January 2020

I made it to March without a blog entry since January. And oh how the world has changed since then.

Blog entries are rather short but strangely hard to prioritize. I’m not sure why. I enjoy the writing. I have more than enough going on to write about. But I often have a hard time getting it done. Now that we are in a historic moment, and I’m in self-isolation, I may be able to carve out more time.

COVID-19. This has hit by storm. We will all look back on this as a watershed moment in history but at this point we just don’t know the long-term impact and how it will change us. However it does seem certain that it will indeed change us. But it’s dominating everything. What we do as a family. What I do in my job. What we buy. Social interactions. Sports. Entertainment. Politics. Virtually everything is being upended. And with no end in sight.

But I’ll discuss that in a later blog. For now I’ll meander back to a different time – January (seems like years ago now but it was only two months). It was a time in which the coronavirus was an annoying little disease thought to be contained in Hubei province, China. We were unaware at the time that it was already busy making its way to northern Italy, Iran and South Korea.   

Meanwhile in East Africa, after just one week in Nairobi after spending the holidays in the US, I was off to Mogadishu. It’s normal after being away to want to get back into the swing of things but I ended up spending most of the second half of January in Somalia. In retrospect, it was a good thing. I front-loaded a lot of time in Somalia without knowing that a couple months later I would be unable to return for a while.

African grey hornbills frequent my window sill
female on the left with the red on the beak
they love to peck on the window to get my attention

Over time I’ve grown to feel comfortable being in the country. It’s not without its “quirks” and security is always in question, but it feels quite normal now. I have my routines. I’m increasingly familiar with food and culture. My Somali is terrible and I would like to change that. Most of my staff manage well in English but I wish I had/took more time to learn the language.

As comfortable as I am there, I’m not so comfortable as to let my guard down. Last night four mortars were dropped in the airport “green zone”. It’s definitely unsettling when you hear such things. Sometimes, depending on how close it is, you can even feel the vibration when they hit. I stay in town, not in the guarded airport compound, and generally would be considered more at risk. But the bad guys seem to be more focused on, beside the government, the foreign troops who are based in that compound as well as the UN and others who support them. I do go in and out quite frequently to attend meetings and travel in and out but I generally don’t hang out there.  

The first trip to Mogadishu in 2020 was rather uneventful. Mostly meetings. At the end of the week I returned to Nairobi to attend some meetings there (and spend time with family, of course). By the 27^th, I was headed back again. This time it would be a bit more eventful.

driving through the old city: bombed out buildings, security checkpoints and tuk-tuks

I ran into a former staff on the previous trip, a Somali guy who is around my age and has lived in the country through thick and think, from the good times in the 70s and 80s, throughout the civil war, throughout the “Blackhawk Down” days, and has seen a lot of hardship. But he also maintains a strong hope that Mogadishu will once again be the White Pearl of Africa that it once was. I’ve known him since 2016 and his enthusiasm for the country has always resonated with me. He also loves that I enjoy hearing his stories of the past and his theories about the politics. As I’ve said in this blog before, I’m thoroughly fascinated by this context where I work. I’ve read several books about it and whenever I get the chance to pick someone’s brain about it, I do.

Another one of my staff who was accompanying me on this trip, a Somali-Kenyan woman, is leaving the program and moving to a regional position. So this former staff, who also worked with this woman for many years, arranged to have an armored vehicle come pick up the two of us (plus my security guy – always) and take us to a restaurant on the beach. A sort of farewell lunch.

I’ve been to this place numerous times. It was the scene of a bloody attach in 2016 when about 17 people were killed. But you kind of need to put those thoughts out of your head when you go there. It’s safer now than it was then and you should to go there in the middle of the day when the place is empty, particularly for me, a non-Somali. Statistically, the number of midday attacks in places like this is nearly zero.

Very few foreigners, particularly white Westerners, get a chance to do this. It’s off-limits for almost all organizations. We do it because, at least I believe, my security guy knows what he’s doing and he has assessed the risks accordingly. I know the manager well and he always greets me cheerfully. The few patrons that are in the place usually stare at the sight of a white guy casually walking in with his Somali colleagues. The drill is that, under the watchful eye of a handful of armed security guys, we usually walk out onto the beach. As a ritual, I have to touch the water. We take a few photos, breathe the sea air and take in the stunning view of the turquoise Indian Ocean.  

But, you can’t stay too long. We were soon back in the restaurant and the food arrived almost instantly. We order in advance to cut short the time we are there for security reasons. A wonderful soup. Lobster. Fresh mango, papaya, watermelon and orange. An espresso to cap it off. Nice.

yummy lobster

Soon we were back in the vehicle, winding our way through the streets, navigating multiple security checkpoints and eventually safely back to the office. As I always say, I look forward to the day when Somalia is at peace. It has too much to offer to remain in the shadows of insecurity.

Sands through an hourglass

As I often say, life happens to me faster than I record it. I don’t really have the instantaneous social media presence like most people. I don’t do things and immediately share it with the world. It’s a different kind of documentation of one’s existence but one that doesn’t seem to suit me very well. Ben Hecht said something about this long before social media existed:

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” -Ben Hecht, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, director, and producer (1894-1964)

Obviously I’m connecting the old daily newspaper with social media today. Interestingly, the pace of the current media is lightyears faster and thus accentuates Hecht’s point. I know people are trying to make sense of all this by extracting data over time and thereby determining patterns and meaning. It’s depicted in all kinds of graphics and gets interpreted in various ways. To be honest, I don’t think we have a handle where the world is going and it sometimes feels like the car has lost its breaks. I think the same can be said of certain peoples’ lives. 

I tend to try to reel in some of this, at least in so far as it is something I can control, whether it is in my job, my family or in my own head. I gravitate towards budgeting time for reflection. Periodically taking stock. Not getting to caught up in the moment. Giving time for wisdom to get involved in steering the car. People seem to increasingly steer their lives like a child sitting in a car pretending to drive. The jerky motions left and right would never make for a successful driving experience. It would produce the same nausea I get from tracking news. Information is coming out so fast, the quality of journalism suffers and there’s a tendency to overdramatize any one thing. 

I’ve spoken to some people that have decided to look at their favorite news websites no more than once a week or more to mitigate this phenomenon. I’ve done that myself on occasion (though I’m often too curious to wait that long) and it does sometimes feel like you’ve missed an eternity. But when you step back you realize that in reality you didn’t really miss all that much. 

In any case, don’t expect me to spew facts about my life moment by moment. I probably have a much more interesting life than a lot people who do but it’s a level of narcissism I prefer to avoid. And it wouldn’t provide a better picture of how, or even what, I’m doing. In most cases it would just be stuff – noise that someone else is trying to filter through in their respective feeds. I'd rather not.

"It’s tricky to write about a life. No one has the complete picture—not even the person whose life it is." -Elisabeth Elliot