Filip Skrońc
Six dollars from death
2015
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45 min.
The masked militiamen appear at noon. The inhabitants of the village are sitting in the shade of their houses. Nobody is prepared for it. Nobody even tries to escape. There’s no time for it and no way to. They will all be subjected to a summary examination.
The question is simple: Muslim or Christian?
The first must answer a few questions on their knowledge of the Koran. The latter are the target, and have the Koran thrust in their face. More exactly, they are beaten with the Koran. The book strikes the right cheek with a slap.
“You may live if you convert to Islam” hear all those who chose Jesus.
Men with masked faces and rifles slung across their backs enter the Myre household. They offer them the same as the other Christians. Islam means life.
In Ethiopia they say a man whose first born is a son has been rewarded for his good deeds. The son is his joy and his future. Marti’s father looks him in the eyes and delicately shakes his head three times: right, left and right again. Silence.
Marti Myre is 19 years old and must decide for his entire family.
Out come the secateur. Heavy, old and blunt. This is probably why the bones in the fingers don’t snap immediately.
Marti loses part of his ring finger.
The question about converting is repeated many times. Marti’s answer, as well.
Question. Answer. Snip off the middle finger. Question, Answer. A rifle butt in the face. Question. Answer. The rifle butt smashes a nose. When the questions end, the shooting begins.
The whole family is stood up against the wall. The burst of fire moves from their feet towards their heads. Marti is hit three times near the right knee, once in the stomach (the bullet enters on the left side and exits through the back) and once on the left side of the skull. Silence falls, though the shooting continues.
Marti’s family falls to the ground, his three younger sisters, mother, grandma, father and two uncles who were helping harvest the coffee that day. Marti drops too. He tries to play dead, but it’s not easy, when someone kicks you with an army boot in the Adam’s apple. He must know his victim is pretending. Suddenly, the assailant stops. He grants Marti this scrap of life.
Lethargy
On the eastern borders of Ethiopia, two wars are running in parallel – one civil, one holy.
The first has been ongoing since the overthrow of the Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
The second has continued since the end of 2006, and is being waged against Ethiopian Christians. As a result of Ethiopia’s intervention, the Islamic Courts Union lost power in Somalia. The Islamists, united in several organisations, begin engaging in partisan warfare.
One of those organisations is Al-Shabaab, which is trying to seize power, introduce sharia law and establish a caliphate. It’s estimated that the organisation consists of around nine thousand combatants arranged in several hundred divisions. It is one of these that has just taken Marti’s family from him.
The neighbours live too far away to help, but close enough to hear the shots. When things calm down, they call for help, though they have no idea if there’s anyone to help. Apart from Marti, only his father survives the attack.
Both are lying unconscious when another set of men with rifles pull up outside their house. Instead of a scarf covering their faces, these are wearing blue helmets and armbands that stand out strongly against the dark camouflage of their uniforms. Their rolled up sleeves are adorned with large badges – the Ethiopian flag on the left and the UN crest on the right shoulder. They carry Marti and his father to a field hospital, where the doctors fight to save their lives. The first gets countless stitches, the second has to have his leg amputated.
The cries, howls and shots mix in Marti’s head, like the blood seeping into the flooring of his family home. He remembers little. He can’t quite work out why he sees the canvas of a tent before him, instead of a plastered ceiling. He can’t move. He hears from his father that the UN troops have taken them to Kenya. If he had said they were in Dadaab, his son wouldn’t have understood what he was talking about. He’s never heard of such a place.
The camp, which has been operating since 1991 is actually a well-functioning town. It is divided into a centre and outlying areas. There is a market place, essential services, bars, concert halls, hairdressers, schools, hospitals and brothels. Children are born, the old are buried, lethargy rules.
The Kenyan village of Dabaad is, in fact, surrounded by three camps: Ifo Dagahaley, Hagadera and Kambios. It’s the largest concentration of refugees in the world, though nobody can say precisely how many people are living there. It’s estimated to be over half a million people, but every day a thousand or more show up at its gates. They are mainly people fleeing the civil war in Somalia, but also include citizens of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti or South Sudan.
Most arrive on foot. Thirty days in any old footwear across the dry Kenyan earth is the average speed. A dishonest smuggler, too small a bribe at the border, the sickness or death of a child can all make the trip last a month longer.
Eventually, though, they reach the camp. As a new resident of Dadaab you receive nothing. A water gourd, a tent, food, clothing, electricity – you have to arrange all these things yourself. You have no idea who to arrange it with, officially or unofficially. You have to fight, beg, scrap like a dog for everything. You’re nothing. Who cares if you’re alive? Everyone’s alive.
II. Escape
2009 begins with a whisper. Marti has been in the camp for a year and eight months now. The wounds have healed and now the days repeat.
In the evenings, he speaks with his father. They speak quietly, so as not to awaken their cohabitants and betray their plans. Father sits in a wheelchair and weeps. He says he’s helpless. He’s sorry he can’t help. He says he doesn’t have enough money for them to lead a normal life and asks only one thing: to escape today!
The dollars they get in the camp have a different colour. The banknotes are creamy and the writing on them in black, though the design is the same as on a American dollar. In the camp, you can buy rice, tobacco or shoes with them, but beyond that, they are worthless. That night, father pressed a hundred and thirty dollars into his son’s hands. The green, American, valuable ones. Then they talked for a few hours more. There’s no need to write that they cried like never before.
That same day, thousands of miles from that camp tent, Barack Obama is sworn in as president of the United States. In front of the U.S. Capitol, Barack Hussein Obama places his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. He asks for God to help him.
As Marti walks through the desert, Kenya erupts in joy. Journalists from across the whole world are drawn to Kogelo, where Barack’s father was born. Everybody wants to talk to the new president’s step-grandmother and ask the inhabitants about their hopes connected with his election. In photos and on film you can see happy people, dancing, singing and carrying a cardboard cutout of Obama in their arms. “If he only remembers his roots, he will do a lot of good for Africa,” shouts a man button-holed by a journalist for British television.
At dawn, Marti hitches a ride on a car. Half-frozen he jumps on the back, where there are already three other boys. Every so often, more jump on. Some are only travelling to the next village. The rest, like Marti, are journeying to Nairobi. There, for the first time in his life, he sees city lights, skyscrapers and wide streets.
III. Wounds
Refugees’ stories are not always true and some can’t be true. Your life story is changed because an altered past gives you better chances for the future. The truth is often unsuitable. The truth often leads to jail, deportation or the grave.
Nobody trusts refugees. Journalists don’t trust them, nor do officials, customs officers, police officers or ordinary people. Anyway, whenever they come into contact with refugees, they listen to their tales with a slight touch of incredulity. Their eyes flutter, their eyebrows raise, they query them. The migrants themselves frequently admit they live in a world of lies. They have to lie and be cautious about who knows what about them. With each new lie they become more confused about their own truth.
I fall into the same trap much later as I listen to Marti and a red light comes on in the back of my mind. I ask him captious questions – about details, dates, and after a few sentences, I ask him to repeat what he said before.
But in front of me I have the hand missing two fingers. A shiver runs down my spine. It’s hot but I have shivers and goosebumps. No, it’s not malaria. It’s shame.
Marti could be lying. He could be making his story up. Even if, as he maintains, he can’t read, somebody could have told him all this, and he’s just repeating it to me. It’s true. It could be like that. He might also have read some books about Africa’s most recent history, watched some programmes about Al-Shabaab and learned about the problems of being an urban refugee. Yes, it could be like that. But he couldn’t think up those chopped off fingers and the scars that cover his body.
I look at them closely. The missing skin on his thin lips (rifle butt). The bent nose (rifle butt). The scar above his brow (rifle butt). The clearly missing skin on his skull (the bullet). The yellowed eyeballs and wandering gaze (lack of vitamins).
Marti takes off his off-white shirt. Only now do I see how skinny he is. He looks at his own body with fright. He eats practically nothing. An orange can feed him for a whole day. The water he drinks would do to wash cars, but not for drinking. Marti says the water from the ocean is often cleaner. He knows what he’s saying. He sometimes used to moisten his lips in its waters.
On top of all this, there are cuts, as if from a razor. Fresh wounds from mosquito bites. I see a long scar on his dark brown skin. Carelessly stitched, it stretches along his entire right flank. Just behind it, I see a hole in his back. Marti rolls his trouser leg up and shows his wounded leg. The boy limps slightly. It seems to be from the gunshot wounds. Then Marti takes off his shoes. He has almost no toenails, and the soles of his feet look like a volcanic flow. The holes, scars and grazes compose a macabre whole. The result of too-small shoes and a trek through the bush barefoot.
Marti’s body is for me confirmation of everything he says. And also of the fact that in the Mozambique bush he got six dollars from death.In Conclusion
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IV. Hope
The city soon spits Marti out. He ends up in the slums. The damp, sweaty and filthy slums. The slums, reeking of decay. There he sees rape, murder and children hooked on cheap narcotics.
There, he meets another Ethiopian named Mulu. Both want to escape from Kenya, but they have no idea where to go to. But, another Ethiopian, who they meet in the city centre, has an idea. Lire tells them about the collapse of apartheid and the route from Kenya to South Africa, which he’s already taken three times. Mulu and Marti don’t ask why he didn’t stay there for good. It isn’t the most important thing at the moment.
Marti is glad that soon he will begin to live normally – he’ll get a job, start a family and send for his father. The four thousand miles he now has to cross is no obstacle.
He crosses the border with Tanzania on foot. Going further along Lake Tanganyika and its waters, they make it into Zambia. From Zambia to Zimbabwe again by water. There it’s the hardest, because to avoid being spotted by border guards, they have to go through water tunnels. They are treacherous, because you have no idea where it’s shallow and where it’s deep. Some walk, or rather crawl, along tree branches. They hold onto them so tight, their entire bodies are sliced up as if somebody had cut them with a razor. They cross the border with South Africa by going through Hwange national park, where they twice have to flee from lions.
The first stop in South Africa is Durban, where it’s apparently much easier to find work. There they meet Ismail Bai, an older man who runs a fish restaurant out of his home. The three of them work there for two months. They chop, gut, clean and prepare fish in all manner of ways. They rent a flat together and share everything. When one of them is short of rice, he borrows it from his friends.
In June 2010 the football World Cup begins. The championships are being played for the first time on the African continent, and South Africa is to be visited by 700,000 tourists. So Mulu and Lire decide to go to Johannesburg with the money they’ve earned and with great hopes.
Marti decides to stay, and moves into Bai’s house. His daughters (eleven and seven years old) adore the young Ethiopian. When he returns from work they jump all over him, ask him to throw them up in the air, or to read them bedtime stories. Ismail’s teenage son asks Marti about sex and meeting with girls.
Marti works and lives with Ismail for another five months. During this time, the restaurant owner helps him get the documents he needs to be granted permanent residence and work legally in Jozi, as the largest city in South Africa is usually called. Thanks to this, he begins working on 8th Avenue, the main street of Johannesburg with no major difficulties.
He works as a street trader. He sells Chinese clothing, sunglasses, super glue, tea, cigarettes or whatever he can get his hands on. He once again rents accommodation with some Ethiopians he met in the streets. Once again, the belief returns that in a short time this will all be over. He’ll be reunited with his father.
Almost three years pass in this way. Things are going well, if not great.
Then some local officials show up. They explain that the regulations have changed. Among them is a man whose name Marti will remember for the rest of his life – Tabi Fannirden. He tells the traders that to work on the streets, they will have tp pay a monthly fee of a hundred and fifty dollars.
Marti pays it for the first two months. In the third, he tells Fannirden to fuck off. He then threatens him with deportation to Ethiopia. In the context of Marti’s life and the miles that separate him from his home town, deportation sounds more like the promise of a return home. As he is taken to the police station, hope burns once again inside Marti.
But instead of a plane to Addis Ababa, there is a holding cell, then a train to Zimbabwe and a bus to Mozambique. A bus which stops in the middle of the bush.
Seven men are pulled by force from the vehicle. They stand in the middle of nowhere, and the men escorting them from South Africa draw their weapons. They say they have two options.
The first is to exchange their documents for six dollars and flee. Despite the fact that they know too well what the other option is, the moment of decision lasts an eternity.
Marti feels what he felt the last time he stood with his family. He knows he could die in a moment. He’d heard about such executions in the bush or the desert. He pulls his resident card from his pocket, takes the six dollars and runs. The others run behind him. Bullets fly into the air.
V. A Gift
The Chinese sandals bought in Durban can’t cope with the sharp stones, tree roots and thorny bushes that shed their leaves. He reaches the border with Zambia practically barefoot.
Several months later, he meets Massoud, who travels across Africa with strange products under his tarp. Massoud pays a bribe whenever he’s stopped, so no policeman has reason to thoroughly search the truck. Marti travels on the roof from Zambia to the capital of Tanzania. According to Massoud, there you can slowly start all over again.
In September 2013, Marti discovers though, that in Dar es Salaam, too, nothing can be done without cash and documents. He finds himself on the street once again. He sleeps far from the city alongside homeless dogs. He sleeps on a sheet of cardboard, turning his jeans and shirt inside out. The dirt on them slowly seeps through to the “daytime” side. At night he tries to avoid the biting mosquitoes, during the day he does the same with immigration officers.
I spot Marti on Morogro Road, which leads to the port.
He shouts to me as I cross the street in a prohibited place. He is walking toward me from my right, the same side the cars are coming from, so he laughs that they will hit him before they get to me. I ask if he knows how to get to the hospital on Ocean Road.
He doesn’t. He stops someone and asks in Swahili about how to get there. It turns out that the name of the street was changed a year ago to Barack Obama Drive.
“I’ve only been in Dar for a year,” he explains. “I come from Ethiopia, but to explain how I got here, I would have to take up the rest of your day. And it would make you sad, because it’s not a happy story.”
I give Marti the rest of the day.
He speaks fluent English. He utters words in other languages that sound to me like unfamiliar instruments. I cannot repeat these sounds even after several attempts. I ask him to tell me his story once more. Then, I write it all down, leaning up against the wall of a ramshackle building. Marti speaks into my right ear, in the left I hear the ocean waves. I hear in stereo the call to prayer of the muezzin at a nearby mosque.
As he repeats the tale of the Chinese sandals, his eyes spy mine. He says that if he’d had a pair like these in the bush, he wouldn’t have got so many injuries on the soles of his feet. I try to explain that they’re really not all that good, but I know I’m being stupid and soon admit that Marti is right.
I close my notebook and ask once again about his father. It’s a lead in to asking him how much money he would need to meet him again. This isn’t purely a matter of empathy, or trusting Marti’s story. It’s also due to the fact that throughout eight of conversation hours he hasn’t even asked once if I could give him a single dollar.
Marti says that for ten thousand Tanzanian shillings (less than five dollars) he could travel to Tanga, where he could hitch a ride on a fishing boat and sail to Kenya. There, he would be legal again, because his documents are in Dadaab. More importantly, his father is there, who he hasn’t seen in six years. When I say I’ll give him the money, he begins to cry.
“Tell me you’re not joking!”, he shouts, hugging me with all his strength. “I can’t believe this is happening!”
“I’ve never ever given a stranger money, so I ask you, please travel with it to Dadaab.”
“As God is my witness, I shall get on the bus today!”
VI. Farewell
Before we part, I invite Marti to supper. We enter an empty restaurant run by Hindus. Marti chooses the cheapest item on the menu, a plate of chips with a fried egg. I ask for the same and order two bottles of water. Cold, sweet, bottled.
We wash our hands in the rear. My soap turns into suds, Marti’s soap turns a dull colour. Marti’s hands are so dirty that it takes him a while to clean the edges of the cracked hand basin. A while later, I watch how he struggles eating. He sweats, pauses, closes his eyes, and tries to drink some water. He lifts his shirt and shows his swollen stomach. He eats some shredded cabbage, maybe seven chips and three quarters of the egg. I wolf down a similar portion. I pay the bill and immediately give Marti the cash for the ticket and a little more for emergencies.
At a quarter past eight, the last bus of the day leaves for Tanga. We have less than half an hour to get to the bus station. On the way, he buys more water for the journey and biscuits. I take a quick photo of Marti standing against a blue container. It ends up being a dozen polaroids.
“Filip, can I take one of you and take it with me to Dadaab?”, he asks a few minutes before he gets on the bus.
The flash once again lights up the gloom. We slap one another on the back, shake our sweaty hands. Marti climbs aboard the bus and I return to the hotel.
I fall into bed in my dirty clothes. I lie there and wonder what time he will be in Tanga. A moment before parting, full of optimism, he calculated that he should be in Dadaab in four days. After years of separation, he will hug his father again.
I can’t sleep, so I grab The Dream of Life: An African Odyssey by Klaus Brinkbäumer, which I read for the first time in a humid room in Tangiers. I read it in bursts and always learned something about Africa and its inhabitants. Now I come across this sentence: “First firearms arrived, then Christian and Muslim missionaries, and then slavery ensued.”
Epilogue
Marti’s father is certainly in Dadaab. It’s not clear though if he’s alive or not.
It would be difficult for him to leave the camp. Stuck in his wheelchair, there’s no way he could get through the desert like his son.
You can leave the camp and travel a distance of about four miles. To go any further, you need the permission of UNHCR workers, who are swamped by requests of this type. There’s little or no hope of emigrating to Europe or North American. This was an option available only to the first wave of Somali emigrants. If a person doesn’t decide on escape, they’ll probably never leave Dadaab.
Unless Dadaab leaves Kenya.
On April 11, 2015, the Deputy President of Kenya, William Ruto, demanded the UN move the largest refugee camp in the world. This was a response to the attack on the university campus in Garissa, in which Al-Shabaab combatants killed 148 people. Ruto gave the United Nations three months and stressed that after this time, Kenya would deal with the problem itself. According to him, the massacre at the university was for his country what September 11 was for the United States.
The date given ties in with the June visit of Barack Obama to Kenya. It is his first visit to his father’s homeland since becoming president of the USA. During this time, the homeless children, traffic jams and rubbish vanish from the streets of Nairobi. Flowers are planted along the route of the cavalcade, and small-time traders import from China mugs, shirts, flags and pictures bearing images of this Son of Africa. So Obama refers to himself during his speech at the Kasarani stadium in Nairobi.
During other appearances he refers many times to the problem of terrorism. He promises financial support for the Kenyan security services and their efforts to curb the activities of Al-Shabaab, but passes over the topic of the future of the Somalian refugees living in Kenya and in the Dadaab camp itself.
Where is Marti right now?
Dar es Salaam, 2015
