About

I lived and worked in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, a self-declared sovereign state which is the success story of Somalia. I wrote this blog to share my day-to-day experiences of life in the Horn of Africa and to inform people about the existence and situation of Somaliland, an independent nation that is yet to be internationally recognized as such.

I have since returned to the US after 13 years of living abroad. I started a new blog, Home Strange Home, in which I blog about the ups and downs of my re-acculturation experience.

M.I.A.

After making daily posts on this blog since my arrival in Somaliland in early March, my regular readers are probably wondering where I have disappeared to over the past two weeks. I am very sorry to have disappointed or worried you by this unexplained silence. I now want to update my friends and readers on the situation.

Two weeks ago, on the Tuesday following the death of Osama Bin Laden, we (meaning my colleagues and house mates) received a death threat from someone claiming to be Al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamist jihadi insurgent group (referred to as a terrorist organization by most western governments) with self-proclaimed links to Al-Qaeda.

While we had no way of ascertaining the veracity of the message, we treated the threat seriously and responded to it by taking measures to increase our security levels. It was a stressful and anxious week to say the least.

While the threatened attack has thankfully not materialized, given the circumstances I have taken the personal decision to leave Somaliland. This was a very difficult decision for me and I spent much time deliberating the choice. After two months, I felt I had just started to settle in to life in Hargeisa, to better understand Somaliland, and to feel happy living there. Not to mention I really enjoyed writing this blog and sharing my day-to-day experiences of life in Somaliland.

However, much as I felt sad about ending my stay prematurely, I also felt that I could not justify taking any potential risk to my life or health. What is such a shame about the whole incident is that all of my other experiences in Somaliland have shown it to be a very safe, peaceful, and welcoming place.  I don’t believe that the person or people who made the threat are representative of the average Somalilander. And I still encourage people to visit Somaliland.

So, the end result is that I am no longer living in Somaliland and therefore I will no longer be updating this blog on a daily basis. But I hope readers will still benefit from reading my past posts and will continue to make comments.

Cactus

The beautiful Somali cactus on Google images.

Throughout town you see these cactus plants, which grow in a huge prickly clump that seems to sprout up everywhere. I often pass them walking down the dusty side streets in my neighbourhood. They must be quite hardy plants to survive in such sandy soil and with so little water.

Sadly, a lot of them apparently don’t survive – a good portion of the catci are shrivelled up and just about dead, and have gathered a huge amount of trash and plastic bags in the process, making them fauna-come-rubbish-dump. However, when you do come across a cactus plant in good health, it is quite cool looking.

The not-so-beautiful cactus next door.

Power outages

Not again.

Like many places in Sub-Saharan Africa, unfortunately the power in Hargeisa is not very reliable. We experience power outages on a daily basis.

Many businesses and offices have generators which kick in when the main power supply falters, but our house doesn’t have one as the local institution we work for doesn’t have the money to pay for that stuff. So when the power goes out, we are simply stuck in the dark.

Sometimes the power goes out for only a few minutes before coming back on; other times it stays out for hours; and a few times we have been really unlucky, it is out for a day or more. Especially when the power goes out at night, it makes you appreciate how much our modern lives are made possible by electricity. There is not much you can do in the pitch black with only a couple head-torches.

The best is when I’m talking on Skype or chatting online with someone and my conversation is abruptly interrupted by the power going down. If I’m ever talking with you and don’t say good-bye, you know why.

Improvised houses

Somali huts in Hargeisa.

Throughout Hargeisa – even in the better-off neighbourhoods next door to large houses surrounded by compound walls – you will see these small patchwork domes, which serve as self-built shelters. The word in Somali for such a hut is aqal.

Historically, Somalis are a nomadic, pastoral people, and they were constantly on the move in the countryside herding their livestock. The arid landscape required families to move frequently to find pasture for their animals, and so their houses consisted of portable huts that they could disassemble, move, and reconstruct in their next grazing location.

While these ingenious houses were traditionally made from natural materials in the countryside, you see them today constructed out of all sorts of scrap materials, tarpaulin, plastic, and fabric, and families build them in the city on unclaimed plots of land. Near our house, a friendly family lives in such a hut, surrounded by a loose fence of branches and thorny plants.

Ginger beards

Ginger is beautiful.

It is a common sight in Somaliland to see elderly men with their beards died orange from henna. Sometimes you see some pretty spectacular shades of orange; other times the dye-job is more subdued, or limited only to the tip of a goatee.

You only see it on old men, because of course their hair must be white in order to take on the colour from the dye.

Perhaps my Somali friends and readers can help me out here, as I’m not entirely sure of the significance of the hennaed beard – is it done simply to hide their white hair, or is there some deeper purpose or meaning? In any case, it looks pretty awesome.

Flying ants (and other insects)

Super-Ant!

The recent advent of the rainy season has caused all sorts of insects to come out of the woodwork. It is true there are more mosquitoes about after the rains, but in general there aren’t many mosquitoes in Hargeisa (it is too dry here), and in any case they don’t carry malaria.

However, there there are plenty of other creepy crawlies moving about – cockroaches, crickets, beetles, ants, and scorpions – necessitating frequent removal of one’s flip-flops to swiftly smash them. (Flies are not even worth mentioning here because they are so low on my insect-radar – I’ve reached the point where I don’t even bother to flick them off my body, unless if they are either A: sitting on my face, or B: two of them are trying to mate on me.)

The most recent actors to appear on the Hargeisa insect scene are the flying ants, which have emerged post-rains. While my interest in insectology (if that’s even a word) is limited, a brief internet search revealed the following riveting information. It seems wingless, sexually-immature ants live in underground colonies, and after heavy rains, sexually-mature winged ants emerge and engage in a mating frenzy that lasts only one day (so, basically one big ant orgy). After mating, the males promptly die (having gotten everything they ever wanted in life) and the females lose their wings and go on to establish a new underground colony.

How does this affect us? Well, it basically means you have a hell of a lot of big-ass ants flying around after the rains. These ants are huge – I’m not exaggerating when I say that they are an inch long – and so it’s good fun to swat them out of your face or dislodge them from your shawl. And it seems as though they bite – my house mate says he was bitten by a flying ant, and another house mate was bitten by a flying beetle.

Tempest

A full rainbow arc across the sky after one afternoon storm.

Last night I experienced the most extraordinary storm of my life. I was woken up close to midnight (having gone to bed quite early) by all sorts of noise – glass breaking, wind blowing, and rain pounding.

I groggily got out of bed and, upon placing my bare feet on the floor, confusedly stepped into a puddle. I walked across the room to shut my window and realized that the curtain was completely soaked. The rain had blown horizontally into my room and the floor was covered in water.

The storm was absolutely raging outside, like nothing I have ever seen before. The electricity in the house had gone out, but my room remained fully illuminated by the lightning. Not a flash of lightning, but a continuous flashing of lightning so frequent that you couldn’t distinguish individual bolts. I didn’t know such lightning was even possible.

I walked out of my room and found my house mates closing all the windows; rain had poured in onto the floor and cushions, and the wind had blown our dishes off the drying shelf in the kitchen, breaking a glass. I opened the back door to have a peek outside, and the instant it was open a howling force of wind and water was blasting at me. I quickly shut it and crawled back into bed.

I lay in bed, watching the strobe-lightning through the (now closed) window and revelling in the glorious monstrosity of the storm. Having grown up on the East Coast of the United States, I am no stranger to storms, and I have childhood memories of Hurricane Gloria, which took down a large old tree in our backyard. But before last night I had never heard a storm with so much energy and force, or seen such spectacular lightning. It was chilling and beautiful.

While this most recent rain was excessively strong, making some Somalis say it was “too much,” the usual reaction here to the rain is joyous– smiles, shouts of glee, and exclamations of “Allahu akbar!”  The rainy season has come late this year, and as a result the country has experienced drought. The arrival of the rain has been sorely needed.

When I lived in England, I used to complain about the regular rain, but here rain is anything but regular, and so its appearance is a reason for excitement and celebration. And, after the storm clears, the gift of rain is iced with the most spectacular of rainbows arched across the sky.

Flying without seatbelts

Dmytry, did you remember to flick that switch?

Last week I flew from Hargeisa to Djibouti City in Djibouti, Somaliland’s neighbour to the north, on Jubba Airways. I have flown hundreds of times in my life on dozens of different airlines, but this was by far the most bizarre flight of my life. I am glad I have absolutely no fear of flying, because I think most people would have been freaking out and/or wetting their pants by what I experienced.

Let’s start with my experience in the terminal. My flight was scheduled to leave at 2:00pm, but check in didn’t even start until 1:30pm. The process was done entirely manually, without a single computer or printer. I mean this must have been what it was like to fly in the 1970s – they have a hard copy list of all the passengers booked on the plane, and then they check your hard-copy ticket against the list. They then hand-write a boarding pass for you on a stub of paper.

I then passed through immigration and a very minimal level of security (basically an old man asked me to open my bag, and then I walked through a metal detector which I’m not convinced was even switched on). The departures area is a small room, given that Hargeisa Airport (spelled Hargeisa Airprt on the sign, by the way) handles only one flight at a time. I took out a thick book and made myself comfortable because nobody was making any move to depart soon. Indeed, the plane wasn’t even there yet.

My hand-written boarding pass. At least it's not on a post-it note.

I think the plane made an appearance on the Hargeisa tarmac around 3pm, after our scheduled arrival time of 2:45pm in Djibouti City. There are no departure screens of course, an there was no announcement or call to board. Everyone just saw the plane arrive through the window and started to get up and filter outside onto the runway. There was a man at the door checking our boarding passes, but I didn’t know at the time that he was the last airline staff I would see, save for the pilots, until I arrived in Djibouti.

First, find a seat that isn't broken. Second, forget everything you ever learned about the necessity of seatbelts.

Flying on Jubba the Hargeisa-Djibouti short-haul was in all respects like riding a bus – you board the bus yourself without assistance from anyone, nobody checks your ticket/boarding pass, you find your own seat, the seats don’t have seatbelts, there are no safety announcements, there isn’t a single flight attendant, and you just take off and go. And when the bus arrives (I mean, the plane lands), within minutes the door is open and the mobile stairway is positioned at the side of the plane. It’s up to the passengers to find their own way out.

When I first boarded the plane, I changed seats about three times, trying to find one with a working seatbelt. When I realized that in fact none of them worked, I gave up and settled on finding the seat that was least broken and least uncomfortable (note from the photo how the seat-backs were leaning at every which angle).

While I was making myself comfortable, other passengers behind me were helping two very elderly and immobile men into seats near the door.  Why employ air stewards when the able passengers can take care of the disabled passengers? Brilliant. Meanwhile, across the aisle, a man was taking out his bushel of khat and starting to chew (see my previous post on this mild drug). Never mind that there were “No Khat” signs throughout the airport; I saw many men sitting right underneath them and chewing.

Please ensure the overhead luggage compartment is closed.

The plane itself was ancient, and old Soviet-era Russian craft. Such planes are no longer allowed to fly anywhere else in the world because the respective aviation authorities won’t allow it. For example, when I flew on the same airline from Dubai to Berbera, the plane was a regular Boeing 747, because the United Arab Emirates Aviation Authority has certain safety standards. But, because of the relatively low aviation safety standards in Djibouti, and the absence of any effective aviation authority in the failed state of Somalia, airlines like Jubba and Daallo can use these old-school planes.

So that’s how you end up flying on an over-the-hill, unmarked plane without seat belts and an “overhead baggage compartment” that amounts to a shelf (again, it’s more like being in a train or bus than on a plane).

The crew is Russian, but by “crew” I mean two people – the pilot and the co-pilot. They shut the doors themselves before moving into the cockpit to fly the plane. Of course, given the non-existence of any air stewards, there are no safety demonstrations and you won’t hear any of the familiar refrain that frequent flyers have ringing in their ears (“Please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position”). I mean, there aren’t even any tray tables to speak of. I’m not sure there was even a toilet on the plane, for that matter. What, you want a glass of water? Or a landing card? Just knock on the cockpit door and ask Ilya, I’m sure he will help you out.

The advantage of the lax security and safety controls is that you can move freely throughout the plane during the flight, and even take a stroll along the aisle during take-off if you wish. I wouldn’t recommend it though, as the take-off caused the entire plane to shake violently. The rest of the flight was smooth though, and literally within minutes of hitting the runway in Djibouti City the passengers were disembarking the plane. No need to waste time buckled-up in your seats while the plane taxis, waiting for that pesky beep to give you permission to get up. Just go for it!

Free lifts

Need a lift?

Most foreign workers who live in Somaliland have their own cars and or a “company car” with a driver, owned by their organisation, that escorts them around town. Since I work for a local institution that doesn’t have nearly enough money for that, they arrange to take us to and from work in a shared van, but other than that I am car-less most of the time. That means I often take the local buses (see my previous post on this), and sometimes accept free rides.

In fact, not having a car isn’t much of a problem at all, as Hargeisa is a fairly easy city to get around. Also, people are very generous with offering you rides when they see you walking down the street under the hot sun. It has happened to me several times that random Somali people driving past have offered me a lift. I usually always except, unless if I am alone at night, because it is very safe here.

One time I was walking from the airport, since there is no public transport direct from the airport, and a man stopped to offer me a ride. I initially expected him just to give me a lift to the closest bus stop (which is where I was walking to), but when he asked me where I was going to and I told him my neighbourhood, he said he would take me all the way there. It was clear across town, and completely out of his way, but he insisted and dropped me off at my door!

We have also had a few Couchsurfers come through that managed to hitch-hike through Somaliland. They did it the old-fashioned way, standing on the side of the road with their thumbs out, and were able to get to Berbera and Ethiopia this way (there are, however, serious issues around travelling without a guard, and obtaining police permission to do so). But the point is, you can get far around here with your own two feet and thumb!