LITERARY | Things We Ate While Responding to Famine
September 2012 | Archive | Written by Daniel J. Gerstle
Humanitarian Bazaar Magazine
When Ghani first piloted the Landcruiser off the Bosaso-Mogadishu Highway tarmac into the rocky desert where there were no roads, no people, I thought he might kill me.
That summer in Somalia the drought was harsher than normal and everyone was desperate. Hundreds of thousands of camel, maybe millions, had starved to death, and now people were falling. We were just one team of humanitarian aid workers responding to famine conditions, and one of the few that was headed into the remote, disputed Sanag region. For years, I had wanted to get out here into nomad country and see what it was really about, to finally take my turn trying to solve the puzzle that was Somalia. But did that mean I was ready to die here?
Ghani drove us across the desolate, gorgeous landscape into the scorching sun. His blinded eyes turned hard and vacant. Abdirizak, the livestock expert, was sleeping in the back and Bashir, a mercenary the aid agency had assigned to guard me, was standing outside in the open bed of the truck, rifle at the ready.
There was a radio, but the only sound coming out of it was a robotic Kenyan voice reading numbers in some kind of code: “Five two six seven nine. Five three six seven nine. Five three six eight nine,” and so on. I could get on that radio, but what would I say to Ghani’s friend, or the code reader on the other end of the line?
For about two hours, I debated what to do while Ghani drove deeper into the desert. My stomach growled and tightened. We were leaving the port region of Bosaso with its garlic-cardamom fried fish, cumen-spiced goat steak, and spaghetti, its mango juice, camel milk, and sweet cardamom tea for a wasteland where it was impossible to farm, where people thought three cups of rice with some salt was a pretty good day.
Ghani was a middle-aged Somali man, a veteran of the war in Mogadishu who had migrated to the African Horn port of Bosaso. Those first days I knew him, he told stories in Somali which were dark, painfully dark, and he told them in a way that lit up the faces of those around him. There was the story about the two gunmen who went to the mosque, robbed the place, murdered the imam, and then arrived next door to our office gate.
The guard, Abdi, was so scared that when the men pounded on the steel door that day he ran to the latrine, locked himself inside, and started firing his rifle overhead. Abdi made so much noise doing this he scared away a pair of killers who thought a battalion of men had arrived on the scene with guns blazing.
A few weeks later, someone threw a grenade in the compound and peppered Abdi’s ass with shrapnel. Listening to Abdi, a fantastic, uproarious lunatic in addition to being partly responsible for our security, tell his side of the story somehow brought not compassion but deep belly laughs, chuckles so intense it brought tears to the eyes.
Ghani clarified and milked Abdi’s story in a way that got even bigger laughs and revealed a deeper wisdom about the power of narrative, like there was something else going on in that head, another side of the story which he would keep to himself.
At the height of another harsh drought and with war raging in the south, there was nothing like another painful tale to push one over the edge into slap-happy medicinal laughs. People loved him for his storytelling, but it proved he was far too smart to be a driver, and it made it hard for me to trust him.
When I first traveled to Somalia to take part in the emergency response to hunger, I had wanted to know not only what people suffering famine ate to stay alive. I also wanted to know what people who responded to famine ate while attempting to distribute relatively modest quantities of services and aid to huge numbers of people. The answer would reveal truths, I believed, about what led many to flee, or fall, and what motivated others to take up arms, to rob, to take hostages, or to kill.
What I found was that hunger was largely hidden, even in some of the hardest hit places. Hardened, downtrodden people stayed at home, their children died quietly, often when it was something better food would have easily prevented.
Hunger was so hidden from central squares and café life in fact that it made it rather easy not only for crisis responders to carry on normally most of the time but also for local people with decent income to deny that there was a famine at all.
And so, far too many people here and abroad were consumed with Somalia’s security fears and reactions, and far too few were focused on the epic lack of income and disaster preparedness that led to hunger and lied at the heart of the violence.
“Starvation,” wrote Amartya Sen in Poverty and Famines (1981), “is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”
There is more to hunger than lack of food. When delicate markets face a shock like a harsher than normal drought or isolation caused by war, production of food indeed falls, but powerful farmers and distributors keep the reigns of the economy tight. Cross-border traders bring in goods from other regions to re-stock supplies for those who can afford them.
The trouble strikes when nomads who have lost their livestock. or small farmers and laborers laid off from production, migrate to markets only to find that large companies and families preparing for the emergency have bought much of the remaining local supplies. The shift often drives prices high just as the nomads, small farmers, and laborers have lost their income and savings.
That first night after I flew into the African Horn port of Bosaso, we drove through the central market at dusk where things appeared to be going well. Cash switched hands quickly under the glow of tiny paraffin lamps. The wartime market was lively with assertive women, business-savvy children, and old men waving canes, a real surprise when so much talk of the country described only the hunger and killing.
Over the months during the famine, Somali colleagues, other aid workers, and I would have fantastic snapper fried in flour, garlic, and cardamom at the Jubba Hotel Koffeteria, snag samosas with ground goat meat and chili from the Kismayo grocery, hear the coughing of camels brought into the mud flat for shipment to Yemen, and watch fishermen pull in nets full of grouper while others dried shark fin under the sun on the port beach. The food was often near, but not in the right location, or not at the right price.
When we reached the aid agency guest house before my journey out to work in the highlands, I found the team of Somalis, Kenyans, and an Iraqi lining up for a buffet of stale buns, spaghetti in oil and tomatoes, and cabbage with lime.
Once out to the highlands and the desert, for a few thousand Shillings we filled our plates with camel steak, goat liver fried in onions served with sorghum injera flat bread, and rice mixed with onions and smoky goat milk yoghurt. To top it all off, everywhere, literally everywhere I went in the country, no matter how harsh the drought was, someone turned around and set down before me a glowing hot glass of goat milk cardamom tea.
On the coast, fishermen sold us spiny lobster which the cook fried up in tomato paste and cardamom. Most meals were of grouper fish and plain old rice. Once a mercenary who had heard Americans liked shell fish brought me a caldron, more like a cake, of the biggest muscles I had ever seen lightly dusted with sand and, to my humiliation and his fury, I couldn’t eat it.
Many of the hungry one sees in the towns hide their plight out of pride by spending their last Shillings on symbols like jewelry or cell phones to trick others into thinking they’re doing well. Others, perhaps the majority, are just on the verge of starvation but they still have one or two goats left, a bag of seed, or a neighbor’s loan to get them through the days.
The lucky ones get the most ironic of jobs, selling goat, spaghetti, and tea at diners to the well-off for just enough Shillings to bring rice home to their family.
You meet people who laugh, tell witty stories, and walk circles around you after only sleeping, eating, and drinking a quarter of what you had. You’re sorry ass still feels like you’re waking up from a two-bottle hangover. If one goes hunting for them, however, there are plenty of cases of true hunger.
Those who have been homeless, truly hungry for months at a time, or so twisted by gastro-intestinal infection that everything tastes like dust, can comprehend the true meaning of hunger. The human body is brutally demanding. It calls not only for water and energy, but for retinol, thiamine, ascorbic acid, calciferol, riboflavin, niacin, calcium, magnesium, folic acid, amino acids, fatty acids, and iron.
Lacking any of these causes some break down of the mind or body: weaker vision, weak tissue growth, gum disease, drowsiness, head-aches, and then the killer of them all, the break down in the body’s self-defenses.
Fall behind on major vitamins and those bacteria and viruses that besiege you every day finally beat down the fortress walls: measles, tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, dysentery, meningitis, more, and more.
And just when one is hungry and ill, just when one has that splitting, is-there-really-a-God head-ache, that’s when it’s most important to get out there hunting for work, selling whatever you can, or taking more extreme action to save yourself and your family.
At last, Ghani pulled past a family tugging on a camel with tarp, sticks, and water jugs piled high on its hump. We pulled into a dusty metal shack desert settlement, the kind of place where nomads came to build temporary shelters after their livestock have died.
Nothing grew here. The only water source was a berked, a recently-dug mud catchment pit with only about three inches of fetid water left in it and a rainy season drainage valley which was now three-months dry.
“Ahh yes!” Ghani said, suddenly waking from his trance and slapping me on the shoulder. When he saw Abdirizak wake up in the back, he started telling me something, urgently, and urging me out of the car. Bashir joined us, rifle pointed at the ground.
“Welcome to Midigale,” Abdirizak translated from Ghani. “This is one of our favorite places to stop on the way to Badhan for goat liver. Now you will eat like a Somali.”
What had happened to the threat, the gun to my head? We stumbled out into the intense heat past kids who mobbed the car, pardoned our way between a gauntlet of red-bearded old men wielding canes some of whom insisted on shaking hands, and sat down in what appeared to be a caravan diner.
A girl of about sixteen came out of a tarp-enclosed room and froze for a minute when she saw my pale face and eyes.
Ghani slipped her a few thousand Shillings and she disappeared into a kitchen. In minutes, she emerged with four plates of goat liver fried in onions and peppers, served beside a tangy sorghum sour-dough injera bread, and glasses of sweet and spicy black tea.
I was so happy to find life out here in the hunger zone that I forgot my fears about Ghani and downed everything like it was my last meal.
Surely the hungry were among the many spectators watching us arrive, eat, and leave, or among the angry who stood outside their huts considering throwing rocks at us as we left. Some of the kids managed to launch a few golfball-sized stones which bounced off the tires.
Later on, we would find the hungry in masses, lining up to shout in our faces during an assessment about losing their livestock or getting laid off when so many others were doing well.
For some, it was a cycle of blame; the charcoal hunters had cleared trees which left much of the grazing areas unprotected from the sun and wind, so the grass retreated and retreated until there was nothing left for the livestock to eat. Another allegation pointed at the foreigners for “saving” other countries and “forsaking” Somalia.
The most logical explanation posed that the government elite and big businesses had hoarded all the resources just as the poor arrived in the market.
The most painful story I heard was about how the Somali tradition of Islamic interest-free loans from emigres through shopkeepers to pastoralists was working until the U.S. government closed down the main wire transfer networks for fear that the money was funding terrorism.
Later still, when I was a little more used to the risks of working in places like Somalia, a pair of gunmen literally tried to shoot me to death because, as one implied, they believed I, an American, was made of money, as if they would dismember my lifeless body and trade my fingers and toes on the market for big wads of cash.
The majority of Somalia’s hungry lived in settlements like Midigale. They didn’t want to beg, and they really didn’t want to migrate five hundred kilometers to live in a settlement camp just for the chance at a cup full of gruel. Those who remained in the nomad settlements or mountain spring villages simply begged relatives for loans and hand outs.
Through the kindness and resilience of many Somali sub-clans and families the vast majority of famine survivors made it through this way. With scraps, they got by on rice, oil, salt, and a little goat milk until they eventually found employ, got a loan for new livestock, or moved to the coast to try their hand at fishing.
The aid agency responded here in a unique way, a few Kenyans had come to the region to innovate a few simple ways to protect livestock. Rather than driving around dumping bags of flour in hands, these guys managed to get funds to pay nomads who had lost their livestock to build retaining walls around the remaining grazing areas, and in some cases to plant new grass and terrace the landscape. This retained grass seed and moisture where it otherwise washed away in flash floods after each dry season.
The desperate ones who made it all the way in to the UN and aid agency camps, supplemental distribution centers, or the emergency therapeutic feeding centers which focused on mothers, toddlers, and infants, tended to arrive after weeks of traveling. They fled from the war zone of Mogadishu, from the moving rebel line across Kismayo or Gedo. And when they arrived they were not only exhausted but often isolated from their extended family.
Here the aid agencies followed the books. They brought vitamin enriched corn-soya blend, grains, pulses like chickpeas, vegetable oil, sugar, and salt. Many of those living in the settlements stood in long lines to snatch up scoops of corn-soya paste. Others received supplemental packages of flour, oil, sugar, and salt to take to their shelter.
Though here they had vitamin-enriched food, free medical care for at least the worst off pregnant ladies, and kids, any one of these people would rather be out in on the arid slopes, tugging their life on a camel, free.
When we finally reached the aid agency guesthouse in Badhan, Abdirizak introduced me to a dozen other Somalis who lived there, as well as Abduba and Reginald, two Kenyan project managers working on the emergency response.
There were handshakes all around, late night teas, and a few hikes out along the edge of the remaining highland grazing area. More food was brought in, despite the famine surging around Badhan: Spaghetti in oil with canned tomato paste, wheat buns, boiled goat, rice with smoky goat yoghurt and onion, and even a few mangos and limes brought in from the east.
Once I regained trust for Ghani, Abdrizak, and my new friends, and celebrated that I would not be kidnapped, nor would I starve while living in the famine zone, I came down with an incredible pain in my abdomen.
For two days, the pain grew until at last I threw up everything into the pit latrine, the goat liver, the injera, the tea, the spaghetti. I kept throwing up for three days until I could barely stay awake.
My last thought before falling unconscious for a day and a half, I recall, was about how Ghani had not threatened my life at all. There were no cannons, no grenades, no madmen waiting on the other end of this journey.
He was a sweetheart, an entertainer, and a talented navigator who had brought me into a family, started a process which would make me, at least temporarily, an honorary member of his sub-clan. What I should have feared first of all was not violence, it turned out, but a breakdown of my digestive system.
Ghani and Abdirizak finally ran out and found me the one thing that might help me recover: Corn flakes. And for the following week, I languished there watching a dung beetle the size of a golf ball run back and forth into walls, ate corn flakes, and continued puking my guts out until my system at last turned the corner. The guys checked on me, and shared with me, until they saw me finally stumble back into the office.
Only then did I begin to understand famine, and how we hope it might one day be cured.
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