The Horn of Africa

Well, I'm still in Hargeisa. My plans to go to Ethiopia have been scuttled.

 

I went to the airport bright and early this morning. I arrived at 7a for my 8:30a flight and the airport was mostly deserted. I walked right through customs and immigration and out onto the runway. I took pictures of the planes.

 

Half an hour later, a guard asked me where I was going and then promptly informed me that the flight was cancelled. We called the Daallo office on his mobile and they said the next flight was on Sunday. That's a bit of problem as my international tickets -- Orbitz, non-refundable, et al -- start Friday evening on Addis. Addis to Dubai to NYC to San Francisco.

 

I hopped a ride to the Daallo office, composing in my head the best method for getting the situation rectified and, secondarily, getting Daallo to foot any expense. I put my angry and exasperated face on and was quickly bumped to a manager. He and I explored options -- there're no other flights to Addis today -- and then decided that I could fly from Hargeisa to Dubai, bypassing Ethiopia entirely, and that Daallo had a flight tomorrow. Although I had plans in Addis -- dinner with Selam, bead market, the Fistula hospital for which I had a personal letter of introduction from Edna that I was going to hand-deliver -- Dubai seemed to be the only solution.

 

Of course, he wanted me to pay for the difference in ticket prices. Hargeisa to Dubai is much more expensive than Hargeisa to Addis Ababa. After 20 minutes of arguing, with me laying out clear, cogent explanations of where culpability lay, he conceeded and gave me the new ticket for free.

 

So, that's that. I'm back at the hospital today. Tomorrow I'll leave in the afternoon and fly to Dubai via Djibouti. ("And Djibouti, I still like Djibouti, doin' squats...") The airport is Hargeisa is too short to support jets, so my flight from here to Djibouti will still be on a puddlejumper. The flight from Djibouti to Dubai will be on a much larger, more modern craft.

 

As an aside, during the Communist days, the Soviets built a huge fuck-off runway on the coast near Berbera -- one of the longest in the world. It's sat mostly fallow, although in the 80s the NASA leased it for many millions per year as an alternate site for landing the space shuttle. Neato.

 

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This afternoon, I met two Somali sisters and their half-Arab friend, all on holiday from London. They've just started volunteering at the hospital, doing admin and filing and sorting the library. We had a four-hour discussion earlier today about Somaliland, the Somali people, culture clashes, Islam (and whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy, in particular). It was a great conversation. I'm going to have dinner with them at the Ambassador Hotel tonight. Which means... pizza! Awful, sloppy, Somali pizza, but pizza none the less. Or maybe a cheese burger. My "beef burger" last time was fairly bad, but I enjoyed feeding my dinner roll to the kittens slinking around the bushes. Skin and bones, whiney, awfully cute save for the obvious ringworm infections, little kittens. I took pictures.

 

I hardly took any trip pictures, despite having lots of flash memory and a battery charger with me. I don't know why, really. I think I see National Geographic photos and I desperately want to take similar photos as a testament to me being here... but then everything is boring. Hargeisa is a dusty, East African town, notable for nothing. Most men dress in quasi-Western style. Most women dress in beautiful bright colors and patterns but won't let me photograph them. Modesty, etc.

 

A few days ago, I set out to wander the neighborhood and just shoot photos until my battery died. I didn't get 100 meters before kids swarmed me, demanding I take their pictures. Correction, boys. There were a few girls around, demure, floating near the edge of the crowd, but they wouldn't let me photograph them. Eventually, a woman emerged from the masses and talked to me in English. She was sure, with my beard and my "Salaam Alaiykum" greeting, that I was Muslim. They want to know where I was from, etc. When I asked her about taking photos, I got a very interesting answer. "We don't want you to take our photo because we know you will show the photo to people and say, 'These are refugees.'" Refugees, of course, are largely Ethiopian, ergo infindels, ergo (and this is the most important part, I think) infected with HIV.

 

A few days ago, I had a taxi ride with two men who had an interesting viewpoint. "We are not black! We are like you. We are white. It is only because of the sun for so long that was look like this." He pinched his skin for emphasis. "We are not like Nigerian! We are white. If you stay here for one year, you will look the same as us." Nigerians, of course, are liars and thieves and have no honor and no pride, etc. It was disappointing to hear.

 

Later, talking to Ayan, one of the Londoners I mentioned earlier, she said she'd heard the same sorts of things here and has also heard much talk about "genuine Africans." "We are genuine Africans!" The rest of the people here in Africa are... not. They're Others, somehow less.

 

I want to jot down an interesting conversation I had with a British doctor, but I'm running late for dinner. He's old British -- interested in culture and empire and bettering the world with "civilization" and infrastructure. We talked for 45 minutes about nation-building and Iraq and Afghanistan and the NWFP of Pakistan, etc. More on this later.