The Road to Hell (8 page)

Those who needed more community were placed in the American compound at K-7, seven kilometers down the Afgooye road, which had a swimming pool, a number of bungalows, a five-story dormitory for the marines, a snack bar where hamburgers and other American treats were served, and a recreation room.

The entire compound was painted an industrial greenish blue. There the Americans would swim and gather for movies projected against a wall by the pool. This was for the American staff and their invited guests. There were very few invited guests, because few Americans knew anyone who wasn't an American, except for the Somalis who worked as assistants at the U.S. Embassy or USAID or the U.S. Information Service (USIS). There wasn't an actual rule prohibiting the Somalis who worked for the Americans from coming to the pool or the movies; it really wasn't necessary.

T
he town had a number of restaurants where the atmosphere was usually better than the food. There was a Chinese restaurant, which served spicy meat on spaghetti, not so different from Somali cuisine. Somali waiters in smudged white smocks served chicken and camel lo mein.

The Italian culture seemed to mix easily with the Somali. The breezy Mediterranean attitude that the Italian colonists brought meshed with the laid-back, urban environment of Mogadishu. On the other hand,
sausage- and ham-loving Catholic Italian culture had little resonance outside the city.

The restaurant at the Hotel Croce del Sud served passable Italian food but was most notable for the people who hung out there. The Croce had a telex machine, so it attracted the rare foreign journalist. It also had a bookstore and a tea shop, and may have been the closest thing to Rick's Place in Africa. That feeling increased during the 1980s as the regime became more and more oppressive and the expatriate hangouts began to feel more and more like sanctuaries.

In the back of the Al Uruba Hotel the Club 57 disco overlooked the ocean. Somali rock 'n' roll and prostitutes mingled in the night air. At the Lido Club, sailors and prostitutes and aid workers drank as the surf pounded against the rocks below and the fragrant ocean breezes swirled magically around the room.

Open prostitution was frowned upon in Muslim Somalia. It was said that most of the girls were Somalis from Kenya, set morally adrift from time spent among the infidels. But that wasn't exactly true. In fact, many of the prostitutes in Kenya were girls from Somalia trying to arn a living. Some began to return to Mogadishu when the Western expatriates showed up there with dollars. The Somali police tried to keep a lid on the outward manifestation of lasciviousness. A police squad known as the
buona costuma
enforced dress codes for women, arresting those who wore too-tight jeans or showed too much skin. The girls usually bought their freedom with small bribes or traded sex for the opportunity to return to the clubs.

E
xpatriates in Mogadishu invested vast amounts of their time and energy trying to live as normal a Western lifestyle as possible, which usually meant procuring food items that were not available in the local markets: fatty American beef, chocolate, butter. Once secured, these items would be used sparingly, mustered for maximum impact, such as when the boss came to dinner. Sometimes they would be hand carried from Nairobi. Sometimes Americans would stock up at an Italian shop at Fiat Circle that carried imported items. Often the embassy would provide them.

The American Embassy staff would flock to K-7 like Somali refugees lining up for their rations of sorghum. Everyone signed up, and then the butter was parceled out among those with the highest ranks. It rarely made it
down to the contractors and others who were actually doing the work in Somalia, remaining instead in the hands of senior officers.

Once in a while when someone would leave the country, he would hold a house sale. His kitchen would contain freezers full of butter and beef and turkeys, beer and whiskey, Rice-a-Roni and Hamburger Helper, and other rare goods, hoarded for some eventuality that had obviously not arrived. People talked about food, bragged about food, delighted in their goodies. Sometimes it seemed that it was all anybody ever did. Living the Western lifestyle became a game and an obsession with those who never left the capital.

In 1981, expat life was transformed by the arrival of the VCR, which changed the very nature of being at an overseas posting. Now there were movies and videotapes of month-old football games, that sort of thing. They provided escape and brought people closer to home. Where once an American foreign service officer might have decided to wander out into a local market, driven to such madness by sheer boredom, there was now the option of staying home with episodes of the Cosby show fresh from the diplomatic pouch.

A diplomatic shop in Mogadishu sold cheap whiskey and Dutch beer. Land Cruisers were always blcked up to its gate, and expatriates stood around with checkbooks and ration cards in hand. So many bottles of whiskey and so much beer were allocated to each person. There was a healthy trade in unused ration cards that kept expats busy. Most bought their entire ration. It was impossible to know when the shop would be out of stock.

If one took the time to breathe Mogadishu in, to stop and watch it for a moment, one would have glimpsed a unique time fading quickly into history. The ancient charm of the city had withstood Portuguese invasions, Italian fascist colonialism, and ten years of Soviet-sponsored “Scientific Socialism.” Now it was about to experience a seemingly benign invasion of young aid workers, people with money and a culture and lifestyle that was contagious. Nothing in Somalia's history had prepared it for this.

Two days after Cassidy finished a two-year tour of Peace Corps service in Kenya, he was ecstatic to be on his way to Somalia to work for USAID. After the Peace Corps, USAID was a giant step up the development ladder. The money and benefits were good, but best of all for Cassidy, he would get to stay in Africa doing development work.

USAID in Somalia was swamped and desperately in need of his help. Somalia had gone from being a socialist Soviet-aligned arch enemy to
being an ally and major recipient of American aid in the space of a few years. There was aid money pouring in. Staff was arriving from all over the world. And there was no infrastructure to handle it. The sleepy little embassy was buzzing with activity. Refugee programs and development programs were bursting file cabinets at USAID, forcing it to move to larger offices. Cassidy was hired to provide logistics to development workers, to figure out how USAID could support all of its staff that was marching into the field.

Logistics is an important word in development. It's half the battle. If doctors are coming to work in a village somewhere, it's necessary to have someone handling logistics—making sure they get there, that supplies get there, that they can get out, that there's fuel for the vehicles, or whatever. These activities take more time in Africa than actual development work.

C
assidy was sent to northern Somalia, to Hargeysa, two days' drive from Mogadishu, where he was asked to look into the rehabilitation of Ogaden refugees. Do you settle them? Do you ship 'em back? And Cassidy was supposed to answer these questions even though he had no experience with refugees and knew little about Somalia.

But he was also answering questions of more immediate importance to the U.S. government. For example, if USAID opens a guest house in Hargeysa, who is allowed to stay there? Should USAID contractors be allowed to stay or just direct the hiring of employees? Cassidy, only a contractor, was asked to express an opinion.

He was also in charge of the field support unit, which meant clearing stuff at the port in Berbera. The only Americans who spent time with Somalis were people like Cassidy and other young former Peace Corps volunteers who were hired as personal service contractors (PCSs), to do the dirty work of going out into the bush and telling the career people what was going on.

C
hris Cassidy seems to have few memories about that time long ago in Somalia. He remembers hanging around with his friend Doug Grice, another PSC who had been there for a year already when Cassidy arrived. Grice had been making a stink about something that was obvious to most of the aid workers in Somalia. The refugee programs, he said, were unnecessary. Instead of finding better ways to get food more efficiently to the refugees, someone might be looking for ways to get them back to their lives in the Ogaden. Everyone agreed that that was a good idea, but no one ever did
anything about it. Instead, they designed programs to deliver more food to more refugees.

The Somali government wanted the refugees to stay. All the reasons for this weren't immediately apparent to the young aid workers. They did know that some government officials were getting rich stealing refugee supplies, but it had to be more complicated than that. The American government's motives were a little more transparent and could be summed up in one word: Berbera. If the Somali government insisted that 1.5 million hungry refugees needed relief food, why not give it to them? It was surplus anyway.

When he thought too much about it, the situation bothered Cassidy. He had really come to Africa to help people. It was a need hammered into him by a strict Catholic upbringing. Africa felt like his calling, development work his priesthood. But when he found the temple full of scoundrels, he couldn't find the courage to change it. So he did his job and drank his dutyfree beer, went to parties, and traveled as much as he could, complaining sometimes. It was at one of these parties he met a quiet, serious Norwegian woman anthropologist. Her name was Tone (pronounced
tuna
) and she had a real interest in Somalia and its people. There was nothing cynical about her. For Cassidy, desperately trying to restore some meaning to an increasingly ambiguous experience, she was a stretch of dry land in an endless ocean of uncertainty.

FIXERS

—Winston Churchill,
The Malakand Field Force

There are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from proximity to disaster and ruin, as others from success.

A
t the end of 1985, Chris Cassidy was on his way back to Mogadishu. Beside him was Tone, whom he had since married, and their six-week-old son, Bernie. Tone would have preferred waiting until Bernie was older before bringing him to so remote a place, but Chris had his dream job waiting for him back in Somalia. It was the job he had been preparing himself to take from the moment he had left Somalia the first time. Chris had departed Somalia as a well-meaning generalist and was now returning as an agricultural expert. Now he would be doing something real. He would be working with Save the Children on a project to teach refugees how to become self-sufficient farmers.

His first glimpse of Somalia from the plane was of the lazy port town of Merka, south of Mogadishu. Farther inland he could see the fertile Shebelle River valley. Somewhere along that strip of green, he knew, was Qorioley, the town that would be his home for the next five years. As the plane made its final approach along the beach into Mogadishu, he saw what looked to be about fifty Somali men, prisoners, stripped naked but for
a cloth around their waists, hammering rocks in the brutal sun, black bodies shining on a field of rolling white sand.

There was a blast of thick warm air as the cabin door opened. The Cassidys were loaded down with baby stuff: a crib, a stroller, bags of disposable diapers, and boxes of baby food, as well as lamps and batteries and blankets. Just because Tone and Chris were willing to rough it in the African bush didn't mean that little Bernie had to suffer for one minute. He'd have all the advantages of a First World life, while understanding something about a world that didn't offer that life to everyone. Cassidy was determined that Bernie would learn a work ethic. He would understand life in a way that those TV-drugged kids in the States never would.

The family stepped slowly down toward the tarmac as the stairway wobbled beneath them. Below, Chris could see the plane surrounded by Somali police in blue berets lounging about the terminal, holding their automatic weapons as if they were as harmless as umbrellas. Fixers and greeters from various aid agencies milled among the police, smiling and patiently waiting in the hot sun for the Westerners they would usher through the erratic and intimidating Somali immigration maze. They would get the right stamps in passports and keep luggage from the grasp of customs officials seeking to supplement their salaries. Anyone who was not picked up by a fixer was at their mercy. A newcomer without an experienced escort would be like fresh carrion to the airport vultures.

M
ost of the non-Somalis on the plane were in the aid business, consultants and relief experts, development mavens, men and women of all ages and European nationalities. Flights in and out of Mogadishu were full of them, coming and going from Nairobi. Some were transiting from Europe. Most were on weekend rests in Kenya's consumer-friendly capital or game parks, fat from buffet dinners, relaxed from hours of lounging around glistening swimming pools and sipping drinks proffered by trained-in-the-art-of-service Kenyan waiters.