Merca and the story of Ali Maow Malin - Somalia

Merca was famous as a beach resort many years ago, used by the British as a rest base for troops pushing up towards Addis in an earlier conflict.

I had a field office close by the mosque, to manage an agricultural rehabilitation programme in the nearby countryside. Swifts used to circle the minaret after their epic seasonal migration from Europe.

Merca at that time was quieter than Mogadishu and provided easier access to the programme area. This was long before the international military intervention led by the Americans. The webi shabelle flowed close by, and the single access road into the town from Afgoi was buried under moving sand dunes and  just passable with a 4 wheel drive.

We used to come back filthy and exhausted after days in the field, to face an even greater challenge - the TV.

One of the national staff had produced this ancient contraption and equally ancient video recorder.  When it was plugged in and the generator started, the crackling noise from the plug and faint air of electrics about to ignite pervaded the whole cinematic experience. We had no TV signal and only one video ‘The Mirror Cracked’ an Agatha Christie mystery. Sometimes we had the picture with no sound and at other times the sound with no picture.

How the compound did not burn down remains a complete mystery, as did the ending of the film. No-one ever managed to stay awake long enough to find out who did it. Over the intervening years when the opportunity arose I have never been able to bring myself to try one more time to watch the wretched thing to its final scene.

Merca has its place in history for one event of global importance. The final eradication of smallpox. Nearly twenty years earlier in the 1970’s Somalia was one of the last strongholds of the disease. An outbreak in 1977 led to a WHO containment programme which eventually led to Merca’s hospital and the hospital cook Ali Maow Malin. He had ducked his jab in an earlier inoculation programme and became infected. His treatment was to be as the last patient before the WHO announced in October 1979 the full eradication of smallpox in the world's population.

A spot of malaria on the Webi Shabelle - Somalia

The ritual at the start of each day in the fields around Baidoa was a visit to a young entrepreneur at the entrance to town with a large mound of coconuts and a panga. For a few shillings you had a freshly opened coconut and they were delicious.

The market

Another routine was to walk the irrigation ditches to check they were in good order. 

One morning with a bout of malaria simmering below the surface, I came to a reed bed outside of town and out stepped a few feet in front of me a bird of jaw dropping height. It did not look up, rather it stared straight forward, more curious than alarmed.  After a minute or so of complete silence between us on that deserted track, it turned away and vanished back into the reeds, leaving only the hum of cicadas in the intense heat.

A verdant landscape rife with malaria and dengue

When I reported the encounter to my Somali friends, they exchanged looks, fell silent and quickly changed the subject. Gerald Hanley’s experience with the spirit world in these parts came to mind and  I was left to wonder if it was just malaria that has left me with the distinct feeling that I had just met with something far more elemental than possibly the largest Saddlebill Stork in existence.

Three brave men - Somalia

Long before the arrival of the Americans in Somalia, farmland near Baidoa was the location for an agricultural rehabilitation programme.

Crossing the Shebelle with  agricultural extension workers

Unlike the surrounding desert Baidoa was green and verdant with abundant coconut and banana plantations. You could still see the concrete huts in which the former Italian colonists kept their plantation workers.  During the rainy season stagnant pools between the houses were ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes – dengue and malaria were rife.

seed trials

Much of the work was restoration of irrigation channels and the perennial problem of raising water from the Shebelle River. The pumps long since  looted.

Where there was once a pump to raise water from the Shabelle

That we managed to bring large swathes of agricultural land back into productive use was down to the determination and bravery of three exceptional extension workers.


 Three  brave men.



and their appreciative audience

A Year in Mog - Somalia

Somalia is a place that really gets under your skin.  A land of extremes that draws you back again and again.

I made one of my all time unforgettable safaris before the civil war, walking camels up from Kismayo to Hargeisa.  The book I took on that journey is the Somalia book, that I have re-read many times - 'Warriors and Strangers by Gerald Hanley. Later during fighting in the early 1990's I returned to establish and manage agricultural rehabilitation programmes along the Juba and Shabelle rivers.

Looking back at old black and white photos of the Italian colonial era it never ceases to amaze that a place could be so comprehensively trashed and still provide a home for so many.

Each day of blazing heat was greeted with the cry ‘turned out nice again’ before heading to the field. The Somalis were just as affected by the pulsating sun and white glare reflecting off an unforgiving landscape, perfectly matching  their highly volatile nature's.  

Back then Mog had the daily backdrop of almost constant automatic weapons fire.  Usually M16’s and AK47’s and occasionally something heavier when the Technical’s became animated.

One faction owned a flatbed truck with a four barrel anti aircraft gun attached. It tended to appear out of side streets, horizontally traverse that gun and let rip. Everyone scattered to the hills as its destructive impact within an enclosed urban space was spectacularly appalling.

Most NGO's had hustlers outside their compounds trying to sell or rent what they had looted. Occasionally these groups became fractious, and the normal backdrop of gunfire grew in intensity and volume.  One security briefing continued under a heavy dining table with bullets pinging off the wall above our heads

Then one day the firing outside really did become intense and the compound  filled with smoke. Bursts of gunfire  tended to last a minute or two, but this just went on and on.  It was the ambush and murder of 24 U.N. Pakistani peacekeepers, an event which contributed to the intervention of the Americans. The rest of that story is now history.

Two outstanding people I worked with and will never forget were Dan Eldon of Reuters and Sean Devereux of UNICEF.  Both were exceptional but found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and did not make it back.

Preparing for a trip to the field

In 2013 the Brits re-opened an Embassy and  and funded solar powered street lighting which has made a huge difference to the atmosphere in Mogadishu after dark.
The diaspora are starting to return, leading to a spectacular rise in the value of habitable real estate and now there is even a dry cleaners.

If Somalia can emulate the success story that is Somaliland, those old black and white photos may cease to be distant memories.

Living with the Pokot (Part 2) - Kenya

                                           The Pokot circumcision ceremony.

In the 1980s I was living with the Pokot in Northern Kenya, working on a camel programme, with  the occasional visit from Sir Wilfred Thesiger passing by on the way up to Lake Turkana.

The Pokot were locked in a near permanent cycle of cattle rustling with the Turkana and the Karamojong from over the border in Karamoja, Uganda. Unlike today fighting was mainly with spears, with automatic weapons appearing only in the most extreme of circumstances. It was their equivalent of Saturday afternoon football, and served greatly to alleviate the routine of their daily lives. 

A principal driver in all this rustling was to accrue enough cattle for the bride price 'lobola', a cause of unending disputes and grief across Africa.

Like many nomadic tribes in the region each individual belongs to an age set that moves through the stages of life together from childhood to old age. One of the most important rites of passage within Pokot Society is the circumcision ceremony 'Sapana' marking  their passage to adulthood.

Given that a consequence of the operation would be to have hundreds of men of fighting age out of action for days if not weeks, the ceremony had been delayed again and again whilst the prevailing security situation was so volatile.

Eventually with many of the age set now well into adulthood it was decided that they could wait no longer and I was fortunate to be there, to see many friends advance through a key stage of their lives.

This is not the place for an anthropological analysis of purpose and meaning within the ceremony, suffice to say it was hot even for the oven that is Pokot.  In clearings across their territory groups of initiates were brought together under the auspice of an elder who was to act as compere for the day. Each initiate attired in dyed skins and tasselled faces (nicely weighted down with coke and fanta bottle tops) paraded past his fellows whilst cheered on by the surrounding mob of women and children.

The master of ceremonies formed them into a semi circle

A final blessing

Cheered on by the women and children

Then as the groups were marched off to the hills, their singing faded until all that remained was the hum of cicadas in the intense heat.

A very hot day in Pokot

The next days armed with first aid kits & supplies of painkillers I  headed to the hills to dispense some relief to the survivors of the ordeal.

At first they were nowhere to be found until guided to carefully camouflaged depressions in the hills, which had been layered over with branching and vegetation providing approximately four feet of clearance above the ground. In these darkened caverns, when one’s eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, were dozens and dozens of silhouettes most sitting in absolute silence.

Painkillers were applied direct to mouth to prevent their use elsewhere. It was clear that the circumciser had taken a while to get their eye in, or the knives had been of an unusually blunt design. Celibacy seemed an entirely reasonable life choice for some time after.

Then finally when led away from the hidden lairs back to the valley floor with a gift of goatsmeat wrapped in aromatic leaves, I felt very fortunate to have been part of a rapidly disappearing Africa.

Living with the Pokot (part 1) - Kenya

For a while I lived with a semi nomadic tribe in Northern Kenya, working on a livestock programme.  This is where I became hooked on camels. Camels were a vast improvement on  the existing herds of low yield cattle that were rapidly degrading an increasingly arid and fragile environment. 

Pokot remains home to the largest black mambas, spitting cobras and camel spiders I have seen anywhere. One mamba who lived by the seasonal riverbed  was in the T Rex class of scary reptiles.

Encouraging a stock substitution programme from cattle to camels is never easy. Often a person’s entire wealth may be ‘on the hoof’ and there is the matter of personal status as well. Cattle are also usually required as payment for lobola ‘the bride price’, which is a subject that deserves its own separate post.  Camel  husbandry  requires its own set of skills which have to be learned carefully, as their loss would be a severe blow to the owner.

Spraying the camels for external parasites

 However benefits easily outweigh the risks. They can lactate far longer into the dry season, providing a milk supply particularly valuable to the women and children.  The soft padded feet do not compact the soil and there are selective browsers often of thorny bushes rather than grazing cattle that quickly remove the sparse vegetative covering  and of course they have a greater tolerance to thirst and hunger than cattle.

The Pokot eventually used scoops harnessed to camels to create dams which would capture and hold water when the rains came.  One of these dams was nearly my undoing. Returning late at night on a XT500 motorbike, I ran into a very large bad tempered crocodile that had unexpectantly made one dam its home and was out for a midnight stroll. With much wobbling I managed to stay on the bike and avoid its open jaws. It was rather a shock for both of us.

Camels scraping out a seasonal dam 

The increasing aridity of these marginal land's and increasing competition for finite water and grazing gives camel herders a distinct advantage in the survival stakes. 

Wajir & the Lorian Swamp

Wajir was one of those Kenya frontier outposts during the days of Empire where the administration could keep an eye on the south west migration of the Somali clans. These days most of the north east of Kenya’s population are of Somali descent.

I first drove up to Wajir in the 1980’s for a camel management meeting. Even then security was an issue with roving bands of opportunistic shifta looking for easy pickings.

Wajir was in those days a scene straight out of the Old Testament with ancient mzee's slumped over donkeys moving slowly in the midday heat

Wajir was famous then for its wells where camels were brought to drink. The wells have a high level of suspended mica which can wreak havoc with ones innards when having a pee. It used to be known as Wajir clap with good reason. Then one day the rains came unexpectedly early and the Lorian Swamp began to fill. The District Commissioners of old had created the fictional Wajir Yacht Club to amuse themselves in the endless miles of desert and scrub, but that journey back through the swamp remains just as vivid today. Digging out and pushing the land cruiser as the waters deepened, passing trucks stuck fast or abandoned and as far as you could see just fetid water. If you do travel this way just take a lesson from experience and check the weather forecast first.

 

The start of a terrible journey

The waters rising

The road to Isiolo

Those that did not make it

stranded

Some decided to swim for it

Then it got worse

The bow wave from the front of the Landcruiser

Finally on dry land and a promise never to try this again

Bukhara & Genghis Khan- Uzbekistan

Whilst Kyrgyzstan is without doubt my favourite country in Central Asia, Bukhara in Uzbekistan remains my favourite city.

Bukhara has seen it all. Alexander the Great passed this way. When the Horde ransacked the city, Genghis Khan marvelled at the Kalyan minaret, before using it to fling his victims to their deaths.  When survivors eventually returned to the remains of their city they renamed it the Tower of Death.  

Kaylan Minaret

The extremely bad tempered 19^th Century Emir- Nasrulla, favoured lingering deaths for his victims in a bug infested pit, including two unfortunate British Officers which he eventually beheaded. He finally fled the advancing Russians to Tajikistan, leaving a trail of dancing boys in his wake as an unsuccessful diversion.

Bukhara had the greatest collection of madrasas in Central Asia before the communists arrived and left them to fade away. 

It was also a disease infested place with many of the inhabitants suffering from guinea worm known locally as Bukhara boil, contracted from the pools of water built in this desert oasis for people to wash, bathe and drink from. One of the first actions of the Russian regime was to fill these pools in, and to construct alternative water supplies, leaving only the marvellous pool of Layb-I- Khauz and its chai khanas intact.

Taking tea at the pool of Layb-I-Khauz

The Ark was the Citadel of the Emir and it was in front of these gates that the bodies of Stoddart and Conolly the two British Officers were buried.

The Ark

Walking through Bukhara is history brought to life. Bukhara Burnes may have travelled this way only a week or two before instead of 186 years ago. For over 2000 years Bukhara has played a key role in the region, from stop overs on the Silk Road to the Great Game.

Travels in the Celestial Mountains - Kyrgyzstan

The Tien Shan Mountains are aptly named.

The range links the Pamirs in Tajikistan, The Hindu Kush in Pakistan and The Alti Mountains of Mongolia. More importantly it cuts Krygyzstan in half .

The Tien Shan Range

In the early 1990's only a difficult route through the centre of the Kyrgyzstan from Osh to Bishkek existed.  In the harsh winter of 1994 when I set up and managed Save the Children Fund's first Central Asia Programme it was easier to travel from the south to Bishkek via Tashkent in Uzbekistan then onto Chimkent in Kazakhstan and finally back into Kyrgyzstan; effectively circumventing the range.

Travel across the Tien Shan from Osh to Bishkek is one of life's great experiences.  Villagers rarely saw outsiders let alone foreigners and the welcome was always overwhelming.

SCF's first programme in Central Asia

Often the villages were completely cut off by snow in winter and eventually we borrowed helicopters to move supplies.

Travel in the Tien Shan by horse was possible but only from late spring onwards.

The range reaches to Lake Issyk Kul near  Bishkek.  Set at 1,600 m above sea level, the lake  is one of the highest mountain lakes in the world.

Issyk Kul