Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [111]
As we sit there, eating and talking with the family, a wave of tranquility washes over me. For a moment, I feel a second flash of pure happiness, to be outside on a cool, starry night, with warmhearted friends, and eating simple food. I could sit there for hours.
Travel is always like this, I remind myself. Uneven, with stretches of loneliness and anxiety followed by unparalleled moments of bliss and discovery. In the droughts, I have to learn to trust that the joy will come.
FIFTEEN
the artificial man
Six months into my tenure, the paper is on a regular schedule, I’m sleeping more, and I’ve started to do some of my own reporting. Most significant is a whirlwind trip to the Kharaz refugee camp, home to some ten thousand refugees, mostly Somali. I go with officials from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. We fly to Riyan in the South and drive west along the coast to Shabwa and the Maifa’a Reception Center, where the Somalis who wash up on Yemen’s shores are processed—if they survive the journey. My cleaning woman Aisha probably landed here.
It’s much hotter than in Sana’a, and our driver blasts the air-conditioning. Red cliffs that remind me of the Grand Canyon rise on our right. To our left, the sea is dotted with colorful fishing boats. I’m squished in the backseat next to a Yemeni UNHCR official and Amal, a tiny woman reporter for the Yemen Times.
No matter where they come ashore, Somalis either find their way to the Maifa’a Reception Center, or villagers who see the refugees on the beach alert UNHCR, which sends transport, says Aouad Baobaid, a field specialist who travels with us.
“When we can’t get to people—we can’t find everyone—the villagers take care of them,” he says. “They feed them and put them up for the night, women with women, and men with men. They even bury the dead.”
There are plenty of dead. In 2006, UNHCR reported that some twenty-seven thousand people made the perilous voyage, with three hundred and thirty dying on the way and another three hundred still missing.
Maifa’a, a cluster of whitewashed cinder-block shelters baking in the southern sun, was established in 1996 to register the refugees. They are asked when they left Somalia, how their journey was, why they fled, and where they arrived. We wander around, asking questions, examining food stores, and interviewing workers. Afterward, we visit several other spots along the coast where refugees often wash ashore.
In the morning, we fly to Aden and drive two and a half hours inland to the camp. Kharaz sprawls on an isolated expanse of steaming-hot desert, many miles from towns, roads, water, and work. It was the only land on offer, say the UNHCR officials leading us around. There are no walls around the vast complex of look-alike cinder-block shelters mingled with a cluster of tents for new arrivals, and refugees come and go as they wish.
Only about 5 percent of refugees stay at the camp. The rest head for urban areas, where they hope to find jobs washing cars, cleaning houses, or doing other sorts of menial labor. The lives of camp refugees consist primarily of waiting—waiting for Somalia to calm down enough so that they can return, waiting for job opportunities, waiting for better food, better shelter, better health care, waiting for something miraculous to lift them out of their misery.
For this reason, any visitor to the camp is instantly surrounded by scores of anxious Somalis who hope that this person is the miracle they have awaited, that help has arrived at last. Many carry handwritten or mimeographed letters that they press into the hands of visitors. Most are addressed to the UNHCR and request all manner of aid.
A woman named Asli Abdullahi Hasson hands me a letter describing the bombing of her home in 1991, the death of her relatives, and her flight from Somalia. On her way to Yemen, men “tried to rape [her] in front of [her] husband,” she writes. “He defended me unfortunately