The Road to Hell (11 page)

Hassan thought himself fortunate for having had an education in English in Ethiopia. He felt like Moses, an intermediary with the powers that be and protector of the Ogaadeen people he had led through the desert. He feared his people would become prey to the Somali government as well as to the expatriates who said they were there to help.

During his few years in Qorioley, Hassan Ilhan witnessed frenetic activity. Foreigners in Land Cruisers came and went. They took notes. They talked with elders. They brought in Somali government officials. They poked the soil. They went away. Other foreigners brought food and handed out ration cards to the people. Foreign doctors came and set up clinics. More people came and poked at the soil. They would arrive in the morning and leave before dark. Then new foreigners would come and do the same thing. They always looked uncomfortable. They seemed anxious to leave.

Three years passed. The people were still eating from bags of food sent from America. Children were born in the camps. People died there. The nomads learned to wait in line for food. Some would take that food to the market and sell a bit to get money to buy other things such as clothing.

The foreigners kept coming, and finally they arrived with a plan. The land would be irrigated. People would be given plots. They would live there and make new lives for themselves. Hassan Ilhan knew that most of these people didn't want new lives for themselves. They wanted their old lives back, but they had run out of choices. They would plant or starve. The people from America and the people from the United Nations promised that the lives of the people would be wonderful after the project was finished in a few years.

After agreeing to help the foreigners with their project, Ilhan knew that he had become part of a great agricultural experiment. The Westerners wanted to show—needed to show—that nomads could become farmers. If they could teach these nomads to grow food, they could teach any nomads to do it. And there was a lot at stake here, especially funding. If nomads could successfully be guided into a sedentary lifestyle, there would be plenty of customers, not only in Somalia, but across all the semiarid areas of Africa, where governments were eager to turn troublesome bordercrossing nomads into controllable tax-paying citizens of a nation-state.

And while governments were concerned with controlling people, NGOs were talking about preserving the environment. Nomads, it was widely assumed, were bad for the environment. Their goal in life was to collect more and more cattle wealth. If a man could gather 500 camels for himself, he would, just for the prestige of it, even if it didn't make sense economically. The cattle were destroying the fragile desert environment; the nomadic lifestyle was destroying itself. The nomads were killing themselves. For their own good, they had to be turned into farmers and fishermen.

Most African governments aren't worried about the nomads themselves, beyond the problem that pictures of starving people aren't good publicity. To them, nomads are pests, vermin. To nominally socialist governments like Somalia, nomads were a bigger problem than that. It's hard to impose socialism on people who can just walk away. In this battle, drought was an ally. It held them prisoners.

Attempts at turning nomads into farmers had met with spotty results at best. The nomadic ethos views farmers as inferior beings forced to live a life of toil. The nomad is a free man. Farming is a dirty job that is better left to the lower castes. A nomad whose cattle have died and who is left begging from foreign relief agencies is still better in his own mind than a successful farmer. This conceit is an important element in the Somali psyche.

Somalis' attachment was to cattle and clan. Second- and third-generation Somalis who've lived in North America all their lives still know their clan background, still derive their identity from that heritage, not from anything as temporal as a plot of dirt or a spot on the earth. Lineage is something that can never be taken away. It is this sense of belonging that allows Somalis to roam the world and still not feel they've lost anything. Home is something you carry inside.

As a trained agriculturist, Hassan Ilhan had transcended that notion and understood the value of agriculture and hard work, but he had no interest in the experimental nature of the Qorioley project. He didn't care about the principles involved. He worried about these nomads. These people. His family.

When Save the Children won the contract to implement the Qorioley refugee agriculture project, Hassan Ilhan had himself a full-time job and hoped to be put in charge of the project at some point. But he was confronted with a steady steam of new bosses, impenetrable layers of bosses, who came from America. Some of the bosses stayed in Mogadishu; others lived at the project site. They were always changing. Bosses never stayed around for too long. And it was always the same: They'd arrive full of promises, ideas, and enthusiasm. Then they'd leave, complaining about
the corruption of the Somalis and the endless bureaucracy and an inability to get anything done. Hassan wasn't sure that any of them actually did anything. He'd watch them fumble around for a bit and then start spending more and more time in Mogadishu and less and less time working on the projects. Each one would kick the project a little further down the line, but in the end the refugees were still lining up for handouts of relief food.

Hassan worried that one day the relief food would end and that these people would once again have to start walking. For him, completing the project was a race against time.

B
y 1985, Hassan Ilhan once again thought he deserved a promotion— even though he knew it wasn't going to happen. He had in essence been running the project: He made sure the Somalis who worked for the project got paid. He got the pipes and the fuel and kept the books, handling the daily operation of the project. Still, the project never seemed to get anywhere. He blamed that on the foreign fuckups and on the Somali government, who, he had reason to suspect, didn't want the farmers to succeed. They would rather have people eating the food they could control, he figured out. If he could, he would lead all these people back to Ogaden today, but they had already stayed too long. There was nothing for them anywhere anymore.

Now, instead of putting him in charge of the project, he was informed that they were sending another foreigner, an American named Chris Cassidy, someone who had never farmed in his life, someone who couldn't possibly understand his people—and placing the lives of these nomads into this stranger's hands.

POTEMKIN VILLAGES

—Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

T
he road south from Mogadishu passes through the K-4 traffic circle, past the headquarters of the National Security Service, the Somali secret police, topped with antennas and satellite dishes, past Benadir Hospital, the USAID building, the American K-7 compound. After the compound, across the street, is the site of the brand-new American Embassy, a $39-million project under construction, surrounded by high security walls and protected by steel gates. A little farther down the road is the university, the golf course, and the international school.

A few miles beyond this the landscape fades quickly into scrub and sand. The potholes in the road grow larger until it becomes a dirt road with deadly chunks of residual tar. For miles and miles along the road drivers had chosen to plow through the bush rather than brave the tarmac. Every vehicle moved in a massive cloud of dust.

One of those billowing dustballs contained the Cassidys and their belongings. The Somali driver stared straight ahead and looked down occasionally to pull another twig from a small bundle of
qat
leaves that lay on
the seat beside him. The Land Cruiser rocked on the uneven trail. The driver chewed contentedly, the baby screamed, and Cassidy shouted at the driver to slow down. Cassidy wrapped his arms around the baby, who was belted into his car seat. The driver released the accelerator slightly, the dust overtook the car, and fine grains of Somali clay poured into the windows. The driver looked at Cassidy. Cassidy shielded Bernie's face from the dust, and the driver sped up again, outrunning the dust tail.

The town of Afgooye appears after about twenty miles and marks the beginning of an agricultural belt that extends along the Shebelle River southward along the coast. After ninety miles and some three hours down the road, one enters the rich agriculture lands of Shalambod and Qorioley. This is where the Italian colonists constructed their banana plantations and where rich Somalis built villas and plantations for themselves. It is Somalia's breadbasket, an area with enough fertile land to feed all of the country's seven million people.

And Cassidy was determined to see that it did.

Arriving in Qorioley, the family climbed down from the Land Cruiser and were directed toward a mud and wattle structure. Tone carried the baby and the three of them approached the house. Chris swung the door back to reveal a large empty room with unassembled furniture. In preparation for their arrival, the cracked cement floor had been swabbed with diesel fuel, to kill the chiggers and other little insects that lived in the dust. Diesel fumes hung in the air. Tone noticed immediately that there was no refrigerator, no cooker, no appliances of any sort.

This was not where Cassidy wanted to house his family. Again he fought his own anger, as his wife tried to make the best of it. It was primitive, she charitably thought. She wasn't going to make his work any harder than it was. But it was a point of honor for Chris. He was going to provide for his family within reason, given the fact that they were living in a country the World Bank considered one of the poorest in the vworld.

C
assidy might never have complained about the house had it not been for one seemingly petty thing: He soon learned that Save expected his family to share the place with a single woman, an American working for Save the Children. In the context of Somalia's problems, this was a relatively minor thing, but for the family getting settled, it proved to be a huge obstacle. This, after all, was their first family home, the place where little Bernie and his parents would spend the first years of their familyhood, a place to which he had made a five-year commitment.

It was this family's American dream, and it was a dump. They had transferred their whole lives to Somalia, His contract called for decent housing and appliances. There were rats in the house, and the roof that was supposed to provide rainwater catchment was made of asbestos. There was no electricity, no generator, no refrigerator for the baby's food. If Save wasn't going to meet even these basic requirements, how were they going to handle the logistics of running a huge project?

Several months later when Cassidy would be in Mogadishu looking over the project books he would notice a line item for the construction of his house. The cost: $85,000. That was enough money to build a mansion in Mogadishu and a castle in Qorioley. But by then he wasn't surprised by anything. For nothing at the project was what it seemed to be, and he had learned to assume his employers were as corrupt as the most corrupt Somali official.

Save the Children had one “impact area” in Somalia. That was Qorioley. All of their resources were concentrated there. All of their expatriate personnel were there. Three of the American couples were what Cassidy called dual-development couples, he-and-she aid workers. Tone was the only spouse who didn't work in development. Cassidy didn't want her to work even though in Africa it was easy to get nannies to raise the children. For what African nannies get paid, any dual-development couple could hire an army of them to take care of their kids. But Cassidy's ideas about family prohibited it. He was one of eight children in a tight-knit family group. He was going to reproduce what he knew. He insisted that Tone take care of Bernie. “The others didn't approve of my family values,” Cassidy says, explaining why he felt the other Americans shunned him.

They felt alone from the first night they arrived. During those early days Bernie wasn't sleeping much. He cried all night as the three of them curled up in a single mosquito-infested room.

W
hen he awoke his first morning, Cassidy strapped Bernie onto his chest and walked out into the muggy dawn of Qorioley. The damp, thick tropical air filled his nostrils with the smells of life; rotting vegetation, dung, pollen. He walked a few yards from his house and there he encountered the towering figure of Hassan Ilhan. Hassan looked at Bernie and grunted disapprovingly.

“We don't do that here,” he said.

“Excuse me,” Chris said.

Somalis say what they think. In a culture where life is hard and short, where any meeting with someone might be your last, you don't wait to get
to know a person before telling him his shirt is inside out or there's a piece of snot hanging from his nose. People with handicaps will quickly have them pointed out. A man with a limp will be called
Jiis
. A man with a hunchback will be called
Muluch
. No secrets, no shame.