Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Going Nowhere

This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.
- Sloop John B, The Beach Boys


As my time goes on over here I'm coming to the realization that this is becoming one of the most boring travel blogs ever written.

Since my disastrous experience in the east I've had little of note happen here. I've wandered passed the Hargeisa city limits to camp a couple nights out in the desert but besides that have been holed up in the city center, trying in vain to get permission to visit the countryside. My problem lies with the Intelligence Chief, a guy who put what appears to be a permanent hold on my travel. I've gotten unofficial word over the last three weeks that he is willing to lift it and walk me through any other security hurdles I'm looking at, but any attempts to actually meet with him to do so have met with failure.

In fact, this "failure" thing looks to be turning into a habit. I'll have meetings set, promises made, and permission granted for what I want to do only for everything to fall through at the last minute. I've made so many plans and seen them fall apart so often that I'm starting to feel like Charlie Brown to Somaliland's Lucy. And really, there are only so many more times I can take a swing at that football before I call it a day.

I've been considering that recently, given the obstacles I'm looking at. Threats against me mean that I can't go east, red tape means I can't go west, and even if I was allowed to leave Hargeisa it would take a minimum of a week and a half to gear up and set out for what would be a three week trek to try to find a suitable project site. As of right now, it doesn't look like I'll have the time barring a miracle.

Yes, it's safe to say that the last couple months here are certainly doing well to cure my Africa Bug. If it looks as though things continue this way I may be seeing my friends and family back home sooner than I thought. I've accomplished absolutely zilch in my time in Somaliland and after two months my patience is wearing mighty thin. Right now the thought of spending a few quiet nights wandering the BWCA or on the Rum River in Minnesota sounds quite a bit more appealing than another dusty week here with nothing to show for it.

Granted, I’m in a pretty foul mood right now so I’m sure I sound more bitter than I would normally be, but I’ve had quite a few expectations for Somaliland which have sizzled. I’m fed up with the flies, the noise, and the food, not to mention the constant frustration of knowing that I'm going nowhere. I don't want to come home early having succeeded in nothing I originally set out for but in the end that's what I just might do.

On the other hand, you guys just got a snowstorm so you're not exactly sitting pretty either. Anyone heard how South America is doing right about now?

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Burao

When Peace Corp volunteers return from South America they come back revolutionaries. When Peace Corp volunteers return from Asia they come back philosophers. And when Peace Corp volunteers return from Africa they come back chain-smoking alcoholics.
-Peace Corp Africa joke.



My planned trek ended up failing to materialize. In fact, the whole thing turned into a fiasco on par at least with any other travel disaster I've experienced. For the moment I'm not terribly amused with the thought of writing down all of the details. I've tried a few times over the last two days but I just get too angry, much too riled up, to write anything that's close to coherent. It's probably best I leave some until I get home anyway. So I'll leave some of the more colorful details out until I'm able to laugh about them, sometime perhaps many months (years?) down the road.

The jist of everything is that a guy I knew from last time from one of the lesser ministries who I hired as my fixer didn't actually fix anything. This is a particularly big deal because I ended up stranded in Burao for nine days, a city in which, according to a UN-sponsored poll recently, al Shabab still has a 40% approval rating and where I had no reliable contacts. Even when I was ordered back to Hargeisa it took me another three days to actually leave the city for a number of reasons. The two or three days I planned on staying I Burao were acceptable and relatively safe; the nine I was there for were not.

I was offered what I will describe as an "unfriendly" welcome by the regional authorities when I stopped in the port of Berbera on my way back to Hargeisa and by the time I got back to Hargeisa I finally realized just exactly how much trouble I was in. Half the authorities seemed to think I was C.I.A. and the other half just thought I was a complete idiot for going to Burao without "official" permission, something my fixer had told me he had already gotten me.

I'm still trying to work my way from out of this mess and at times over the last week I've been close to calling it a day here and coming home. If nothing else my stay in Burao impressed upon me just how impossible it would be to work on my educational project for any amount of time in the eastern half of Somaliland.

This is a real shame because even in Burao itself I saw terrific potential in a former vocational center build by the Germans in the 1950s. Though gutted by Siad Barre's forces in 1988 - bullet pock marks still clear on many of the walls - the foundation of the twenty buildings are still solid and would have a perfect start to a new vocational center.

For now though, with the growing instability along the border and west until Berbera, I can't do anything there. And for the moment, unless I choose to leave the country, I'm stuck in Hargeisa until the Intelligence chief comes back and gives me permission to leave. That means I can't even check out any potential project sites in the western regions until he gets back to Hargeisa from his current trip to Djibouti.

I still want to trek as well and I've come up with an alternate, though less exciting, route. I figure with everything I need to get going within about two weeks in order to give myself enough of a cushion to get back to Minnesota. The only other places I want to go in the Horn will take enough trouble to get to that by the time I actually trek them the temperatures would be much too high as the summer draws closer. Likewise, Yemen continues to have riots and nobody can tell me what South Sudan is like post-election, so I don't want to force a trip to either or those countries.

I'm down to only one region that I'm interested in working in for the school project, and that's the western coast, the areas I walked last time. I've stumbled directly into a number of walls on the school front in my time here but I still have good hope for something there; if not, I'll probably be forced to call it a day on that front, much to my annoyance.

Still, I'm holding out hope that I'll be able to salvage my time. It's be a shame to come home early having accomplished nothing. I'm working through different channels both on trekking and on the schools and the gears appear, on some level at least, to be turning. It's impossible to read the tea leaves at the moment but I'll probably know within a week.

Finally, there's a good read through the link below on a new dairy farm outside of Hargeisa that a wonderful friend of mine here, Ahmed, has been helping to set up since I met him two years ago. It is almost ready to start production and would be the first milk production plant in all of Somalia. In such a dry region it really is a coup to have a dairy farm with one hundred Holstein cows. It's a great read, written by a BBC correspondent recently on assignment in Somaliland. The article can be found here.