Ifo 2
Words and Images by Ryan Youngblood
’We will die here like animals’, she could only hear herself think as a mirage of something ‘worse’ was being left for something ‘better’. Yet the chalk white of Mogadishu, its buildings with peppered memories of bullets and mortars, old Hilux’s with sawed off cabs to serve the mounted .50’s, Al-Shabaab’s shadow, the crammed IDPs, and the sound of the ocean, at this moment felt better than a dying desert. Her feet moved west upon an earth that was a bleached dream, as the famine dried everything to a snowy white bone.
The Somali horizon was cruel and it cast a McCarthyan narrative of death; cattle and camel carcass lined the roads like palm leaves for her arrival. The sun followed her and her children each mile past fellow exodus’ of cotton swabbed mouths of thirst and emptying hunger; bands of hyenas trailing the shadows of their corpses; the thick toothed devils creeping along the ground like 4 hoofed vultures. In the white out of noon she came upon a decayed cow. It found no pleasure in a distorted posture, horizontal to the grey as if excavated in an archeological dig, powdered with dust and partially complete in its frame, it was fossilized into a brief moment of tragic history and ready for death’s final step to erase its existence into the wind. Out of the bright shadowless nothing, birds arrived. They were bandits of the dead and the most alive thing she had seen. They were cautious, bouncing with prudence and making no footprint with their weightless and wirey legs. Could they have seen the walking dead before, as if somehow waiting for the cow to rear up, while cartilage and particles fell to the floor, and he, throwing his head in absolute exhaustion at the provoking fowl. Their feathers were faint and pail and the birds nearly invisible against the ashen ground. Their forked claws suddenly paused and their bodies cowered in humble fear. A bird not like the others moved towards the pile of rot. His eyes were fixed and his colors violent, so bright and deep that it could be mistaken for hope. His presence was unsettling and he was impervious to the plague. He seemed to come from another world. With a coat of dyed royal shade he floated inside the fluorescent decay and he wasn’t afraid. Like a sunken ship, the grey birds moved in and out of the cadaver searching for remains. With sharp beaks they picked apart dried flesh and bone, giving way to the colored stranger. Yet he wanted nothing at all. No shard of bone for his nest nor morsel of tissue for his hunger. He had no home, neither an appetite. He came from his world only to rapture in the decay of the bleached dream of this one. She felt connected to the moment, and it disturbed her.
The horizon in all directions became orange. The sand and the heat danced creating an endless desert. Mogadishu could not be home anymore and maybe it never would be again. 2011 brought continued pressure into the city with an escalation of fighting. The mother and many other Somalis were caught in between the war with Al-Shabaab and African Union troops. The conflict was a pressure cooker of violence and it continued to fracture an already unstable country. In brutal irony, or in anguished response, the earth waged war with itself, the rain and the sun fighting each other, the sun winning and taking everything given by the rain. The drought swept across Somalia and into neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. Soon it would create the largest refugee camp in the world, Dadaab. The lack of rainfall wringed out the earth and nothing grew. Then the worst food shortage seen in the past 60 years had come to effect millions.
Dadaab refugee camp was like a city, broken into five camps, or what felt to be counties, Dagahaley, Hagadera, Ifo, Ifo II and Kambioos. Some eventually were closed and people resettled; what were to be political moves from a growing tension between the complicated border relationship between Somalia and Kenya. Dadaab was primarily dwelled by Somalis, however other African nations could be found represented throughout the camps. Dadaab looks and feels like the wild American west. The sand streets are just wide enough for camel herders and NGO vehicles. Store front establishments seemed almost out of an amusement park, tall and thin plywood with grand and colorful signs arched or etched across. Boys riding carts carried by donkeys brought jerry cans of water back to their families. There are makeshift bus stations, police stations, and kiosques to buy cell phone airtime. Side streets snake between the main roads and flush back out into the desert expanse. Rags and tarps act as roofs as they get supported by sticks. Inside the tent gives shade, yet only mild relief from the sun. Children are everywhere and are occasionally caked in dirt from the prevailing winds. They’re happy, as their parents carry the burden of memory. Schools remain in session and people still seek employment. There’s a currency in refugee camps, and the symbol of money, the idea of exchange for goods, gives life and meaning to a temporary civilization. And although the camp is governed, the security of its borders remain a veneer. Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group in East Africa with the most agency and network, hide active members as refugees within the camp, posing threats to other Dadaab inhabitants and the NGO staff working behind the wire.
The mother, in near delirium, entered Ifo 2 with her children. She found them in their eyes, somewhere far back or maybe nowhere at all, and said that this was now their home. She was greeted by a UNHCR worker with a dangling badge around his neck as he processed her into the next life. It was like arriving at the gates of heaven, greeted by an angel of God, kind with a smile and surrounded by barbed wire. Her heavy brows weighed over her eyes and any gesture of compliance was more of a yield to her exhaustion. Like tagged sheep they were moved into an enclosed hangar and awaited rations. A sea of colorful hijabs and koofiyads stood under the giant structure waiting for a kilo of sugar and salt. The enclosure seemed to clamp each time a new refugee entered from the back and patience became lost. The grated building appeared to be on fire, allegorical flames roaring from the ground as plumes of dust escaped between the holes in the hangar, people stretching their arms through and screaming, palms gripping over faces as each person fought forward. The invisible flames flew to the ceiling as a whistle blew. She felt like they were a herd of cattle being moved from pen to pen, with a cloud of white ash encircling them from the shuffling feet. The mother felt hands push into her back and her sides as she ran to keep up. The crowd was yelling through the kicked up dust as security attempted to keep everyone in line. She finally found her way into the designated corridor where people were waiting to dump flour into her sack. The chaos was over and she thought to herself, ‘We will die here like animals.’
The mother, again in the continued cruel odyssey, guided her children to their tent. The ground was hard. Barren shrubs upon a perfectly flat earth were her garden. Other children were playing outside on the outer ring of a sandstorm’s shadow. She found her children in their eyes, far back and they were there, and she said, “Go play”. It was going to be dark in a few hours and she needed to start preparing food. She walked into her tent and rested their straw sacks. A forgotten collection of cards fell onto her mat. In Mogadishu she used to sell old postcards to the AU troops and the few foreign aid workers present. They were photos from the 1970’s of Somalia. Women were uncovered with beautiful and curly, caramel colored hair. The men smiled barefoot wearing macawis and holding guitars. Mogadishu was a thriving hub of European tourists and classic Italian cars. It was a paradise. She took a breath, looked through a hole in the roof of her tent, and prayed for rain.
Behind the Project
Commissioned in 2011 to cover the famine in the Horn of Africa, a time when Eastern Kenyan IDP’s and Somali refugees poured across the border into the largest refugee camp in the world, Dadaab, Kenya. Later in 2012, I spent a month in Mogadishu, Somalia working as a DP on a documentary covering rape in Somalia and seeing the place where many of the famine refugees had come from. Everyone carried the burden of drought during this time in Kenya and Somalia. But it was the mothers that let the pain of hunger, the pain of loss, and the pain of egress sink into their shoulders as they guided their families to a safer place. Hearing and seeing these stories led to the writing of Ifo 2.