Mahamuud was pressing me to move on, to find his family before nightfall. I promised to return on our way back to the border, and painfully detached from Ainanshie and his family. We walked on, inquiring under every tree. Under the tallest trees were the families with men who had guns. Women who were alone were trying to shelter their children under bushes that were barely more than scrub. Mahamuud began meeting people whom he knew—business partners, neighbors—and they kept telling him, “Farther back. They are back there.”
Mahamuud spotted Fadumo, the wife of his older brother, Mahamed. Fadumo was also the sister of Mahamuud’s wife. She grabbed Mahamuud’s arm as if she would never let go. Her husband came running, barefoot. He still had his mustache and bushy eyebrows, but the rest of him had shrunk into cavities of bone. He looked like a corpse running. Mahamed and Fadumo had four children with them, who looked up at me as though an angel had just come to them from heaven.
Mahamed told us that Mahamuud’s wife was just a short distance away, and their children were well. He grabbed his brother’s arm and we started walking. Mahamuud’s wife caught sight of him from far off and began running to greet him. When she threw herself at him she began to sob.
It was the first time I had ever seen a Somali couple display affection to each other like that. They were clinging to each other and stroking each other’s faces, both of them crying and not letting go. The children came running and clung to the two of them—there was a moment of pure joy and tears which was very private, and Mahamed and I turned away out of respect.
Still grasping Mahamuud’s arm, his wife, Si’eedo, took us under the tree where she was camped. Sitting there was Mahamuud’s younger sister, Marian, and her two children. Marian’s three-year-old daughter was the most beautiful child I had ever seen. But when I looked at Marian’s baby, it seemed almost as though there was no baby in there—just a tiny, crumpled-up human form, a few days old, clinging to the dry breast of his starving mother. A malnourished baby has horrifying physical proportions, his head seemingly bigger than the rest of his body. I thought it was the most terrifying thing I could ever see.
At the same time, I saw in the child a sudden pull of life. It was being extinguished, but it was there. I said to Marian, “We have to save this baby. It’s alive—we must get it across the border.” She looked at me and said, “Allah has given me this child, and if He wills it, Allah will take him away.” She was one of the real Brotherhood people and seemed completely passive. She felt that she was being tested by Allah; she had to accept that the child would die if Allah wanted it to be that way. To show bitterness, or despair, would be to fail the test of faith. In fact, everybody seemed to be patiently waiting for this baby to die in her lap. And why not—after all, other babies were dying. Mahamuud’s youngest child, who was about a year and a half old, was sick, too; his little bottom was flaccid and wrinkled from dehydration.
I said, “We have to leave tomorrow. We have to save this baby.” Everybody thought I was being sentimental, that I was dazed, that this was my way of dealing with death and the horror that was all around us. Perhaps it was. There was no way this child was going to live. We boiled water for tea, and I cooled some of the water and handed a glass to Marian to give to the baby. When she held it to the baby’s lips they started moving.
That night we slept on mats and thin cloths spread on the white sand, all near each other. Si’eedo cooked a kind of watery sorghum porridge with dirty water. There was no nutrition in it, not even any salt. Then we fell asleep where we’d eaten, wrapped in shawls. It was comfortable in a strange way; the sand was soft, and the wind smelled like Mogadishu. But everyone had scabies and lice and warned me I would catch them, too. The children had lice visibly trailing along their necks, and there I was with my sporty little duffel bag, with a toothbrush and toothpaste and a change of underwear and clean clothes. It was surreal.
The next day, as everyone was collecting their stuff, I decided to walk back to the tree where Aflao and Ainanshie and their family were camped. As I was headed there everyone asked me who I was. I answered, “I’m Hirsi Magan’s daughter,” and someone asked, “Which wife?”
I said, “The Dhulbahante wife, Asha Artan.” They told me to go over under another tree, where I found another cousin, whom I had never met: Zainab Muhammad Artan, the half-sister of Mahmud, whom I had secretly married in Mogadishu just three months before. When I heard who she was, I started. I felt as if that life had been eons ago.
Zainab told me she had taken the coastal road out of Mogadishu, to Kismayo. When Hawiye fighters attacked Kismayo, she and her husband left in panic, and they had had to bring another woman’s children with them—two boys who had been playing with Zainab’s children when the fighters came, and whose parents must now have no idea where they were.
She pointed them out. I recognized them. They were Ahmed and Aidarus, the two youngest sons of my mother’s youngest sister. They were about seven and five. One of the boys ran over and clutched my right hand and the other my left, and they looked up at me. They didn’t even plead—they didn’t have to. I had to take them. These children were mine—my responsibility.
I took the boys back to Mahamuud and told him the story and he just nodded. He, too, knew we had to take them.
We had to get back to the Kenyan border as quickly as we could before our army officer, Mr. Mwaura, forgot about us. We looked around. We had told him that we would return with one woman and four little children, but now, in addition, we had Mahamuud’s brother and his family, his sister and her two children, and my two little boy cousins. On top of that, both the wives had young women relatives along with them. So now we were accompanied by one man, five women, and twelve children. Instead of being a party of seven, we were now a huddle of twenty human beings.
We decided to try to make it together, even though we knew that we might not have enough money to get everyone through into Kenya. Mahamuud paid for a pickup to transport all of us back to the parking lot near the border. It cleaned out all his Somali money. Now he had only U.S. dollars on him, and if he showed those here, with all the guns around, he would be killed. When the truck dropped us off, we were in the no-man’s-land between countries. There was a sea of people between us and the riverbed where the UN High Commission for Refugees had its tent, even more people than there had been the day before. We settled down in the sun to wait for Mahamuud to arrange matters.
It was late when Mahamuud returned to us, and he was being carried by four men, who dumped him on the sand by our mat. He had been stung by a scorpion and was nearly paralyzed with the pain. We lay him down on a guntino cloth and tried to make him comfortable; there was nothing else to do. His leg was swollen and black.
Now it was up to me to walk back into Kenya, to talk to the border guards, and to try to find some food for us all while we waited here on the Somali side for Mahamuud to recover enough to move. If he were to die, which can happen from a scorpion bite, our situation would be even more desperate.
The guards let me into Liboye with my ID, and I managed to buy some milk; my grandmother always said camel’s milk counteracts scorpion venom, but cow’s milk was all I could find. When I returned, I saved some of it for the little baby, though the others grumbled that it was a waste, and I gave Marian some to help start up her own breast milk. But when I told her to give the baby a name she refused; she didn’t want to get attached to the child because she had prepared herself for him to die.
We waited for days in the shadeless zone full of tarpaulins and desperate people. Mahamuud developed a fever. When it rained we gathered water from a pothole that was coated green with algae. We crushed maize flour into the water and I gave some of it to the baby.
All the children cried all the time, a constant moaning wail. The youngest of my cousins had some kind of respiratory infection. Everyone had diarrhea. The baby was so small and bony and vulnerable that I was too frightened to hold him. Marian kept the child tight to her chest, wrapped in a cloth.
The UN began to distribute food; basically they handed rations to people who claimed to be clan leaders, and these people either kept it for their own families or sold it. You could get rations only if you registered at the main tent, but hundreds of people were lined up there. There was a water tank, but I never managed to get close to it: water was the scarcest commodity of all, and there were constant fights over it. People were dying all around us. The UN had hired Kenyan and Somali guards to help bury the bodies.
The place was crawling with scorpions and snakes, all kinds of reptiles, and I had no idea which of them were dangerous. I tried desperately to recall my grandmother’s lessons as I tried to figure out what we needed to do to keep us all alive. Everyone else had become so passive; it was as if they were stunned, just waiting to die. Everywhere I went, people looked at me as though I could somehow save them. In my shoes, with my toothbrush, walking to and from the border to buy maize flour and bananas, I looked like an emissary from another world—the world of normal life, which still existed somewhere.
One morning when I went to get water with all the throngs of other women I heard that a woman had been attacked in the night. She had arrived alone, and she was from a small subclan; she had no men to protect her. Kenyan soldiers had taken her out of her hut in the night and raped her.
I went to see her in the tiny rag hut she had made for herself. She was one big wound. Her face was swollen and covered in dried blood, her clothes were torn, there were marks all over her legs. She was shaking uncontrollably. I touched her hand and asked if I could help her but she didn’t talk. All she could say was Ya’Allah, Ya’Allah, “Allah have mercy on me.”
I went to get her more water, and all the people nearby told me, “You shouldn’t be seen with that woman. She is impure. People will say you’re the same.” All I could see was a human being who had been abused, who was on the verge of death, but to them, she was an outcast.
I knew she would die soon. I walked all the way to the UNHCR tent and found a Sri Lankan woman and told her, in English, that there was a woman alone who had been raped. I explained that Somalis would leave this woman to die. She came to the tent with some guards and took her away. I told Mahamed and the others about it and they said, “Of course it is not the woman’s fault, but you know, there are so many problems. You can’t save everyone here.” I did know that, but we could have taken care of each other. Two days later, again there was a story of another woman who had been raped. It began happening all the time: Kenyan soldiers came at night to rape Somali women who were alone without protectors. And then all these women would be shunned and left to die.
This is what my grandmother had meant when she warned me: if you are a Somali woman alone, you are like a piece of sheep fat in the sun. Ants and insects crawl all over you, and you cannot move or hide; you will be eaten and melted until nothing is left but a thin smear of grease. And she also warned us that if this happened, it would be our fault.
It was horrible. Everyone in that camp called themselves Muslims and yet nobody helped these women in the name of Allah. Everyone was praying—even the woman in that hut had been praying—but no one showed compassion.
* * *
Mahamuud’s fever had already begun to abate when Mahad arrived in this no-man’s-land, straight from Nairobi. He had Kenyan shillings with him; he had raised money from the Osman Mahamud to come and rescue as many people as he could. I told Mahad he must go to Dhobley and get Aflao and Ainanshie’s family out to safety, and he said he would do it.
My brother was now acting as though he were commander in chief, though to me it seemed as though he had arrived after the battle. He loudly expressed concern for my well-being in this appalling place. He ordered me to head straight for Nairobi with Mahamuud’s wife and children; he said he would return to pick up Mahamed’s family, and Marian, with her two kids. But I knew Mahad: his intentions had a way of not corresponding with reality. So I told him I would stay. I couldn’t leave these two families, especially the little baby with no name.
Mahad left for Dhobley. He was gone for two nights. Two days after he returned, together with Ainanshie and Aflao and everyone else, Mahamuud finally stood up. The fever had gone. Everyone was still alive, even the baby. The money that was supposed to pay for bribes and transport had severely diminished as I bought food in the Kenyan border village, and the people camped around us were beginning to eye our stocks hungrily. Now that Mahamuud was well enough to move, it was time to try to cross the border.
It was now Mahad and me, Mahamuud and his family, Mahamed’s family, Aflao and Ainanshie’s family, Marian and her child and baby, and my two little cousins: fifteen adults and sixteen children.
We decided to separate. Mahad would wait for a day or so with Aflao and Ainanshie’s family. I would leave now, with Mahamuud, with two men, three women, the two young girls traveling with them, and twelve very young children.
First we had to find Mwaura and renegotiate. I walked with Mahamuud along the path into Liboye. Every time soldiers stopped and questioned us, I spoke to them in Swahili. We finally tracked Mwaura down in the empty lot where hundreds of refugees were massing and trying to negotiate with Kenyan men with pickups and buses. Mwaura looked at me and said, “Ah, the girl who speaks Swahili.” He was friendlier now. I bribed him several thousand extra shillings to let us all get through. It had become an easy transaction, adult to adult, eye to eye. He was not a bad man, and I later realized that I had vastly overpaid him. Mahad made the same trip after us for far less money.
But then it took several days for Mahamuud to negotiate our transportation from the border. Again and again he trudged back to the Somali side of the border, where we waited for him, and told us “Maybe tomorrow.” There were simply too many of us, and the prices were too high. All the Somalis who still had money, as we did, were also bribing the police and offering huge sums to anyone who would drive them closer to Nairobi. Finally Mahamuud told us he had made a deal. He had found a bus driver who would take us—but he had agreed to pay him almost all our remaining money.
The bus took us to a place in the foothills of Garissa, where we spent the night. Then we took another bus to Garissa, and yet another one to Nairobi. By this time, the children were no longer even crying; they were almost motionless.
* * *
We walked into my mother’s house at 10:30 in the morning at the end of February 1992. I had been gone for three weeks. She had been so desperate about us—she, too, looked thin and haggard. She was stunned to see me walk in, filthy and crawling with lice, with a huge crowd of starving people.
We ate and drank clean water; then, before we even washed, I put Marian in a taxi with me and told the driver to go to Nairobi Hospital. We had no money left and I knew Nairobi Hospital was expensive; it was where I had been operated on when the ma’alim broke my skull. But I also knew that there they would help us first and ask us to pay later. Saving the baby’s life had become the only thing that mattered to me.
At the reception desk I announced, “This baby is going to die,” and the nurse’s eyes went wide with horror. She took him and put a drip in his arm, and very slowly, this tiny shape seemed to uncrumple slightly. After a little while, his eyes opened.
The nurse said, “The child will live,” and told us to deal with the bill at the cash desk. I asked her who her director was, and found him, and told this middle-aged Indian doctor the whole story. I said I couldn’t pay the bill. He took it and tore it up. He said it didn’t matter. Then he told me how to look after the baby, and where to get rehydration salts, and we took a taxi home.
Ma paid for the taxi and looked at me, her eyes round with respect. “Well done,” she said. It was a rare compliment.
In the next few days the baby began filling out, growing from a crumpled horror-movie image into a real baby, watchful, alive. One evening at dinner I said, “Now we must give this baby a name.” He must have been about six weeks old by then. Just as I said that, there was a knock
at the door and yet another refugee arrived, the eighteen-year-old younger brother of Osman and Mahamuud and Mahamed. His name was Abbas Abdihalin. “Let him be named after me, after the great Abbas!” he crowed. So the child was named Abbas. He must be a teenager now.
Little Abbas was everyone’s favorite. A child with no father and no future—a child who could so easily have died, but for the grace of Allah—he was a gem, winning and lively, cooed over and protected by us all. The house was full and everyone was jubilant just to be alive. The two cousins I had brought with me became my mother’s children. She was gentle with them and cooked separate meals for them. Ma was oddly happy for a while with this huge tribe around her. Ramadan came—the time of families—and our flat was like a clan meeting of the Osman Mahamud.
People began sending us money from abroad. Somalis living all over the world, in Canada, in Europe, sent us money by hawala. The hawala system is a fine example of Somali ingenuity. You go to see a man in Toronto or Stockholm or Kuala Lumpur. You give him cash. He calls a grocery store in a Somali neighborhood in Nairobi, or Birmingham, or anywhere else, and arranges for your friend to pick up the money. There’s a commission, but no paperwork. The whole thing takes a few phone calls and just a day or two; it’s based entirely on trust within the clan, or within the Muslim Brotherhood, which runs the cheapest and most reliable systems of all. The same thing was happening for Somali families sheltering refugees all over Kenya: money was coming in from the clans.
But even though we had enough money for food, the apartment was still a madhouse. The noise alone was insane. Order was barely maintained by the men leaving the house all day. The scabies and lice drove us mad, too—scabies especially. We bought crates of lotion at a time at the clinic, but the lotion only works if everybody uses it at the same time and washes everything; in our apartment, people always forgot, or just didn’t bother, and more people were constantly arriving. At one point there must have been thirty-five or forty of us. We were constantly reinfested; it was like a plague.