FEB-B-2
DEPARTURE HARGEISA AFTER “THE LONGEST
DAY”
AND A NEAR ALL-NIGHTER IN HGH AND EAMH
WITH OPERATING THEATRE AND CRUSHING
CROWDS
OF OUTPATIENTS, TO ARRIVE AT THE MANSOOR
AFTER MIDNIGHT TO BE UP AT FOUR AND OUT
AT SIX
FOR THE ROAD TRIP TO BERBERA IN OUR
CONVOY
TO THE RED SEA PORT
February 13, 2004
It was a short night. We had hardly settled in when I got up on my perpetual early rising schedule which I have not tried to break despite its clumsy drowsiness in the late afternoon, so as to get a jump on each daily schedule. It will probably be a similarly matched jet lag re-entry in which I wilt yr to prolong the early wakefulness to use that time to get caught up on details and use the doldrums of my circadian rhythm to go through the routines established for such scheduled work. I have been cultivating these early morning “séances” ( to use the term inappropriately for the time of day when it occurs) to try to do my agenda, while the regular parts of the day I am pulled apart by the requirements of others’ needs. I have wanted to give a rather careful accounting of this experience, so that you might appreciate this new venture into a part of the world that is virgin territory for me, despite my being a seasoned Africanist. This is more middle Eastern than African, with the desert terrain and the Islamic predominance, but that familiarity is rather strong in my background as well. But, the peculiar “worst of both worlds” status makes this peculiar non-nation vulnerable yet full of hopeful aspirations. I would hope that they can make it. Today I will venture out of the capital for the first time and see a bit of that foreboding countryside and the relics of the war that was is principle feature for much of the recent past, before going to the principle port, with the legendary name---Berbera---among a group of people who call themselves Isaak—the lost tribe of Israel.
So, I began the day with a quick run to the Business Center to see if I could send out some postcards I had tried to address during my stay, and then to stand at the door with my light pack of things for my own use, and the full duffel bag of medicines and surgical supplies for the use of the Berbera Hospital.
` [A later note added in addendum; all the postcards that I had addressed and written at each stage in my Somaliland stay were packaged together in a single envelope and shipped to the United Arab Emirates, arriving festooned with UAE stamps, on which a hand-lettered address I had left with my name and GWUMC address was pasted on the outside of the envelope and delivered to me a month later, for me to open and affix US postage stamps to mail from the domestic terminus in Washington DC to those I had addressed from Hargeisa. This was a very clever idea on the part of the Hotel Maansoor staff who had pointed out to me that otherwise each postcard would be carried out by DHL special air carrier and the cost per postcard would be over $80.00. I was seeking a thrill for you in getting an exotic postage stamp, but this alternative would have been too much a thrill for me!]
I had time, of course, for yet another postcard or two, since the four o’clock AM rising for the six o’clock departure was just a whistle in the wind. First, the vehicles had to pick up the nurse midwife students at Edna Aden Hospital as well as Rhoda, our reliable translator coordinator from Qatar and Stacey Norville, the Leeds-born UK nurse midwife serving a one year term here before trying to decide what to do next, quite possibly go on to Australia to work in a similar capacity or go back to Leeds for an MPH degree. We waited well past the time that we expected them in being fashionably late, but finally boarded with our Berbera host Dr. Mahmoud. Remember that they had been in a rush to get us yesterday around noon, and then after only a short stay at Edna Aden Hospital for the trivial number of patients we might be expected to see there, and be on our way to see patients in the evening in Berbera. As I had predicted, that certainly was not going to happen, but I thought there would be some sense of urgency about getting us down there for an early start and a quick entry into the clinical queue that I could feel almost palpably at this distance was growing longer and more impatient by the hour.
Instead, we boarded the vehicles for what seemed like a leisurely sightseeing drive down the 193 kilometers on a tarred road, but with road blocks, speed bumps and checkpoints along the way—not to mention unscheduled stops for a drink of camel milk, tourist tank climbing, desert dik dik spotting, camel crossing, and war damage viewing, besides the occasional spot checks on passports. We left closer to eight o’clock which had us arriving in Berbera closer to eleven o’clock for our full day’s work to start late among quite disgruntled patients who had been standing in the desert sun for over half a day. But, that is just getting started!
We pulled out and drove through the “downtown” of Hargeisa. Donkey carts are hauling water in the ubiquitous 55 gallon oil drums that constitute the life line of this desert. We stopped at the ruins of a mosque in the process of being rebuilt and whitewashed as I used it as a background for the donkey pulled water carts crossing in the foreground. Next to us was what was left of the national Museum. In Kuwait the government under the Al Sabah family of “royalty” had left as a relic several historic ruins to show the savage barbarity of the Iraqi occupiers. I had been invited to tour the oil lakes in the desert and to see the burned and twisted hulks of the economically crippling oil equipment wreckage out there, not only, but also the more deliberate sabotage of heritage in the Kuwait City. The carpet Museum, where antiquities had been collected was a stinking sodden mess behind the pictures of what each display had once been before it had been torched. The Kuwait Dhow, emblem of the nation, was a charred outline on the grounds of the Museum, a “ghost image" of what it had been and could be seen in the “before” photograph. That same “monument to Destruction” that is the Kurfustendam in Berlin, or Hiroshima Ground Zero is still here in Hargeisa where the abundant ordnance and liberal use of the antiaircraft firepower lined up on the desert plateau overlooking the city had been turned around, out of the aiming point at the sky from which Siyad Barre’s Mig fighter bombers came, and used to direct a withering cross fire on the town itself. The pictures from that era look like the firebombing of Dresden or the saturation of the Bombing of Tokyo, a city made of paper Shoji screens and carved wood. There was little left of Hargeisa after the deliberate urban eradication of the capital by the “Butcher of Baghdad (currently one of the candidates alleged to be running for the presidency o f the “other” Somalia) and his commander Siyad Barre. The dictator himself went into later exile in Nigeria and was found dead on the toilet, his great heart having failed him in an inopportune moment, when he clearly had the heart for genocide of a clan of Somalis not his own.
The Performance Center and the National Museum are still here, their pock marked and ventilated hulks having not been torn down nor rehabilitated, with a few squatters in the fringes, apparently heedless of the great danger due to unexploded ordinance. Hardly a square meter anywhere is not punctuated with a fifty caliber exclamation point. The tattered public buildings looked they had once been quite splendid, and are now dead. In the obverse of this situation, in there broken shadows are hovels that look like patchwork geodesic domes made of thornscrub plastered with discarded plastic bags—the Somaliland flags that flutter from every thornbush in dense pennants—these meager hovels are alive while the public buildings from which their parts have been scavenged are essentially the same “Denkmals” as that seen on Ku’Dam in Berlin. Survival by the rubble pickers has continued, where the institutions in the much more substantial edifices before the war succumbed. As we paused to look this over, several wheelbarrows came jouncing by dripping blood and covered with cardboard box sides ripped out to keep the flies off their cargo—large haunches of camel meat, fresh from the slaughter. The special treat for special occasions such as a wedding would be to revel in the camel hump. This would be a quite ordinary occasion and I would prefer to go for the lower fat skeletal meat of the camel in any case, thank you!
I did make from the hip photos of the linear race course of the rolling wheelbarrows in a hurry to be the first of the camel’s moving parts to make it to market, before the sun, and flies, and dogs and goats got to the first course of the delicacy. The blood spoor along the dirt road in their tracks was followed with interest by the street curs with their noses to the ground in obvious approbation of this fine camel feast. I watched with my camera under one arm, snapping candidly as such street scenes had been unfolding around me in the camera-shy Somaliland street scenes. I may have great candid shots of the undistracted people going about their business, or I may have many axillary self-portraits of a photographer in blurred motion—but at least I was a stealth photographer in an almost war correspondent role in Hargeisa downtown’s barely rehabilitated ruins.
ROAD TRIP:
PASSING THROUGH TOWN INTO DESERT
COUNTRYSIDE
MAKING OBSERVATOISN ABOUT WHAT WE CAN
SEE,
AND WHAT EACH OF US CAN LEARN ABOUT THE
“HORN OF AFRICA” ENVIRONEMENT
There were partly cleared fields near the center of town where large building shad stood. These sites were excavated and served as sites of mass graves, of which well over one hundred are scattered around the town. Some have been excavated by returning Diaspora relatives searching for the remains of their families and re-burial if anything could be found and whether or not identified. This is not a happy part of the story. There are few happy pieces of history to be found in the downtown, so it is better to move into the present tense, in which kids are playing in areas where much of the de-mining has taken place. There are those who make a living in the “entropy industries” salvaging scrap metal or smashing rocks and bricks into rubble and any other usable castoffs gathered are setting up small shelters from the overhead sun using the curse of the Somaliland desert environment—the indestructible plastic bag.
We passed signs for the UDUB, the majority political party. This is a reminder that, whatever its past, Somaliland is a functioning democracy, something that cannot be said for far better off nation –states we recognize and with whom we are doing business and guaranteeing their loans, such as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or, in the recent past, Jean Bidel Bokassa’s Central African Republic, (ex-Empire,) or Sese Mobutu’s Zaire, or the successor Kabila’s military dictatorship, or Uganda’s Idi Amin’s reign of terror. So, as tawdry as Somaliland may look in its present threadbare and impoverished condition, it is proud and free and a democratic republic, and can hold its head higher than several neighbors who might claim to be likewise.
We passed the Halal Butchery where the camel parts had been coming in dripping wheelbarrows along the road into the markets of the town dirt streets. I could also look out over the outskirts of the town and see the “signature of Hargeisa”—the “Two Tits of the Maiden.” In an email that had been sent from Saad Noor, I had learned that there was progress here represented by the de-mining of the “left tit” which was a rather enjoyable climb of twenty minutes affording a good view over the emerging reconstruction of the city of Hargeisa.
As we drove along the houses got less frequent, and desert squatter camps became irregular, with a few bands of camels browsing the tops of the acacia thorn scrub visible along the roadway. It is a hazardous undertaking for heavy footed camels to be plodding through the dessert that is still seeded with mines and unexploded ordinance. We also saw small creatures scurrying across the road, and at one occasion we paused for me to identify the tiny African antelope I saw in two pairs near the road side as the “dik dik.” As I was trying to take a picture of the antelope miniatures, an interesting conversation was repeated between Mahmoud and Kevin as we drove along after he had reintroduced the topic of the heritage of the peoples living here in the Horn of Africa.
A CONVERSATION ABOUT DIFFERENCES AND
TOLERANCE
AMONG DIFFERING PEOPLES ALONG THE ROAD
TO BERBERA
Kevin brought it up again. “Tell us again about the synagogue ruins we might see when we are in Berbera along the Red Sea Coast.” Mahmoud was driving the vehicle and I was sitting next to him as Kevin was immediately behind him in the vehicle. Mahmoud was talking to me and looking intently into the rear view mirror to include Kevin in the conversation.
Mahmoud had gone on about the heritage of this crossroads of the continents in which the name of his clan is that of “Isaak." “They even say that we might be the lost tribe of the Jews, and there is even an old synagogue at Berbera, not used anymore since all the Jews were expelled in 1948. I do not know any Jews, but I do not think they would be people different from me.”
Kevin did not let that comment rest, since he seemed intent on pursuing the point and asked again about the synagogue and the people who were once here who had made it.
There is even a synagogue along the Red Sea side, said Mahmoud, the Medical Director of the Berbera Hospital, the man who had come to meet me at the time of my inaugural lecture at the fledgling Hargeisa University Faculty of Medicine. OF course, the Jews were all expelled in 1948, he added, but the synagogue is still there in ruins, but nonetheless is a symbol of heritage, that we were once all Semitic peoples. He was trying to learn, he had said, what it is that makes people do horrible things to each other as is evident from the great carnage of war that is evident to us today in passing through the ravaged countryside from the interior capital to the principle port of Somaliland, and he confessed he did not understand what would lead someone to do such a thing. Me, for example, he said, “I am told by the neighboring Middle Eastern Arab agitators that we should all hate the Jews. I do not know any Jews, so I can not hate them; after all, they were our neighbors here in Berbera.”
Kevin warily responded to his gentle and generous inquiries. “What would you do if you met any Jews?” Mahmoud responded: “Well, I would be happy to know them, as I hope they would be pleased to know me.” Mahmoud’s response was innocent and quite forthcoming. So, Kevin responded in kind. “Well, you have met one, since I am a Jew!” Mahmoud responded with enthusiasm. “Well, I am pleased to meet you!” He went on to say that he thought it too bad that there were not other peoples he had never met available for him to get to know, since he was sure that he might like them if only he could get to know them.
I learned only later that Kevin pursued this conversation at the request of Mahmoud, who was impressed with his luck—and with Kevin’s. “It is good that you told me, since I will not tell anyone else; but neither should you! You might get into trouble with those people who do not understand, and that might get us all in trouble, so do not volunteer to anyone that you are a Jew. I am delighted to meet you and to know that, but not everyone might be.” He seemed genuinely upset that this conversation might have been overheard by anyone else, and wanted to protect him, and us, and to let him know he was welcome, but that not everyone might be so liberal in their welcome having been conditioned by others. It was a Middle Eastern paradox: “You are welcome because of your reasons for being here and the work you are doing; but, not everyone here can accept you for who you are, so do not make your differences too obvious. Missionaries who proselytize are not welcome, whereas we are a democracy in which everyone is entitled to believe and practice as they might.”
NOMADIC WANDERINGS
THROUGH THE LAND-MINED
HORN OF AFRICA
The conversation stepped delicately around the possible contentions of proud self-identification (as it had earlier with Qatari Rhoda) and cautious exploration in unknown territory. This is probably the same kind of tentative footing that the nomads out here follow in walking carefully in their camels’ tracks. A camel is a big and heavy enough beast to mimic more than a man’s weight, and therefore the ground once trodden should be safe from the possibility of mine residuals. We shortly saw what such mines could do to vehicles, their human passengers long since carted away and whatever fluids they had leaked having been long ago absorbed by the desert.
I looked up and spotted the refuse of war. I saw a tank with the turret askew off the main road and facing the Berbera direction. I did not try to photograph it since we were approaching a speed bump in the road, and at that point another check on our identities was made. On several other occasions the license plate of the car was enough, since it is an identification of a government vehicle owned by Berbera Hospital Regional Hospital Board. But, the next occasion for exploration of the leftover military hardware was an occasion for stopping and enjoying the full benefit of tourist snapshots on the relics of past horror here in the desert—a T-34 Russian WW II vintage tank!
POSING ATOP THE RUINED WRECK
OF SIYAD BARRE’ S T-34 RUSSIAN TANK
It is probably a lot more fun to be here now, sitting atop the tank, than it would have been then, sitting in it. I imagined what it must be like in the sweltering oven of the iron confines of the tank, knowing it might become a crematorium any moment that someone with a lucky toss can put the flaming bottle of Comrade Molotov into the porthole. The treads had fallen to one side, mostly burned away. Little was left that could be stripped away as scrap, as souvenirs or more useful as combustible for a desert night fire to keep warm by whatever could still burn after the fiery disabling of the tank and the incapacitation of its crew.
Our gang got out of our vehicle and climbed up on the tank to quietly think about the time of our lives NOT spent in one of these devilish contraptions, and what a waste of life it must have been to ride through desert wastelands in the vaunted power of this iron coffin vault. Once again, I pause looking over the 85 mm cannon protruding from the turret, and think: “Sic transit gloria mundi!”
The intimidating presence of this forceful weapon of war is more a handicap to its occupants than the donkey and camel plodding along the road passing it—at least they and their drivers are still alive and in motion! I stood on the tank for some time after the obligatory posed photo and thought quietly “What a waste!”
The waste was not here—or, just here. Somewhere, probably outside St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) at the huge Kirov tank factory I had visited in Russia, a group of workers had spent their lives building this monolith of iron. It is a concentration of heavy metal and energy in the refining and fabricating process to produce this impregnable projection of force, to impose policy in distant places of windswept sand. It was the proudest product of an Empire—now vanished as surely as all others before it. The mighty USSR, second greatest military might the earth has ever known, was already history before this tank was. And that projection of power, directly or by proxy is now—and then—a waste. And this monument to that waste has lasted longer than the combatants burned out of it, and remains as bloody blotch of scrap within a barren waste that, for a transient moment, seemed to have strategic value to someone enough to be consumed by it. This tank is a monument to the obsolescence of power, and it may last longer than the potentates, but not as long as the next generations of similar contestants who will try again to project power into foreign places. Replacing this WW II-vintage T-34 are the new Somali T-38’s which have improvements, all right; they now sport 100 mm canons in place of the 85 mm guns of this one rusting. And the US has Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and the newer M-! tanks just combat tested in the Iraqi desert sands—and along this escalation in hardware and refinement of tactics, someone somewhere has, once again, missed the lesson here—what a waste.
We passed a row of rather non-descript acacia thornbushes, which Mahmoud pointed out to me, although I could hardly discriminate these bushes form the others. They are all thorny, and “user-unfriendly.” This is the “Galool” the tree bark of which is useful, when mixed with water, to stop the diarrhea of cholera. Mahmoud reported this, and not form some distant book learning, but from his own personal experience. If a place were picked for an ideal cholera venue, I would say that the salt water crowded coast of a desert crossroads of displaced Middle Eastern peoples and pilgrims would be about ideal—and Berbera here, across the Red Sea from Jeddah and Mecca, fills this bill quite nicely. I have had all the personal experience I care to pursue in vibrio cholera, so I will take their word and experience for its efficacy.
We pulled up to stop briefly as we passed a few huts with camel herders standing by. With a few words and gestures, a bowl was brought over, and Mahmoud took in a foamy draft. “Ah…fresh camel’s milk; would you like to try?” I had already had the pleasure in the Emirates of the warm frothy sweet stuff so I did not need it for the novelty of it, and the drowsy backseat inhabitants only responded “Oh, pulleeeze!” and we were off after the exchange of a few of the nearly valueless Somaliland Shillings. The message from the back seat was clear: “Do not bother to stop or awaken us for your next cultural samplings or points of interest.” These guys are the same age as when I had last heard that from my own kids, who are senior citizens to them now, and are probably being viewed as antiques by their own kids in such matters in turn. When sleep was not possible, I heard, “Who has the deck of cards?” The difference in time and place was that when I had last driven through exotic terrain with my kids each had their own Rubik’s cube for entertainment.
We experienced the one usual reason for a stop along the side of the road. No, not that one only—although the occasion did present itself conveniently—but to change the flat tire that nearly always accompanies the convoy of remote desert terrain trips. When wandering off the road into the bush to get behind acacia scrub, the cautionary note is sounded, “Don’t worry about those camels—watch out for untrodden ground that may still be mined!”
We were passed by horn-blowing “:Khat cars” barreling through “under the influence.” It is the one “cash crop” in heavy transit through the Horn of Africa among an Islamic population that alleges to eschew alcohol as a “mind-altering drug.”
REACH THE RED SEA,
AND THE PORT AT BERBERA
We first spotted the long desert airstrip of Berbera—the longest runway in all of Africa. It was first built by the Russians to accommodate their heavy hauling airlifters for the kinds of equipment we had seen in mangled scrap heaps along the road. It was later rebuilt by the Americans who wanted to have backup ports for their space program, which turned out to be handy during the several waves of emergency airlifts of food aid in the humanitarian missions that the droughts and civil wars have inflicted on this region.
We could then see the blue waters of the Red Sea, with a few tankers and freighters anchored off the port, and a very large box like “Ark” floating in the middle of the channel into the port of Berbera. Mahmoud explained that this was the camel-carrying livestock ship standing off the port, apparently because it is none too pleasant to be docked next to for the other paying customers. Now that would be a luxury cruise in freighter travel for a stowaway!
We approached the seacoast and rounded a hill in the upper part of Berbera looking out over the Red Sea, and drove up along a series of large buildings, with the first labeled prominently “Berbera Hospital.” “Oh, no!” came the cringing call form the back seat. Standing in the hot 10:00 AM sunshine crowding toward the entrance to the OPD were over 1,000 clambering patients jockeying for position to be seen by the just arriving medical team.
“These are just the medical patients,” Mahmoud explained. “The gynecologic patients are all huddled over there, and there is a separate surgical hospital over there for the other team who will be seeing patients along with Dr. Geelhoed.” A man in a flowing robe walked around the periphery with a bullhorn he would turn on to make announcements about keeping order in the stampede for the doors, on which a number of patients were already banging, even though we, too, were on the outside working our way forward to get in.
And, so ends our ride to Berbera from Hargeisa, and so begins our Berbera Clinics and Theatre experiences, the subjects of the following chapter Feb-B-3. “There is no rush,” the man with the bullhorn counseled us. “They have all been waiting since yesterday, so you will have time to get set up with your clinic gear and medical packs.”
“Another opening of another show!”