Somaliland: Working in Somaliland Part 5
Iain will be writing to Somalilandpress.com about his experience in Somaliland and will be offering tips to anyone who may want to visit the unrecognized republic along the way – discover Somaliland from a Non-Somali perspective.
A sign at the University of Hargeisa reads “The road to success is always under construction.” The road to the border town of Wajaale has never seen construction. My boss and I were squeezed into the single front seat of a car driven by a woman who couldn’t speak. She could only shout. And she shouted with impunity to her mobile phone, other passengers, us, policemen, goats, other drivers. She was so loud that I couldn’t hear my Ipod. The road ended twenty kilometres from the border and the desert started. She drove slowly but with little regard for the most level parts of the sand.
We crossed the border and entered Ethiopia. We had four days of work and wanted to take advantage of them by visiting Somaliland’s neighbour before our visas expired. We caught a bus to the nearby town of Jijiga which sits anonymously one hour up a perfectly paved road. We were crammed into the space which one person would normally be expected to sit in, in any other part of the world. The bus station is merely a patch of earth within a low-walled perimeter. A few old ladies sit cross-legged besides metal pots. I walked up to one and said hello in Somali, the main language of this region. They smiled and opened the pots. Spaghetti and sauce. We sat under the shade of corrugated iron roof as local street children gathered in a group ten metres away and laughed hysterically. Look! White people. And they eat and sit just like we do. This was certainly different to life in Hargeisa.
The road from Hargeisa to the border was full of check points. Each was manned by a polite and friendly soldier who treated both us and the Somalis in the car with congeniality. The road into Ethiopia is congested with check points. Every twenty minutes or so another power crazed, qatted-up policeman hails down the bus and squints through the window. White people? I need to see your passport. It doesn’t matter that we must have passed through ten of these already and the slightest irregularity would have been sniffed out at the border. The whiff of a bribe has broken their quiescent brains but the eyes still remain vacant as they hold our passports upside down. They are clearly unable to read. We are more trouble than it is worth and the passengers argue on our behalf. We speed off again as the police go back to their qat and the shade of a bulldozer. This is really different to life in Hargeisa.
The bus conductor isn’t playing fair. He wants us to pay for Dire Dawa. I refuse. My friend is asleep beside me. The conductor turns away to think for a while then taps my arm again. This farce continues fifty times and each time I tell him in Somali that we will only pay until Harar. English speaking passengers try to intervene but it isn’t their fight. I tell him, in English, that we will happily get out and take the next bus but he will get no payment. Suddenly we are charged the Harar price. I can only remember once being overcharged in Hargeisa. This is something about Ethiopia which Somaliland doesn’t have. Sure there have been less than positive experiences in Somaliland but Somalis don’t see foreigners as walking cash machines. People do not stop what they are doing simply to stare and shout.
We relax in Harar. We pass our Eid with cheap food and drink. The one advantage Ethiopia has over Somaliland is that food and accommodation is cheaper. A few guys surround the entrance to the hotel and offer us tours of the city or guiding to see the Hyenas. We don’t want to, thanks. We set off to find it ourselves and after ten minutes I stopped dead as two hyenas lay lazily across the path about two metres from where I was standing. We sat watching them before the New Hyena Man of Harar turned up with a basket of meat and called us over. An Indian man arrived with one of our guide-suitors from outside the hotel who seemed genuinely offended that we had come here alone instead of paid him to guide us to a place which we already knew. In Hargeisa people are more inclined to seek friendship before money.
We stopped in Jijiga for a final beer with lunch before cramming onto another minibus. It was just about to leave the patch of dirt when a bucktoothed soldier with eyes pointing in opposite directions clambered on and shouted at us in Amharic. “He wants you to get off the bus.” One of the passengers translated. Why? “He won’t say.” We were in the furthest two seats from the door, packed under our rucksacks and surrounded by twenty people who would have to get off before we could.
I went out to deal with the stoned simpleton soldier who wanted to know where we were going. We were on a bus to Wajaale, would he care to take a wild guess? What were we going to do there? Get the hell out of his shitty country and go back to one where every second person doesn’t shout “White man give me money.” at us without having the skill to translate it into a language we speak. I patiently showed him my Somaliland residence and work permit along with my Ethiopian visa. He clearly couldn’t read and just wanted to show how important he was. He smiled a goofy smile, popped some of the narcotic leaf qat into his mouth and then sauntered off into the distance.
Thirty men stood by the roadside and crowded the bus on its arrival. Hands started pounding the side of the bus. “Qat, qat.” It was an ethereal wail which started sporadically and rose in unison. The conductor nervously got off the bus and went to the boot. He pulled an entire bundle of the poisonous leaf out. A man beside Brandon pulled open the curtain and looked into the bus “Qat?” It was a truly pathetic sight. Thirty men following the one who had the precious bundle in his arms. They disappeared into the hills to forget how miserable their existence out there must have been. Surely this was the point that other drugs had been banned, this one seemed just as rotten as the rest of them. Most curious was that the village only had four or five small buildings constructed mostly from rubbish. Where the men had come from we had no idea.
We were happy to cross the border late into the evening and get on a car back to Hargeisa. After being an animal in the zoo or a freak at the circus it was good to be going back to a society which even if it holds you at arm’s length, treats you and itself with dignity.
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