Where is Somaliland?

Happy New Year!

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0300

Happy New Year! I know I have been neglecting this blog, and I don’t really have a good excuse. But I am going to pick it back up today and see if I can’t write more regularly for the few months I have left here. So in honor of this New Year’s resolution, here’s how I spent my New Year holiday.
The last few weeks have been very quiet in Hargeisa. Even by Hargeisa standards – which means really really really quiet! There are few other expats around, and a lot of people in my office have been using up their leftover vacation days for 2009. So both work and my social life have been pretty slow. Luckily Ayan has been here to keep me company so I was able to keep the boredom at bay. Ayan and I were trying to figure out what to do for New Years when Neil invited us to join him and another expat Heather in Berbera. We said yes, of course, and on Thursday afternoon Neil picked us up in his armored vehicle. (Neil works for Halo Trust a de-mining organization – they have a fleet of armored vehicles for their de-mining.) We squeezed 7 people in – the two soldiers sat in the back with the bags and the guns, and Neil’s Somali colleague sat up front, while Ayan, Heather and I squeezed into the backseat. It was a tight squeeze, but we were all excited for the beach and we had some good music to pass the time.
When we arrived in Berbera it was already dinner time, so we ordered some food and went down to the beach while we waited. We just walked down to the water and dipped our toes in. Then of course we rolled up our pants and lifted our skirts and waded in a bit deeper. It was a blue moon which apparently is just a fancy word for full moon, and it was so big and bright I couldn’t even look directly at it! It was just such a beautiful night.
After dinner we got out Jenga and Uno and played games and just talked for a couple hours to pass the time until midnight. Heather and I had heard that there was going to be a partial lunar eclipse, but neither of us had looked up the time. We started talking about when it might be and then we looked up at the moon again and noticed that it wasn’t as full as it had been down on the beach. It was the partial eclipse - we saw it by accident! It was just great luck.
Then when it got closer to midnight we put on some music and began reminiscing about 2009. I remembered my trip to Botswana with Shonna - and seeing the leopard. I remembered all the hard work that had gone into my research and all the great people I get to work with every day. I remembered climbing Mt Longonot with Elena. I remembered the delicious mezze I had eaten in Istanbul with Lauren. I remembered all the Friday brunches with Ayan. And I remembered spending Thanksgiving with all my family in Peoria. Then we poured non-alcoholic strawberry champagne and toasted to a new year.
On New Years Day I woke up early and went for a walk on the beach. It was perfect out - still cool but the sun was rising higher. I took a short swim and then laid out on the sand to dry off. Heather and Neil joined me a while later and we swam again before heading back for breakfast.
After breakfast Ayan finally woke up and we all went down to the beach together and swam for a while until some boys on the beach started running and yelling: Shark, Shark! We looked where they were pointing and saw fins but they were definitely dolphins, not sharks! We had started swimming back in, but when we saw they were dolphins we swam towards them instead. We watched them for awhile until they swam away. Then later Neil was the only one in the water when we heard him calling to us. Two dolphins were swimming so close to him that he could almost touch them. I grabbed my camera and tried to take a few pictures. But I was too far away to get any good shots, so I left the camera on the beach and ran in to swim with the dolphins instead. It was amazing how close they were to shore – they were only a few feet from me, and I could still keep my head above water by standing on my tiptoes. And it really seemed like they weren’t scared at all and just wanted to play with us. Although they swam away after a crowd of Somali boys followed us in.
Then we dried off on the beach and headed back to the hotel for a shower and lunch before piling back in the car for the drive back. It was the perfect way to start a new year. I hope everyone else had a great New Year’s holiday as well!

Politics as Usual

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:53:00 +0300

I first sat down to write this blog entry a couple months ago. Politics in Somaliland is always a hot topic. While the men are chewing their qat in the afternoons they often discuss politics. However, I didn’t really have much to do with Somaliland politics or really understand them. The one thing I did know is that the presidential election has been delayed and rescheduled twice in the year and a half since I first moved here. And only a few days ago, the election scheduled for September 27th was postponed to a date yet to be determined.
Not surprisingly people are rather unhappy about this - no one more so than the members of Somaliland’s opposition parties. The parliament voted to impeach the president and somehow this escalated into a fistfight and several members of parliament were injured. One even pulled a pistol out of a briefcase although no shots were fired. The police were called and the president closed the parliament. This resulted in a big demonstration on Saturday which peaked around the time I was trying to get from one side of Hargeisa to the other in order to catch my flight to Nairobi. My driver had to make a quick U-turn and we went the long way around. As we approached the airport we had a clear view of thick black smoke which apparently was coming from the tires that the protesters had burned in the roads. Apparently several people were killed during the demonstration and many were injured and many more were thrown in jail. It’s hard to imagine all this happening in the place I am currently calling home!
You may be wondering how all this happened. After all, I’ve been reassuring everyone in my blog that Somaliland is a peaceful place committed to democracy and development. While there are many reasons for the current situation - the biggest stumbling block to the election has become the voter registration drive which I wrote about in December. As I mentioned it was a nationwide drive and a very large effort by the government with the support of international donors. The registration was supposed to employ a fairly sophisticated biometric system and register fingerprints and photographs for everyone. Of course to do this you need to train a lot of people to be able to take this kind of information and to be immune to any and all forms of corruption. So obviously it didn’t go off perfectly – some people were registered without fingerprints; the numbers were inflated by people registering multiple times; and Somalis from Djibouti and Ethiopia were reportedly bused in to register as well.
According to my colleagues at PSI, after the data was collected, decisions had to be made about how to deal with the flaws. The ruling party, opposition parties, National Election Commission, and the international organization funding the project sat down and worked out some rules for cleaning the data. Finally a list was completed and an independent expert was brought in to evaluate it. He declared it a useable list, albeit with some flaws, and the logical conclusion was that after all that time and effort and money, now that the list was useable, it should be used! However the National Election Commission (with the support or some might say at the insistence of the ruling party) decided to throw it out, and declared that the election will go forward without a register. They claimed the flaws were too great. The opposition parties refused to accept the decision and claim that the ruling party is unhappy with the numbers in regions where it counts its greatest support and plans to stuff ballots. Of course stuffing ballots becomes more difficult to achieve when relying on a voter register.
When the campaign period was scheduled to begin about a month ago only the ruling party began holding rallies and campaign stops. The opposition boycotted and held demonstrations against the ruling party and against the NEC. The president held press conferences insisting that the election must go on without the voter registration and exclaiming that he is the president and has the authority to make this decision. The opposition refused to participate unless the voter register was used. Obviously this created a large impasse. Some people here have argued that the opposition is just trying to stall because they aren’t ready for their campaigns and will lose. And some argue that the president is afraid of losing. I’m sure everyone is of course looking out for their own interests, but I just hope that in the end the interests of peace and democracy win out because that is what the people here deserve.

Going Native

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 08:47:53 +0300

I just read back through some of my blog entries and I think I can honestly say that I have spent more time blogging about my Somali co-workers than about my expat friends. Mostly because I figure it’s more interesting to my family and friends who are reading this. Hearing about how a bunch of white people got together on Thursday night to drink smuggled alcohol and chain smoke is not what people expect to hear from me. However it has been a large part of my experience here in Somaliland. While I do consider some of my co-workers to also be my friends, the amount of time I spend with them outside of the office is pretty limited. I tend to socialize with other NGO workers – getting together for movie nights, dinners, and of course the obligatory Thursday night “parties.” It’s a small group of people, but we get along well and find ways to amuse ourselves. Our activities are usually pretty limited to food and drinks at various compounds, but we also get together for basketball pretty regularly. (Would anyone believe me if I told them that I recently played 2-on-2 basketball with three men and my team actually won? I didn’t think so, but I swear it’s true! You can verify it with the young Somali men that came to watch.)
Recently I saw two new faces at one of our Thursday parties. I heard that the woman was American, so I went over to introduce myself. Since Heather’s departure I had been the only American woman I knew of left in Hargeisa, so I was curious about the new arrival. We chatted briefly about where we were from, etc. and she asked me how long I had been here. When I told her she seemed surprised and said she hadn’t seen me around at all and that I should give her the scoop on where to go and all that. I said that there really weren’t that many places to go - beyond going out to dinner or the market, there aren’t really that many other public events or places to go to. I mentioned that before the bombings we used to go out to dinner more, but since there are fewer people around now, we don’t as much. She looked confused (again) and said that she always saw lots of people out. I started laughing and explained that I meant expats – not Somalis. Of course there are just as many Somalis here as there were before - they weren’t evacuated! I mentioned that I had found it difficult to make a lot of Somali friends. At this point her phone rang and she spoke to someone briefly. Then she looked at me and said, “Well that was my Somali friend coming to pick me up.” I was surprised by her tone and instantly became defensive, but I just said something like nice to meet you and see you around. I should mention at this point that I had come to the party with my friend Ayan – excuse me, my Somali friend Ayan, and I had to bite my tongue from saying, “Well let me introduce you to my Somali friend.” It seemed a bit petty and beyond the point really.
Obviously this woman doesn’t know me or anything about me, but I was pretty bothered by our little conversation. I feel that I have cultivated friendships with Somalis and that I definitely get out and see Hargeisa beyond my compound. But I do stand by what I told her. The culture isn’t unfriendly in any way, but it is a conservative society and it is more oriented around the home and family, which doesn’t make it particularly easy for me to integrate myself. Of course people go out and socialize, but the most public activity is qat chewing and that’s the exclusive domain of men. Whenever I have hung out with Somali women, it has been in my home or to go shopping. There are few opportunities for women to go out besides weddings and I haven’t been invited to many of those.
Then today I found out that the American woman I met that night also has a blog about her experiences in Somaliland. However hers is published on a local news site – the Somaliland Press website – for all to see. In her last entry she writes the following:
Somaliland is a place that is easy to become attached to, perhaps because the country is so unique and the passion of the local people is perceptible and contagious, or perhaps because it is small and it seems like everyone knows each other. Spend a few months here and I bet you’ll start to call yourself a Somalilander, unless you’re one of the many (among the relatively small population of) foreigners here who do not bother to meet any native Somalis but rather isolate yourself in a compound, only seeing the light of day through an escorted car window. If that’s the case it’s like saying you’ve been to Paris when you never left the airport.
I read it out loud to Yasin and asked him if I was one of those people. Of course he said no, and I know that I am not. But I can’t help but think that she was thinking of me and my friends when she wrote it. Perhaps that’s a little selfish considering that I met her once for about 5 minutes, but considering I’m one of the “relatively small population of foreigners” here, it’s hard to avoid the association! I think the part I find most funny is to think that anyone is able to come to Hargeisa and never meet any “native Somalis”. People come to Hargeisa for work – that’s why I am here of course – and we work with Somalis! I am surrounded by an office full of Somalis every day and every other expat I know is doing the same. Many of them spend a lot of time out in the field interacting with Somalis on a daily basis. The fact that we head home after a day at the office instead of doing whatever this girl thinks we should be doing doesn’t mean that we are isolated.
In the end, I am glad that this woman is enjoying her time in Hargeisa and that she has found a home with the Somalis. But I am even more glad that I am enjoying my time in Hargeisa, and I don’t think that separating myself from other expats and immersing myself in whatever she believes to be real Somali life would make me a happier or a better person. After all I think setting aside a couple hours on a Thursday evening to put on a pair of jeans and a tank top and have a glass of wine (or more likely a strange cocktail derived from whatever half empty bottles we’ve been able to scrounge up) with a bunch of people who didn’t grow up in Africa is probably imperative when you are 26, single, American and living in a conservative Muslim country in Africa for two years. Feel free to disagree.

Driving Lessons

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:22:42 +0300

Until very recently I had never even attempted to drive in Hargeisa. When you have a driver on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s difficult to motivate yourself to get behind the wheel of a Land Cruiser and navigate the rocks, potholes, goats and children. Or at least it was difficult for me to motivate myself! But one day I decided I should take advantage of some of my free time here and learn how to drive stick shift. I figured it’s a skill that is bound to come in handy. I enlisted one of the PSI drivers to teach me – Fu’aad, the only one who speaks English fluently – and we began our lessons a couple months ago.
Fu’aad is taking his job very seriously and has been very patient with me. For the first few lessons we drove almost out of town to find a place where there were pretty much no other cars and very few people or goats to run over. Of course a place like that also doesn’t have much in the way of a real road either. I was driving through dry river beds, over big rocks, up and down dirt roads over hills. So not only was I learning how to drive stick, I was also learning how to drive off road. It was really fun. I’ve never gotten to do anything quite like that before. We even saw desert foxes and camels and dik diks which caused Fu’aad to scold me for not stopping the car to look. Apparently I’m not supposed to drive and observe animals at the same time.
By the third lesson I was driving on main roads and learning how to slow down for the many speed humps that are placed throughout Hargeisa as security and to slow people down. There are two very large speed humps right in front of my compound. At the beginning of my third lesson, I spent a good fifteen minutes going back and forth over them until Fu’aad was satisfied that I was doing it right. In addition to the speed humps, the main roads are almost as bad as driving off road because of all the potholes. It is very difficult to avoid them and the more I tried to dodge them, the more I seemed to fall into them. Finally, Fu’aad told me that my hands follow my eyes. If I look at the potholes I will steer into them, but if I look around the potholes, I will steer around them. Strangely enough, it really works - so now I only fell into about half of the potholes!
In order to drive in Somaliland you must get a Somaliland driving license. I had to pay thirty dollars, give them a passport picture and a copy of my work permit and US driving license. Then they told me I also needed an eye exam. So I went downtown to a small pharmacy that had a picture of an eye painted outside. Mustafe told me that a very well known eye doctor worked from that pharmacy. But on that day it was only a clerk. Mustafe and I followed him into a back room separated from the main pharmacy by a dark curtain. I was told to sit down in a chair facing a mirror. Then I had to cover one eye with my hand and look at an eye chart full of E’s facing up, down, left and right. The clerk pointed to an E and I had to tell him which way it faced. But I didn’t think he spoke English so I pointed with my hand instead. After I did this exercise with my other eye covered, he filled out a form saying my eyes were perfect, signed it, stamped it, and took five dollars as payment. Finally I received my license – a small blue hardcover book with my picture stapled inside.

Then Fu’aad became busy so I didn’t have any more lessons for a while. But now that I had my license, I got a key for the car that is always parked at my house. Then one Friday morning my colleague needed the duty driver so I was forced to drive myself to the market for my weekly vegetable shopping. As I walked out of the house, one of the SPU, Mohamed, was walking by. I said good morning and through a combination of Somali, English and sign language, explained that I was going to drive to the market. He then used Somali and sign language to tell me that he wanted to come along. I quickly said yes, thinking it would probably be a good idea to have a Somali accompaniment at the market and in case I hit a goat and needed to negotiate the price! On the way to the market I probably stalled the car at least 4 times. And on the way back I stalled a few more. But more importantly I did not run over any goats or children or hit any other cars, so I deemed it a success!
Since then I have begun to drive more regularly. I have even started driving at night, but only in the automatic transmission Land Cruiser! I think I need a bit more practice before I can manage stick shift in the dark! My most frequent passenger is Ayan and she’s thrilled by my driving. I feel more confident when she’s in the car because I know she can direct me if I get lost and of course speak Somali if I end up in any kind of situation. Driving the Land Cruiser at first was really stressful because it’s so large, but now I’ve gotten used to it and I actually enjoy being one of the bigger cars on the road. I usually take one of the SPU that guard my house with me so I don’t have to drive alone. I can tell he thinks I’m too cautious and often he’ll direct me to “Go! Go!” but he always smiles and says good night when he gets out of the car and once he even said, “Good driver!” And I think my Somali sign language is definitely improving after spending so much time with the SPU!
NOTE: It has been a long time since I last posted anything. Unfortunately my computer had to make an emergency trip to the US for repairs, and I had to wait for its return before I could get back on here. But it’s back now and that means lots of blogs this week for my faithful readers. Hope it hasn’t been too much of a hardship to wait it out!