3
The Face of Evil
Many years later I thought about the excitement of that Easter Sunday, and I wondered again if the story of Jesus had anything to do with real life—especially real life in the Horn of Africa. As my exploring of Hargeisa continued, I happened upon a crew from a British company hired to find, disarm, and remove land mines left in and around the city.
For a while, I watched in fascination (from a distance!) as these men operated a machine called a flail—an armor-plated bulldozer-type contraption with a cab set as far back out of blast range as possible. The machine has a long extension in front with a revolving axel that flings lengths of heavy logging chains ahead of the machine to set off unexploded mines. The machine’s heavy blade can then scrape up and push the remains off the road. When the crew took a break, I walked up behind the machine to talk to the men.
Their equipment was designed primarily for clearing anti-personnel mines. Those were usually small explosive charges buried so that their tops are level with, or just barely under, the ground. They are typically packed in plastic casings that won’t register on a metal detector, and set with a simple pressure plate or button that can be tripped by stepping on it and exerting merely a few pounds of weight. These mines are designed to kill or at least maim human beings; their original purpose had been to decimate, delay, and demoralize enemy forces. One problem with land mines is that long after a war ends and the combatants go home, the explosives remain hidden—armed and dangerous for years, maybe even decades. Worse yet, they are equal opportunity exploders—unable to distinguish friend from foe, enemies from innocents.
Since there were thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of land mines in and around Hargeisa, and because flail machines were incredibly expensive, this mine-removal company also hired and trained local crews to search for mines manually. That dangerous work required searchers to squat close to the ground and move very slowly and methodically along roads and across fields, inch by inch, watching and feeling for tell-tale warning signs while sometimes gingerly probing the ground ahead with a long, stiff wire. The physical and mental demands required of these manual-detection crews were especially exhausting. The margin for error is tiny and the cost of a mistake is huge. One of the workers told about a crew of Somalis who had been tediously working their way through a farmer’s field for hours, finding and marking a number of mines for removal as they went. When it came time for a much needed break, the men all sat down cautiously right in their tracks, just as they had been taught to do. Then one fellow decided to stretch his cramped legs out in front of him, and tripped a mine that blew both of his feet off.
Watching that flail machine work, seeing that crew of men risk life and limb (literally) to find and remove yet another one of who-knows-how-many-thousand more mines, raised again the questions that I had been asking myself since my first day in Somaliland: What kind of place is it where you worry about your child getting blown apart every time he goes out to play?
I know that the Bible doesn’t describe hell in great detail. I know that Scripture does not ever pinpoint its precise location. But I recall that many theologians contend that the worst thing to be endured in hell would be eternal separation from God. In 1992, I had only been in Somaliland for a few days. Yet I had already seen enough of evil and its effects to decide that this place felt like total separation from God. It seemed to be a complete disconnect from all that was good in the universe.
Somaliland in February of 1992 was as close to hell as I ever wanted to be.
Lying on the floor in the dark, I felt so oppressed by the manifestation of the evil I had seen that I again told Jesus: “If I ever get out of this place, I am never coming back!” Even the familiar old mantra “Just take it one day at a time” seemed too much to ask. For many Somalis, living one hour at a time was as much as they could deal with.
Even as a visitor, my senses were bombarded and so overwhelmed that it was impossible to process all that I was seeing. I simply relied on instinct and tried to keep going.
At other times, I found a way to ignore my instincts. A few days later in Hargeisa, walking alone down an alley, I noticed a little boy, about the same size as my five-year-old son Andrew, on the opposite side of the alleyway some distance ahead. He was turned away, his back toward me. He didn’t see me coming. He was preoccupied with something that he was holding, so he didn’t seem to hear me coming either.
I was almost parallel with him, maybe fifteen feet across the alley, when my mind finally registered what my eyes were seeing. Now able to look over his shoulder, I realized what he was so intently focused on. He clutched a classic, saucer-shaped, anti-personnel mine against his chest with one hand, while at the same time, with the index finger of his other hand, he poked at the button on top.
My heart may have actually stopped at that moment. I do know that every instinct and every nerve ending in my body was screaming, RUN! Time seemed to stand still—there is no other way to explain how so many thoughts and images flashed through my mind all at once.
I calculated that in less than five seconds, an adrenalin-fueled sprint would probably carry me out of any blast zone. But in that very same instant I realized that, if I turned and ran, I would never be able to live with myself should that little boy depress the button and blow himself to bits.
It took everything inside of me—all my energy, my determination, and my self-control—just to move. I hurried across the alley as quickly and as quietly as possible. I certainly didn’t want the boy to hear me coming and panic. At the same time that I was trying to assure myself that his little finger must not be strong enough to push the button, in another part of my mind I was carefully plotting how I would grab the deadly explosive before surprise and fear prompted him finally to press hard enough on the button to blow us both up.
I don’t think he ever heard my footsteps. Before he even turned his head, I was able to reach past his shoulder and snatch the land mine out of his hands. The moment I did that, however, I realized that the underside of the saucer which had been turned away from me was hollow. The explosive charge was missing. All the boy had been holding was the empty casing tilted toward himself with the pressure plate button on top. That’s all that I had been able to see.
I have no idea what that young Somali boy thought was happening when a desperately frightened white man yanked his newfound prize away from him. I wonder, if he survived to adulthood, whether or not he even remembers the incident today.
But I can assure you that I remember it. I can still see the look of sudden surprise and utter fear (of me) in his eyes. For me, that day was unforgettable. In that experience, I glimpsed yet again the face and the handiwork of pure evil in Somaliland.
I saw evil’s impact again countless times. One day my young friend, the orphanage staffer, engaged a vehicle to take us out of the city. My plan for this extended scouting trip had been to observe and document the outlying communities’ greatest needs, so as to consider potential projects that my non-government organization (NGO) might begin in the countryside around Hargeisa.
It is important to know that most of Africa’s potable water supply is dependent on electricity. Even most communities that depend on ancient village wells for basic survival now use submersible electric pumps powered by small portable generators to bring the water to the surface. Such basic “technology” is not only relatively inexpensive and low-maintenance, it is also a reliable and efficient means to tap meager water supplies in areas where traditional methods are unable to access deep water aquifers.
Unfortunately, such simple equipment is easy to steal or sabotage. Once we got out of the city, we discovered that every communal well had been rendered useless. The village generator had been looted, and/or the submersible pump had been pulled out and taken for use elsewhere. Perhaps thieves had been able to sell their plunder. What was even harder to understand was the pointless destruction and cruelty inflicted on those few villages that had still depended on old fashioned hand pumps—until roaming vandals, armed raiders, enemy clans, or perhaps one-side-or-the-other in the ongoing civil war had simply smashed and destroyed the pumps and then permanently sealed off the old wells by filling them with rocks or sand.
Whoever the culprits, whatever their motivation, the results in nearly every village were the same. Entire herds of goats lay dead in fields where grass no longer grew. Dried and rotting camel carcasses littered the roadsides and filled the air with the stench of death.
Many of the homes in these outlying villages were now empty and abandoned. The farm families who had lived there had either died of starvation or had fled to the city in the desperate but uncertain hope that things had to be better there.
The people of these villages really had no other choice. What once had been productive life-giving land had been rendered uninhabitable.
I had flown into Somaliland to assess the needs in and around Hargeisa. Out in the countryside I quickly concluded: There is nothing that these people don’t need!
What needed to be done? Everything!
The more pertinent question for me was: What practical things could a relief organization do that could make a difference for these villages and for these people? Where could we start to help when everyone is destitute—where the least of these includes everyone?
The word overwhelmed doesn’t begin to describe my reaction. I may have been a neophyte in the relief business, but I had talked to enough experts and lived in Africa long enough to understand that before it could address basic human needs, a relief agency must address essential needs of its own:
By the time we headed back into the city, I knew that I had to face the hard, honest truth. I did not yet have enough of any of those fundamental requirements for a functional relief effort even to begin to tackle the staggering needs that I had seen that day. On some level, I had started to understand the depth of hopelessness that I saw in the eyes of so many Somalis.
The emotional fallout from that countryside expedition may help explain the intensity of my reaction to an incident I witnessed during a subsequent visit to the Hargeisa marketplace. At first, nothing seemed different from any of my earlier visits. The same vendors offered the same meager fare at the same few stalls. With nothing new to see in the way of merchandise, I stood off to the side and watched the people come and go.
Suddenly I heard the sound of heavy vehicles somewhere in the distance. They slowly, steadily drew closer. Eventually I saw the caravan rolling through the streets toward the market. Finally, the caravan came into view: truck after truck, fifteen in all. Each vehicle was bristling with weaponry. Armed men stood in the back of every vehicle. Each soldier was outfitted with an AK-47 over one shoulder and bandoliers full of bullets draped across his chest. Mounted on some trucks were fifty-caliber machine guns. At least one truck was equipped with anti-aircraft artillery.
What struck me more than the firepower were the emotionally void faces of those men—their imperious looks befitted battle-hardened Roman centurions who had seen the world and were now marching proudly back into Rome.
My immediate reaction was, “Thank God! The cavalry has arrived. A caravan of food and supplies has finally reached Hargeisa.” The sudden swarm of people flooding into the market seemed to confirm my assessment. I backed up against a building to make room as the clamoring crowd quickly engulfed the trucks. The convoy’s armed guards forced them back to make room as they began to unload their precious cargo.
I watched, sharing the excited anticipation of the throng, trying to imagine what new and wondrous things might be served for supper throughout Hargeisa on this joyful day. The multitude surged forward again as the first boxes were opened.
What I saw then so sickened me that I nearly threw up. What came out of those boxes was not packaged food, canned goods, or bottles of juice or water. I had lived in Africa long enough to recognize the contents immediately. Packed in those boxes were canvass-wrapped bundles of khat, a plant grown in the Kenyan and Ethiopian highlands, the leaves of which are stripped from the bundled stems and chewed for their narcotic effect. Considered a recreational drug, some say it works much like amphetamines with the intensity of the party drug Ecstasy.
I could not believe what I was seeing. In a place where tens of thousands of people had no shelter, no running water, no food, and no medicine, someone used the resources required for a heavily armed, fifteen-vehicle caravan to import an addictive drug into the country.
What horrified me even more was the reaction of the crowd—many of whom had not had enough money to buy food for their family in who-knows-how-long. But here they came now! Men carried stereo speakers and other electronic equipment on their shoulders and traded those now-useless items for small bundles of khat. I watched other men bring gold chains and jewelry that their wives had worn—items once considered a woman’s life insurance. They exchanged the jewelry for a chewable drug that might enable them to forget their misery for one night. It was as if they believed that their only hope of ever escaping the hell of Somaliland was in a drug-induced forgetfulness that would last but a few short hours.
Only minutes passed before all the boxes had been emptied and the remainder of the crowd gradually drifted away. For me, the vivid and troubling memory of that experience has stuck in my mind for twenty years. For a brief time that afternoon in the Hargeisa market, as I watched those caravan guards nearly mobbed by desperate customers, I saw again the mask pulled back and the face of evil briefly exposed.
I realized then that the supply line for evil was better established, and a lot more efficient, than the supply line for good. And I was not at all sure that I could do anything to change that when, and if, I managed to get back to Nairobi.
Fortunately for me, the grapevine still worked very well in Africa—especially among the international community. Somehow, my European friends at the orphanage got word that a Red Cross plane was coming in the next day.
They didn’t have to tell me twice.
As thrilled as I was to be leaving Somaliland, what I wanted more than anything was to get back home to Nairobi to see Ruth and my boys. This was before the cell-phone and satellite communication revolution had reached much of Africa. I had heard nothing from my family, and they had not heard any word about me, for over three weeks.
If I had had a parachute during our descent into Nairobi, I might have exited the plane before we landed at Wilson Airport. Since I hadn’t been able to let Ruth know I was coming, I took a taxi home to surprise her.
After three weeks in the alien world of Somaliland it was surreal to be back in my world—to walk through the door of my own home, to eat a normal supper sitting at an actual table with my own family, to sleep in my own bed, to live my own familiar life again. I felt as if I had gone from hell to heaven in a single day.
What conflicted feelings! On the one hand, I was absolutely ecstatic to be with my family again. Yet I couldn’t help feeling guilty taking a bath.
I had taken hundreds of photographs wherever and whenever that had been possible. As these pictures were developed, I shared them with Ruth and the boys. I tried to recount for Ruth the details of my trip. She would ask questions in response. Eventually I remembered and added more details and told more stories. That was how I finally processed what I had experienced, felt, and hopefully learned during my mind-blowing three weeks in Somaliland.
I still wasn’t clear about what a relief organization could accomplish there. Or even where we might start. But if you had asked me for my honest assessment, I would have told you that Somaliland just might have been the neediest, most hopeless, most hellish place to be found on this earth.
I was soon to discover that I was wrong about that. Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, was even worse. And I was heading there next.