The Horn of Africa

Crossing into Somaliland

In the morning, it took an hour to fill the bus and it was too dark to read. I had forty or fifty pages to go in "Ravelstein" and was eager to get to it. Once the bus was full, the bus driver turned the key and -- nothing. I won't go into the details, but we sat for two hours, as people fiddled with things, before I gave up on them and found another bus heading east.

On the new bus, I met an ethnically Somali Djiboutian man who was a French teacher in Hargeisa. His English was very poor, and my French doesn't extend far beyond asking someone to sleep with me, but we made do and chatted off and on as the bus made its way toward Jijiga.

Once in Jijiga, it became apparent that we'd have an hour to kill before a bus left for the border. We had pasta for lunch and I convinced him to ask the waiter if he'd seen American soldiers. He said yes, but not for the last two weeks. A little more poking around town after lunch pointed us toward a nearby hotel.

At the hotel, it turned out that the Americans who'd been staying there had now left for a nearby town, but that they'd given the hotel two placards as "thanks." I looked and, sure enough, it was two Civil Affairs groups, from the 412th and the 96th. The hotel owner showed me pictures of them and explained that while they'd been here, they'd worked in Jijiga and the surrounding areas to build twenty schools, dig six wells, and start a medical clinic. It wasn't the exciting counterterrorism scoop I thought it might be, but this was good: hearts and minds. Everyone at the hotel was gushy over how good it was of the Americans to help out.

We boarded the bus for the border, at Togowahale (sp?), and arrived a few hours later. On the Ethiopian side of the border, my new friend was detained and sent back for now having his papers in order. Apparently, he had no passport but had citizenship identity papers for Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somaliland. Somali people extend into all three countries, true, but apparently people are only allowed to pick one country to be a citizen of. If I understood correctly, they were going to force him to pick one and then tear of the other two sets of papers. The guards shooed me toward Somaliland and marched him into a back office.

The border between Ethiopia and Somaliland is almost exactly nothing. There're dumpy shacks on one side, an open expanse of a hundred meters or so, and then some more dumpy shacks on the other side. In the middle is a metal pole, the sort you see at a parking garage exit. I walked across it alone, baking in the hot sun, past bushes completely plastered with plastic bags and other trash. On the other side, one of the shacks looked more official than the others and I stopped in to have my passport stamped.

The man inside looked mildly surprised to see anyone, but he was quick to ask for my passport and visa, writing my information into the log book. Full log books from earlier years lined a shelf and I smiled at the idea that a single leaky roof or fire could wipe out every record of who has come and gone from a country in the last decade.

And that was that. Somaliland. I was officially in Somaliand, technically in Somalia, standing on the ground of a country claiming to exist while the world denies it.

Now on the Somaliland side, I found a shack that looked to sell cigarettes and change money. I wanted to change USD$100 into Somaliland money, but I wasn't exactly prepared for the man to start pulling out stacks of bills, rubbed-banded together, and piling them up on the counter. My USD$100 bought me $640,000 in Somali shillings. The largest note is 500 shillings. Sixteen thick bricks of cash went into a plastic bag and I walked away from the counter feeling like a mob boss.

I wasn't fifty feet down the road, eyes darting side to side as it was blatantly obvious that the sagging bag in my left hand was filled with cash, when a man approached me and asked if I would like a ride to Hargeisa for free. He came to the border to drink, he said, with his friend and girlfriend, and they were leaving back to Hargeisa right now. I found his motives highly suspect, though the smell of alcohol on his breath lent credence to at least part of his story. I kept walking toward the taxi area as we talked, me trying to feel him out, him trying to get me to turn around and get in his car.

Taxi drivers started to approach and a sort of bidding war broke out, except that this guy was offering to drive me for free. After a minute of confused bickering, the police showed up. Police here, mind you, are slouchy guys in khaki who carry machine guns. The argument escalated and one of the police shoved the guy who was offering me the ride. I didn't immediately realize he was police and I stepped in between them, without thinking, and pushed the two of them apart, one hand against each mans chest. Immediately, I realized it was a mistake. The policeman didn't even look at me, but I thought, "What the fuck am I doing? I need to defuse this, get out of here, not get involved." Another shove and then a second policeman was there, pushing the man backward out of the crowd.

I got in the nearest taxi, one with an English-speaking passenger who'd been beckoning to me, and we immediately pulled away from the crowd, parking a few hundred feet away. In the ten minutes before we really got underway, two interesting things happened. One, a policeman showed up and asked, through the English speaker, if I knew the man who'd been offering the free ride. I gave a short account of meeting him and the policeman said they'd already arrested him: alcohol is illegal in Somaliland and they too had noticed the smell of alcohol on his breath. Second, the French-speaking teacher appeared, looking badly shaken. He told me that they had let him across the border but that they'd taken all of his ID papers and robbed him of all of his money. The taxi I was in was full, but I gave him what was left of my Ethiopian birr and hoped that would be enough for him to get a ride to Hargeisa. I felt bad, in that I may have drawn attention to him because I was a foreigner, but I wasn't sure how to make the situation right beyond giving him some money.

The road to the border from Jijiga is a road, albeit a very poor one. A single lane, dirt, but still a road. The "road" from the border to Hargeisa starts off being not a road at all. It's a dirt track, or rather a series of dirt tracks crisscrossing each other across the desert. After heavy rains, the whole route might be wiped out. Thankfully, after 45 minutes of this, you end up in asphalt.

We cruised into Hargeisa and I caught another taxi straight to the hospital here that I'm volunteering at. I was completely knackered from three days of little sleep and two days of the physical pain associated with cramming 34 people into a minibus -- the size of an American minivan but three or four feet longer. 34! Edna was here when I arrived and dinner was about to be served. I put my bag in the room I'll be staying in here and went downstairs to have dinner.

posted by daviduri @ 12:18 AM