Nairobi Notebook

Sick State of Health

I went to Hargeisa's General Hospital yesterday. It is Somaliland's only referral hospital. Apart from a brand new operating theatre (built with donor aid and equipped with $500,000 worth of equipment donated by the Kuwait Red Cross - not a Somaliland shilling from the government), the hospital is a depressing, pathetic place. Old, fading blood stains still splattered the paving stones beyond the main gate, the plaster-ceiling of the paediatric ward was caving in and the mental patients just don't get any care at all. There simply isn't the man-power to give patients the care they require so they lie chained to the bed. The deep groans and strong odour make for a tragic place.

The other day I blogged about the Somaliland government budget. $30 million dollars in all last year, up to $50 million this year thanks to some foreign funding for elections that the President decided to put-back a year. The Ministry of Health receives just $750,000 from the pie. As a result, the poorest patients in one of the poorest regions of the world have to pay for their own treatment and medicine. The official term is something like "community payment" i.e the clan pays. Doctors at the hospital are paid just $65 a month. A new medical school in the nearby town of Boroma is churning out the first doctors the country has trained for decades - 16 in all last year. The British government is having to supplement their salary with an extra $435 a month to keep them not only in the country but in the public sector.

In the paediatric ward, flies swarmed all over the plates of old food brought in by relatives of patients. There was a single oxygen cylinder in the corner of the room but it didn't work. There were three children in with severe malnutrition. The skin of one starving toddler, whose glazed eyes stared vacantly, was riddled with something nasty, his feet swollen with fluid. The remedy should be simple, starting with high energy milk. Except there isn't any high-energy milk in the country. "His case shouldn't be difficult", said Dr Farhan, one of last year's medical graduates, "but we can't be sure he'll make it".

The one ray of hope for this hospital is its staff...paid peanuts but dedicated to caring for their patients.

That's it from Hargeisa. Back to Nairobi.

 

How to Spend a National Budget of $30 Million

I am told that last year that the 'Somaliland government' (we have to remember that this is not an internationally recognised state)  had a  budget of  just $30 million to play with.  More than half of this I understand would have been spent on defence and security...when you are a breakaway republic your borders need defending!

That leaves no more than $15 million for health, education, and justice...not to mention agriculture, immigration and social security...if only. No international recognition means no direct foreign budgetary assistance...quite literally zero dollars, neither direct contributions to a government pot, nor ringfenced to specific programmes. Some money does make its way through UN programmes and international aid agencies, but the numbers are miniscule relatively speaking. The frustration of Somalianders'  is understandable when you consider the money being paid to warlords in neighbouring Mogadishu - see this article written by Rob Crilly of The Times of London.

Just in case $30 million sounds a decent chunk of money, here's how far it goes elsewhere...

Saddam's Yacht - the decor aboard this floating palace - originally called Qadissivat Saddam - includes Arab the decor aboard the floating palace -originally called Qadissivat Saddam - include Arabesque  arches, dark wood carvings, deep pile carpets and loose rugs woven in Islam's holiest cities.

Carlton House, London. Price: £17 million - This new, 15,000-square-foot house on a half-acre features a 50-foot long ballroom, catering kitchen fitted out for banquets, has nine bedroom suites, all with Italian marble bathrooms. The leisure complex has a heated mosaic swimming pool, sauna, gym and a 12-person Turkish bath, and, like Thunderbirds, there is a vehicle lift that takes your car from the forecourt into the four-vehicle garage below.

And should you ever forget your swim-wear on holiday, how about this for value for money! The bikini, contains over 150 carats of flawless diamonds, some of which are the rarest in the world including a 51-carat, pear-shaped diamond, a 30-carat emerald cut, a pair of 15 carat rounds  and a pair of eight carat pear shaped stones. The stones are sent in platinum for one valuable and very tiny bikini.

To prove it is the real deal, you can see it being modeled at http://www.luxist.com/2006/02/15/the-30-million-diamond-bikini/

How To Cook A Camel

Somaliland isn't known for its haute cuisine. Ask people here what their staple foods are and they will reply rice and spaghetti. The days of a meat and milk diet are drawing to end as pastoralists succumb to export bans, land rights and of course, climate change.

However, if there is a speciality dish, then it is camel. They say you can judge a restaurant by its kitchen. In which case the omens were not good for my lunch-stop this afternoon. The wooden work-surface was covered with innards, off-cuts and slop from the huge vat of camel, onion and tomato that simmered away on a  charcoal-burner below. Flies swarmed over hunks of meat  and piles of the sour tasting njera laid out on the side  ready to be thrust through the hatch.

The recipe is simple: grill the meat over coals for ten minutes then add to the simmering cauldron of mucky water and vegetables. Eat with soggy njera.

But I was brought up to try eveything once and for a meat-lover the camel meat was more than palatable. A little like mutton perhaps, nice and tender. Not quite so easy to stomach was the  'soup' with its layer of fatty globules on the surface. I drew the line at a slab of fat from between the brain and skull.

My stomach survived the experience and it got me thinking there's probably a book-load of camel recipes out there. I've had a quick scan...here's the pick of the bunch.

1 medium camel
4 lambs
20 chickens (roasted)
150 eggs (boiled)
40 kilos tomatoes
Salt and seasonings

Stuff eggs into tomatoes, stuff tomatoes into chickens, stuff chickens into lambs, stuff lambs into camel. Roast until tender

This though leaves the cook asking several questions:

- Just how big is a medium camel?

- How exactly do you stuff 2 kilos of tomatoes in a single chicken and five chickens in a lamb?

- Are we talking oven roast (how?!) or spit roast? And how many minutes per pound?

Any other recipes out there, send them my way...

Khat Dependency

It is bitter, requires hours of dedicated chewing and leaves less food on the kids' dinner plates, but khat is the love of nearly every man throughout the Horn of Africa, Somaliland included. The reality is that it is less of a love and more of an addiction. Chewing khat provides an amphetamine like high. It's the Prozac of this part of the world. Of course that's not how it is seen in Hargeisa where alcohol is abhorred and hard drugs are non-existent. No, here the men here will try and tell you it is an integral part of life.

Every day at 10am the trucks arrive from Ethiopia where khat is a lucrative cash-crops for farmers living in a country where aid agencies say millions of children are at risk from famine this year. The money involved is phenomenal. It's thought - hard figures are hard to come by - that Somalialand's men spend some $300,000 a day on khat. Given this is one of the most impoverished regions in the world it's hard to work out where the cash comes from. There simply isn't $2,000,000 in weekly lose cash floating around here.

For men, the day revolves around chewing. Government ministries empty at 1pm sharp, so to do private businesses and cafes. The working day is effectively over. Aid workers joke that politicians are at their most productive whilst chewing...this is when the real negotiations take place. For the unemployed khat is a means to escape the drudgery of life and chew their way to an over-stimulated oblivion.

For women khat is the greatest curse and one of the main reasons their husbands don't bother seeking work. Their husbands pathetically argue they chew becasue they have no jobs. It's a convenient excuse that leaves many wives simmering with anger and contempt for their husbands. But they have few alternatives other than to work fifteen hours a day to support the family.

Some scientists say there is a link to impotence - could be the best antidote for polygamy!

Mutual Respect

The call to prayer in Hargeisa leads to a mass exodus from the city's cafes, places of work and the market. Nothing remarkable there, but what is incredible is the law and order that prevails in the eerily empty city centre. Nobody feels the need to lock up their wares. The currency exchangers who I wrote about the other day leave their thick wodges of Somaliland Shillings piled high on their tables (admittedly any dollars and euro are most likely under lock and key), market vendors leave their stalls unattended while cafe owners leave their kitchens wide open. In Nairobi, in fact any other city I have ever travelled to, bricks of cash worth hundreds of dollars left unwatched would disappear in seconds. And in Hargeisa we are talking about a city where perhaps as many as 90% of men are unemployed, destitute and need of cash to buy the next bundle of khat.

Why on earth doesn't someone run and grab? People can explain the sins of theft and quote from the koran until they are blue in the face, I still don't understand why desperate people here don't steal.

More than anything else it is I admit rather a sorry indictment of western values and morals that I consider this display of mutual respect for one's property so remarkable.

Passport to Nowhere

One intriguing, unusual problem that citizens of the breakaway republic of Somaliland face is which passport to carry. Under the Somaliland constitution they are required to travel on a Somaliland passport. But there is a snag: the international community has for the last 17 years refused to recognise Somaliland as an independent, sovereign State. In the eyes of international law this isolated, impoverished, yet relatively stable region of the Horn of Africa remains a part of Somalia. Present a Somaliland passport to any immigration officer and he will send you back in the direction you arrived.

I am told this is exactly what happened to President Dahir Rayale Kahin in the United States a couple of years back.

The other option is to hold a Somali passport. This however is illegal under Somaliland law. But a Somali passport is desperately easy to get hold of. At various roadside junctions in central Hargeisa currency vendors sit at battered metal containers piled high with brick-size wedges of Somaliland shillings, US dollars and Euros. Wedged into these stacks of cash are Somali passports.   

“We sell these passports because our government is not recognised, so if we want to do business outside Somaliland we have to use this document”, 26 year old Hussein told me flicking through the front pages of a pristine Somali passport. Adding ones details is no sweat – simply glue a photo over the box that says ‘picture’ and fill in your details by hand. A minister’s signature is required from Mogadishu – if indeed there is a Minister of Immigration -but that is easily circumvented.

“We just forge the signature”, Hussein said nonchalantly.
 
“And the Somaliland officials turn a blind eye?” I asked. “Of course they do”, smiled Hussein, “They have to travel on these passports too”.

So, should you want one, for $42 a Somali passport is yours on the streets of Hargeisa

Rain from the South

Today I took a crash course in rain forecasting from 65 year old Muhumed Qalinle Aare. Aare lives in the village of Laaya deep in the Somaliland bush. His people are pastoralists and depend on his predictions.

Rain forecasting is a developed art among nomadic herders in the Horn and East Africa. Its origins, I am told, lie in a combination of Persian and African astronomy.I am not sure if I really got to grips with the subject but here is my understanding of how it is done. The first clue lies in the day of the week New Year, Nayruus, falls on. This year it was a Tuesday...not a good omen. For those with even the most basic grasp of science, this seems far from convincing. But then it gets more complicated.

In each month of the year there is a period of seven days when a certain set of stars should be aligned. Where exactly in the month these seven days fall is determined by the positioning of another star. In western Somaliland the first rains of the year are expected in late March. So, if in January the stars are aligned during the said period of seven days the March rains can be expected on time. Single men are advised to go forth and find a wife as it is set to be a bountiful year! If the stars are not aligned then alarm bells ring. If the same stars are aligned during February's seven day period and the wind is blowing from the south (Ithink!) then it is panic over. If not, then the rains are set fail...as is happening this year. Capiche.

Clearly there is more to the art than that. After all it takes years to acquire "the knowledge" to read the skies. The rest I fear was lost in translation. Aare can't say for now if and when the rains will arrive. After all they are "very disturbed" this year. But looking at this chart (above) produced by the Famine Early Warning Network, Aare's predictions at the start of the year are proving accurate. Just 10-50 percent of the expected rainfall has fallen over Somaliland in the last two months.

I asked Aare whether global warming is making it harder to predict weather patterns. Surely, in this day and age of green house gases and climate change the calculations that his great-grandfather applied no longer work. Aare quickly raised a finger. "Man is too weak to alter the skies. Only Allah has the power".

Shame. Religion trumps science and for me the mystery of rain forecasting unravells.

Hargeisa: Brief History

Egal International Airport - little more than a pot-holed asphalt airstrip on the outskirts of Hargeisa - looks architecturally like a post-war British airfield. Walk through into the "arrivals lounge" and there hanging on the wall is a bronze plaque declaring that "This building was opened by HRH Duke of Gloucester in 1958" - just two years before Somaliland became the third African country to  gain independence from the British. It was for a few days an independent state before forming a union with neighbouring Somalia, a former Italian colony...a move Somaliland has since regretted and, it the mind of its people reversed, but which the international community seems hell bent on continuing to enforce.

Thick clouds of cigarette smoke and loud, animated conversation filled the immigration hall. Waiting for me with a grin that exposed his three gold-plated front teeth was Yassin, better known as Yankee Kilo in Hargeisa circles. He grabbed my passport, ordered me to sit and duly returned five minutes later with the visa. Normally on this continent a country with few visitors charges top dollar for a visa. Not Somaliland, though, which demands an almost apologetic $20. From there I was shown towards a Toyota Landcruiser and onto Hargeisa's roads that don't appear to have seen a new layer of bitumen since the civil war.

The city of Hargeisa was razed to the ground during the late 1980s as Somali forces loyal to the military dictator Siad Barre repressed Somaliland's bid for renewed independence. 95 percent of Hargeisa's  population fled across  neighbouring  borders. They could only return in 1991 when Barre was toppled and Somalia began its descent into state-collapse.

Hargeisa needed re-building from scratch. The West turned its back on Somaliland, which turned to the diaspora for help. Many of the people on board my Ethiopian Airlines flight had connected through Addis Ababa from the US. "For a family to survive you have to have a family member abroad" my neighbour Abib told me. He set up the first remittance agency in the US for Somalilanders and  said the diaspora in the states sends home some $7 million a month.

Hargeisa is now bustling city of one million people, or at least it is in the mornings and evenings. In the afternoon it is like a ghost-town. Empty. All the men are inside chewing Khat, a mild natural stimulant...but I'll save khat and the colour of Hargeisa for another day and leave today's post as a brief history to the city.  

Hargeisa Bound

For much of the last week I have, I admit, been a little overzealous in my eagerness to take a bunny-hop tour of Somalia en route to Somaliland. What good fun to set down on Mogadishu tarmac for a few hours! This prospect did become somewhat less appealing with the news a couple of days ago that Islamic insurgents had lobbed mortars onto the airfield as the Somalia's President set off for "peace talks" in neighbouring Djibouti. Still, I wanted to see the coral waters and  white sand beaches  that fringe Somalia's ruined capital...not to mention a glimpse of the city itself.

But I must have been looking for an excuse to avoid the cattle-truck ride that "Daallo - The Pride of the Horn of Africa" provides. Safe(ish) by all accounts, but one hell of an unpleasant experience according to most. So the prospect of 24 hours, then 36 hours in Djibouti on my return (and it's a logical question to ask how Djibouti can be considered on the way back when it is north and Nairobi is south) was enough to persuade me to pull out a couple of extra hundred dollar bills.

So instead of a stomach churning cork-screw descent into Mog and a hot sweaty layover in Djibouti I will be enjoying the legacy of Italy's brutal occupation of Ethiopia, munching on pizza and enjoying a really good macchiato on the streets of Addis Ababa.

Right now I am watching a bunch of red-neck US marines unload a US Airforce Hercules...hard to make out what is coming out of the hold, except one burly chap has just walked out with a collection of toilet brushes. Sure they sold those in Nakumatt last time I looked!