Layer after layer of people have hunkered down here, embedding themselves in the landscape, wrapping shelters and hammering fences and making more babies and deeper roads, until there is this: a thick human settlement of tents and tin, hundreds of thousands of people clinging to life in a land of nothing but sand. Now you are one of them.
WEEKS PASS. WHEN you arrived, you and Jamilah were passed from one agency to another, in a string of registrations and queues and fingerprinting and health checks. Now you have been given a shelter for the two of you – one of the grey-white dome tents, with a sandy floor. There is nothing in the tent besides a little pot for water, and the sticks you collect for a fire. You sleep on the bare ground.
You are each given about a handful of beans and a handful of rice every day, gained after standing in line for hours with little cardboard tags around your necks, which get a hole punched in them in return for the food. You have long since eaten Sampson’s snacks and spent the last of your money on extra food and a blanket, and you are always hungry.
Rahama’s pen gleams on, the ruby so red it looks edible. You’ve started school, in a crowded metal shed where fifty boys sit together on a concrete floor, but you couldn’t take the golden pen out to write with there – it would be stolen in an instant. You keep it wrapped in paper and buried under the sand in a corner of the tent, showing it to no one.
What is the point of having something so beautiful in a place like this? you think bitterly. It just makes everything else look uglier.
YOU’VE BEEN IN Dadaab for months, learning how to survive and get by. Sometimes you hear rumours that al-Shabaab agents are mixed in among the camp’s population – plotting, spying, and recruiting – so you don’t tell anyone the story of why you’re here. When you tell the UNHCR your story, you simply say that you were fleeing the famine.
You and Jamilah keep your heads down and blend in, and you feel safer here than anywhere else you’ve been so far. However, you still often lie awake at night, filled with a restless frustration. I can’t stay in Dadaab forever, you think. I have to get in touch with Aadan; I have to investigate Bright Dream.
But you know now, from talking to people around the camp, that most people simply run out of options and never leave Dadaab. There are people of your parents’ generation who were born here, Somalis who’ve never set foot in Somalia. The only way to get from here to a truly safe place is to wait for the UNHCR to resettle you in an overseascountry, but getting a resettlement place is like winning the lottery.
If only you could call Sampson, or use a computer to contact Aadan. But the only computers and phones here in Dadaab are impossibly expensive to use.
Some people starve themselves and sell their rations in the marketplace as a way of making money. Maybe you will have to try doing that. I have the pen, you always think, but I can’t sell that.
One day an idea occurs to you, so simple you can’t believe you haven’t thought of it before now: I could sell half the pen – the writing half – and keep the part with the ruby and the memory stick!
You send Jamilah off to school the next morning but skip class yourself. You don’t want to tell her about your plan until it works and you have some really good news for her.
Dadaab’s central market, nicknamed ‘Bosnia’, is a sprawling labyrinth of dirt footpaths and trestle tables piled high with goods, from tomatoes to baby clothes to glistening lumps of camel meat. It buzzes with the voices of stallholders hawking their wares, the squawking of chickens destined for the chop, the clunking of vans being unloaded, and the occasional trill of a bicycle bell as a rider weaves through the crowd.
Most of the market has a makeshift ceiling of plastic bags and rags to keep out the desert sun, and you very quickly become disoriented in the maze of crowded tunnels. You have no idea who would be a trustworthy person to approach about selling your half-pen.
A mountain of potatoes atop a wildly weaving wheelbarrow charges towards you. The load is so huge that you can’t even see the person pushing it.
You jump out of the way just in time, and a wiry, sweating man in a red T-shirt shouts, ‘Make way, make way!’ as he throws his full bodyweight into the load.
You watch, amazed by the spectacle. Just at that moment, the wheelbarrow-pusher swerves violently and only just manages to right his load in time. He shouts angrily at a man with a huge sack who got in his way – then, to your horror, he smacks the man across the face, making him drop his sack, before charging on.
You run to the man who was hit. ‘Are you all right?’ you ask in Somali.
But then you realise he isn’t Somali – his skin is pitch-black and he has tribal scars on his forehead. Maybe he’s Sudanese, you think, and try asking again in Arabic.
He smiles. ‘I’m all right, thanks kid,’ he replies, in accented Arabic. ‘That’ll teach me for getting in the way of a stampeding herd of potatoes.’
You laugh and begin to help him pick up the contents of his sack: used cans, bottles and other bits of rubbish. Then you notice that he reaches for the rubbish with only one hand: the other arm ends in a gum-pink stump at the wrist. You gasp in horror, then
