a sprawling settlement just outside the city to do some reporting. We were waved out from our air-conditioned vehicle into the sweltering equatorial heat. I remember in that instant a narrow-shouldered woman dressed in a flowing hijab hurrying past on foot. She pointedly looked away, as if a couple of white Westerners getting pulled from a car and being forced to lie spread-eagle in the ditch at the side of the road were an everyday occurrence or, in any event, something she had no power to stop.

It was clear to me then that nobody was going to call for help. Nobody was going to punch some sort of reverse button so that we would be pulled to our feet, put back into our car, and sent spinning down the road to where we had started. No, with every second that passed, the way back was becoming more obscure. It was hot, the air tasting like cinder. We were lying on some sort of edge. I pressed my forehead into the dirt, closed my eyes, and waited for whatever was coming.

 

This is how one life ends and another one begins. In the eyes of my family and friends, in the eyes of the cheerful young waiter who served me coffee and an omelet that morning at our mostly empty hotel in Mogadishu, and from the point of view of anyone who would next try to piece together the story, I vanished. And so did Nigel, who was a photographer from Australia and an ex-boyfriend of mine—who decided at the last minute to come with me on the trip and who may well spend the rest of his life regretting that he did.

I was 27 years old. I had spent most of the last seven years traveling the world, often by myself, as a backpacker, financing extended low-budget trips with stints working as a waitress in a couple of fancy cocktail lounges at home in Canada, in the oil-rich city of Calgary. With my saved-up tip money, I went through Venezuela, then Burma, then Bangladesh. I saw Pakistan and Syria, Ethiopia and Sudan. Each trip bolstered my confidence, convincing me that even while strife and terror hogged the international headlines, there was always something more hopeful and humane to be found on the ground.

Before going to Somalia, I spent the last year or so trying to transition to more serious work, learning photography and teaching myself how to produce a television report, locating myself—as many aspiring journalists did—strategically in the world's hot spots. I did a six-month stint in Kabul, followed by seven months in Baghdad. As a freelancer, I filed stories for a couple of English-language cable networks, taking whatever work I could get, and was writing a regular column for my small hometown paper in Alberta. I was getting by, but just barely. My plan was to spend a week in Somalia, which, with its civil war and what seemed to be an impending famine, had no shortage of potential stories to cover. Knowing it was risky, I took what felt like the necessary precautions—hiring a local fixer to arrange our logistics, paying for a pair of armed government guards to escort us around Mogadishu. For me, going to Somalia felt like a steppingstone, though I recognized it was a dangerous one.

 

Later, our captors would tell us they had been watching our hotel. What happened was planned, to the extent anything like this can be planned. Guns were marshaled; a place to take us afterward was secured. As we headed northwest out of the city that day, they somehow knew Westerners were coming. Maybe it was a cousin's cousin who tipped them off. Maybe it was the sight of our freshly washed SUV rental ripping around the battle-worn Old City, with its collapsed buildings and bullet-pocked walls. Most assuredly, there had been cash promised to somebody—a driver, a hotel employee, a guard—in exchange for information about where the foreigners were headed. We were ambushed just outside the city limits, at a precisely vulnerable moment, right after our government guards climbed out at a checkpoint and just before we were to meet two replacement guards a few kilometers down the road. Somebody—we don't know who—sold us out.

After our car was searched that day, we were pulled from the ditch and then driven about 45 minutes through the desert, swerving off the paved road and into a brushy wilderness. My heart pounded loudly in my ears. The car—piloted by one of the masked men—dodged thorn trees and ran right over bushes, not following any sort of path. With every passing minute, I knew we were moving farther off the grid.

One of the three men sitting in the front seat was unmasked. He turned back, smiling in a way that gave me some hope.

“Sister,” he said, “don't worry, nothing will happen to you. There is no problem here.
Inshallah.
” God willing, it meant. He added: “Our commander would like to ask you some questions. We are taking you to our base. We think maybe you are spies.”

I could feel the fear spike in my throat. I tried to keep talking. I started babbling, listing off every Islamic country I had been to, as if that made me more of an insider.

The man ignored me. We drove on. Eventually, we pulled into a walled compound and were put in a darkened room inside a low, tin-roofed building. The Somali men with whom we were traveling—our cameraman, driver, and a representative from the displaced-persons camp we were hoping to visit—arrived in a different vehicle and were installed in a nearby room.

Nigel and I sat glumly on two foul-smelling foam mattresses on the floor, our shoulders pressed against the dirty walls. We whispered in low voices, wondering what was happening: Was this a robbery? Did they really think we were spies? Some part of me believed that we had just overstepped our boundaries as foreigners, that we would receive some sort of militiaman reprimand and be sent back down the road. Outside, I could see a cooking area underneath a lean-to made from scrap wood and a thick tree whose branches hung heavily over the yard. In front of the house was a small outhouse. The sun radiated across the metal roof above, heating the room like an oven. Beyond our door, men were murmuring.

A man who had earlier told us his name was Ali came into the room and demanded our money. “Where is it?” he screamed. I fumbled with my backpack and produced $211—U.S. dollars being the currency of choice in Somalia. It was all I'd brought for the day, having left the rest of my cash under lock and key at the Shamo Hotel (sometimes spelled Shamow), where we were staying in Mogadishu. Nigel was carrying a few coins and a folded-up hundred-dollar bill he had stashed in his front pocket.

The men had already confiscated our cell phones, and now Ali grabbed my bag and dumped out its contents. He inspected everything disdainfully. My camera, my notebook, my water bottle. He took the cap off my lip balm. He examined both sides of my hairbrush. He handled each item delicately, as if it might explode.

It wasn't until later that day, when a new man arrived, introducing himself as Adam, that it became clear they were after more money than we had in our pockets. Adam looked to be in his mid-20s, thin and serene. He wore an orange-striped polo shirt and Ben Franklin eyeglasses. He asked for the phone numbers for our families and told us that he no longer believed we were spies. “Allah,” he said, “has put it into my heart to ask for a ransom.”

The thought was crushing. My parents were divorced. My father had chronic health issues and lived on disability checks. My mother had a low-paying job in a bakery. My bank account was just about empty. I'm not sure anybody I knew back home could even find Somalia on a map.

Nigel and I were allowed out of the room that evening, to use the bathroom and to get some air. Ali ushered us to a straw mat laid out alongside one of the compound's walls. He handed us two tins of tuna fish and a flask of tea. As darkness fell, the air cooled off somewhat. The sky became a screen, shot through with pinpricked stars. Beneath it, I felt small and lost.

Over near the lean-to, I could see the soldier boys lolling around. They were listening to a silver battery-operated boom box that was tuned to the BBC Somali Service. A male newscaster's voice blared, speaking Somali, delivering what I assumed was news of the war. Then, with bizarre clarity, I heard him say the words
Shamo Hotel
.

The words caused a stir. The soldiers were sitting up and beginning to talk. Ali waved at us excitedly, pointing toward the radio. The newscaster said
Canadian
and then
Australian
. My eyes met Nigel's. The story was about us. The feeling was devastating. It was confirmation that our troubles were both real and deep.

 

I know now that kidnappings for ransom happen more frequently than most of us would think. They happen in Mexico, Nigeria, and Iraq. They happen in India, Pakistan, Algeria, China, Colombia, and plenty of other places. Sometimes the motivation is political or personal, but most often it's about money. Hostage taking is a business, a speculative one, fueled by people like me—the wandering targets, the fish out of water, the comparatively rich moving against a backdrop of poor. The stories pop up in the news and then often disappear: An American traveler is grabbed in Benin. A Dutch consultant is held for ransom in Johannesburg. A British tourist is dragged from a bus in Turkey.

Families are phoned; governments are contacted. A certain machinery quietly goes into gear. Nobody would ever call these situations common, but they happen enough that there are procedures in place, a standard way things go.

The first call to my family from Somalia came on August 24, a day after we were taken. A rumbly voice surfaced on my father's voice mail, the man named Adam saying, “Hello, we have your daughter.” He said he would call again to talk about money and then hung up.

By nightfall, three agents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrived at my father's home in Sylvan Lake, several hours' drive north of Calgary, and were sitting around the dining-room table, along with my mother, who had arrived from her home in British Columbia. The agents listened several times to Adam's message. They requested permission to tap my parents' phones and offered talking points for what to say when Adam called again. When it came to money, they were to tell the truth: they had none, and the government wouldn't pay a ransom either.

Kidnappings happened, my parents were told, but they also ended. The RCMP agents then offered a bit of hard comfort: Nigel and I were now commodities. We were worth money. If our captors killed us, it would be their loss, too.

 

In Somalia, of course, we knew none of this. The hours crawled. Our hopes sagged. A day became a week and then a month. The kidnappers moved us several times, hiding us in vacant buildings surrounded by high walls and in tucked-away desert villages, where all of us—Nigel, me, the three Somali captives, plus the eight young men and one middle-aged captain who guarded us—remained invisible. When they moved us, it was anxiously and usually in the quietest hours of night. Riding in the back seat of a Suzuki station wagon belonging to one of the group's leaders, I saw mosques and night markets strung with lights and men leading camels and groups of boisterous teenagers, some of them holding machine guns, clustered around bonfires along the road.

Each time we arrived at a new place, the captain shuffled through his set of keys. The boys, as we called our young guards, rushed in with their guns and found a room to shut us inside. Then they staked out their places to rest, to pray, to eat. Sometimes they went outside and wrestled with one another in the yard. The leaders of the group—Adam and three other men who wore expensive clothes and spoke a polished English—all lived offsite, visiting us once or twice a week, sometimes bringing supplies.

Our captors practiced a fundamentalist form of Islam, interpreting the words of the Koran in the most literal way possible. Most of the boys, we learned, had gone to insurgent training camps in rural areas. They were part of a loosely organized movement that was fighting their country's own faltering transitional government and Ethiopian troops, who were sent over the border in 2006 to support Somalia's attempts at democracy. They described this fight as their jihad. Nigel and I came from what they termed “bad countries.” We belonged to the Western world, which to them was inscrutable and immodest and ruled over by Satan. Presumably, some portion of any ransom money they got for us would go to support the larger cause.

Every day I worked to make myself—to make us—harder to kill, by being friendly and remaining neutral on politics. If we could bore our captors without frustrating them, I figured, maybe they would deliver us back to the Shamo, like two boxes that had spent a month uselessly collecting dust in a warehouse.

When the leaders weren't around, the boys often loitered nearby. The air around us hummed with what I can only describe as male energy, a buzzy mix of repression and young strength. I felt it when they came to deliver food, when their eyes fell on me and then quickly moved away, as if the sight of me, or whatever thought that followed, was shameful. A number of them seemed curious about us, though, and eager to practice what little English they knew. We spoke most often with a guard named Jamal. He sat on the floor of our room, cross-legged, in a T-shirt and a pair of tan dress slacks with cuffs that rode high over his skinny dark ankles. He was 18, a clear work in progress, with long spindly legs and narrow shoulders that sloped forward, as if he were trying to shed some of his considerable height. On his chin, he had a few sprouting hairs, the very beginnings of a beard. He told us that his father had been killed by Ethiopian soldiers. The memory of it was fresh enough that it caused his eyes to water. “For me, this was start of jihad,” he said.