Navigation

I rarely see Hargeisa at night, and then only from inside a moving car as I travel from one walled compound to another.  I know little of the night-life here.  I don’t mean clubs and other such things—they don’t exist here—but I mean that even after almost 5 months, I know very little about Hargeisa after dark.  I know it is busy, but where are these people going?  What are they doing?  I see them, as I rumble past in a Land Cruiser with tinted windows and worn shocks, groups of women shrouded like ghosts, men with bundles of stems wrapped in plastic that one might mistake for flowers (perhaps a gift for a sweetheart) but which are in fact bundles of khat.  The men are on their way to chew these bright green leaves and forget themselves in the vivid, coked-out flight of ideas typical of khat use.  They build castles in their minds, think deep thoughts, solve all the world’s problems, and then wake up to find nothing but a pile of stripped branches and the same poverty, the same wife and hungry children, the same old life they had before, and all the great dreams spun in the night have vanished. 

The market stays open quite late here (but remember, everything closes down from noon to almost 5 pm), but in a city with an unemployment rate estimated to be around 70%, I often wonder who is buying.  Sometimes it seems that we groups of westerners are the only customers.  I never go alone to the market, but we go in pairs or small groups, to buy tomatoes and bread and sometimes lengths of lovely direh cloth.  I’ve become fond of my comfortable Somali dresses, bought for almost nothing and sewn up in front of me by old women sitting at foot-powered sewing machines, some of them antique Singers which would make a collector drool.  The women whip up the simple dress in under 10 minutes, sometimes humming softly, sometimes chattering to one another in Somali.  We aren’t allowed to stand while we wait; sons and nephews working the family stall are dispatched to find chairs for us, and nothing will do but we sit and rest while we wait.  I drive everywhere—I have had enough of sitting. 

A display of bright cloth used to make simple dresses.

While we are buying things we are honored guests.  It is only while we are on the move, traveling from one stall or cart to another, that I hear muttering or see unfriendly faces.  I must admit though, that they are outnumbered by the merely curious, or the openly friendly.  Sometimes the curiosity is obnoxious and rude (I’ve never shouted at someone in the streets “Where you are from? Where you are from? Egyptian! Canada!), but some are eager to share their own stories about studies in London or a brother in Sweden.  However, no matter how friendly they seem, the men here make me nervous.  They are almost universally convinced of their own awesomeness, and can be pushy and demanding and dismissive.  Like people can be anywhere, I suppose, but there is an edge to it which comes from being steeped in a culture in which I am inferior by default.  No matter that my mind is sharper, my education superior, my experience broader, my professional skills and training in high demand; I am and always will be a lesser creature.  In some ways it reminds me of the frustration I felt as a child, trying to make suggestions which were ignored because of my youth.  Ask my mother who was best at assembling toys and bikes and Fisher-Price cars; now ask her how many times she and a friend would struggle to turn a pile of parts into a working red plastic sedan while ignoring my suggestions, only to finally listen to me and find I was right all along.  “Mummy, I think that part goes in there” was possibly the most-ignored statement of my childhood.  I often get a sense of déjà-vu here. 

The sun setting over Hargeisa.

But anyway…navigation.  I started this piece with that title, and have drifted somewhat.  Hargeisa at night.  Seeing life through tinted windows.  Yes, there I am, sitting in a Land Cruiser, bouncing along deeply rutted roads on my way from one enclosure to another.  Safely inside the walls of the hospital compound, I can finally breath fresh, cool, crisp night air, but the sense of imprisonment is strong, and grows stronger every day.  I think it is making me a bit crazy.  It’s ok, everyone else here is nuts too and so no one notices, but truly, I am losing my mind day by day. 

Some of the lights of Hargeisa at night.

Often I escape to the roof.  It is quiet and private and no one sees me, especially at night.  I look out over the city, lit up and looking for once like an actual city.  I turn my head towards the airport, wishing I were there, getting on a plane to Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, then home.  I look towards Iftin and Half London, nearby neighborhoods.  Half London is home to many expats.  I visit them sometimes, for a game night or other social events.  I crave the freedom to leave this place.  I envy them their ability to go home at the end of the day and leave work and coworkers behind for the night.  I look towards the Hodan Hills.  The name of this pair of hills means  “Girl’s Breasts,” but we call them “The Nipples.”  It’s such a funny little piece of Somaliland—a  kind of dirty joke in a country where the sight of a woman’s shoulder is shocking.  At last I look up.  I look towards the sky.

As a child I wanted to be an astronomer, until I thought about having to stay up past 9 pm to see the night sky.  This, I decided, would not work.  But I still love the stars.  I love black holes and galaxies and nebulas and gas giants and pulsars and neutron stars and supernovas and all the  constellations.  I love the stories: Orion chasing the Pleiades across the sky for eternity, the Big and Little Bears, Andromeda poised forever in the moments before her rescue by Perseus.  I love looking up, seeing the familiar patterns, and knowing where I am.

The familiar Star and Crescent symbol of Islam
tops the minaret of a mosque. 

Here, however, the stars are not where they are supposed to be.  Polaris sits much lower in the sky, and all the constellations are wrong as well.  I can still find Orion, and he still pursues the Pleiades, but they are off somehow; it feels wrong to look at them where they are.  Polaris, the North Star or Lodestar, is constant; it has been used for centuries as a guide.  Navigators used the North Star to find their way home.  But what happens when the immutable suddenly changes?  When the thing you’ve always counted on to be exactly where it always is, suddenly isn’t?  I have found the displacement of the stars surprisingly unsettling.  It’s not something I thought about before I came here, although in an intellectual sense I knew it would be true.  But that kick to the gut which accompanies the first glance at a disordered sky still caught me unawares.

It echoes the larger sense of displacement, of dislocation, that I have felt since I arrived here.  This world is alien, and I feel off my axis.  I find I cannot navigate my way through this strange, frustrating, and sometime frightening culture.  None of my old points of reference work.  To wit, the North Star has moved, and I cannot figure out how to plot a course in this new world. 

I am facing some big decisions about my future here and how much longer I will stay.  I ache for my family and friends; I wake up crying from dreams of my home.  But at the same time I want to finish what I set out to do, and I don’t want to surrender.  My mind goes in circles, I can’t decide what to do.  I need a new North Star, something that makes sense here, to help me chart my way in this world.