The tale of young Hussein Maalim Abdullai In Mandhera

[Samafal]

In the border town, he is known as iskoris - Somali for a child fending for himself.

 

He hawks neem sticks as toothbrushes. When he was born, Somalia was in turmoil. Twice, with his family, he has sought refuge in Mandera near Kenya's border with somalia.

 

Master Hussein Maalim Abdullai, 12, and Abikar Iftin, 13, during the interview. Pics by Boniface Ongare

 

Brought up by the gun, Hussein Maalim Abdullai, 12, does not wish to live by the gun.

 

"The gun is bad. If it were my wish I would opt for reconciliation because revenge has not helped to stop bloodshed. I have seen worse times, I can tell you it is not a good sight," he says.

 

Gunshots no longer send cold shivers down his spines.

 

Since the fall of former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre's government in 1991, the testing of a gun today, the tossing of hand grenades and the felling of bodies tomorrow are the hallmark of the war-ravaged country. The collapse of the government split the nationals along clan lines and militia control the territories thus created.

 

He learned that they opened fire when he was barely three years old and killed his father.

 

Inter-clan fighting over the control of the tiny town of Bula Hawa in Somalia led to the displacement of the sub clans of the larger Marihan clan. This is the clan Hussein belongs to.

 

They fled to Bula Amin along the border and had barely settled before the gunmen routed them out.

 

With his father dead, Hussein would, eight years later take the responsibility of raising his family.

 

Today, with his meagre earnings from the sale of the toothbrushes, he feeds his mother, three sisters and a brother.

 

His younger sister fetches reeds with which their mother weaves mats, which are used to thatch Somali traditional houses.

 

Due to scarcity of the thatching material, it could take up to six months to make a complete set which is sold for Sh2,000 at most.

 

His day starts at 5.30am. He goes to the thickets to harvest fresh twigs.

 

He has to be at the Mandera bus stage by 6.30am to sell the sticks to passengers travelling to Nairobi via Wajir and Garissa.

 

He sells the sticks at Sh1 a stick.

 

To avoid returning home empty handed, he skips lunch or if he cannot brave the pangs of hunger, he gangs with fellow skoris to pull resources to buy a plate of rice and pasta.

 

On many occasions, the children hang around hotels and scramble for leftovers. But they cannot escape the wrath of hotel owners who view them as a nuisance to their customers.

 

When business is low during the day, he sleeps on the pavements or accompanies colleagues who criss-cross the town offering cheap domestic chores and shining shoes.

 

Some as young as five do odd jobs for a shilling. Their number has not been established but they will be seen loitering the town in groups of twos or fives. He says if given a chance to continue schooling he wont.

 

"My education was rudely interrupted when I was in Standard Two. Gunmen stormed my class and shot my teacher in the head. We screamed and ran away. We liked the teacher very much. He told us the pen was mightier than the bullet, but the bullet fell him. I wanted to become a teacher like him," he says.

 

His mother Indayar Mahat Sheikh says the community did everything to give their children education.

 

But frequent feuds exposed them to easy targets from marauding militia and momentarily kept them off.

 

Hussein regrets that the 14-year-old Somali war has wasted him and denied him many rights he sees Kenyan children enjoy. The most important of all is education, parental love and guidance.

 

Instead, it has been replaced with trauma, family disintegration and lawlessness upbringing.

 

The children are brought up knowing that one has to own a gun. Owning one is the rule.

 

His prayers are that the interim Somali government elected last October in Nairobi Kenya takes over and restore order.

 

The boy says he has been following the development of his country through the BBC Somali. I am a keen BBC listener, he says.

 

"I ask the leaders to stop the fighting and forget the past for the sake of us. Let them hear the voice of the children. Let them rekindle our hope. We are not hopeless.

 

We have not given up, I hope one day I will own some business and settle in a free country," he says trying to control tears.

 

"I am grateful to Kenyans for being tolerant with us. I have been moving around selling my sticks without interruption. I want to enjoy this peace in my country," he says as he walks away to look for a customer.

 

However, occasional incidents dampen his spirit. Officials purporting to be from the Mandera County Council harass them and demand Sh15 as cess. They are not issued with receipts.

 

As evening approaches, Hussein crosses the border to his country and the head of the family will trudge past gunmen armed to the teeth. He has to constantly look behind his back to ensure none is aiming the barrel of a gun in his direction.

 

He will pass by a row of butcheries and with Sh15 buy half a steak of goat meat.

 

 

By: Adow Jubat And Boniface Ongeri Posted: 07th/May/2005

[Samafal]

And here’s what they have to tackle: the horrors of Somalia May 11, 2005

 

 

 

Famine, crime, narcotics, crazed gunmen, mad warlords ... welcome to the poorest country in the world. By Foreign Editor David Pratt

 

As hell-holes go, Mogadishu is in a class of its own. For years the city has provided a glimpse into a post-apocalypse society where only the vicious survive.

 

In the eerie no-man’s land that divides the north and south of this African coastal city, the Kalashnikov is king. The frequent flat pop of gunfire from the rival militias who roam here, a grim reminder of Somalia’s lawlessness.

 

But war is not the only horseman of the apocalypse that has trundled across Somalia’s hardpan earth throughout the years. Famine stalks here too.

 

And as if this was not enough, even the ravages of the recent Asian tsunami touched Somalia’s African shores. Not that many aid organisations were prepared to brave the gunmen of this anarchic land to bring relief to its beleaguered fishing communities.

 

This, after all, is a country that has been without a central government since clan-based warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Since then, as one British foreign office report put it: “Somalia has completely collapsed as a functioning state.â€

 

On this, World Poverty Day, as our political leaders make pledges towards fighting human hardship in the developing world, it is the challenge of places such as Somalia, that is the harsh reality of what such a campaign involves.

 

What, one wonders, would our pledge-promising politicians make of a walkabout in downtown Mogadishu?

 

This is a place where people live on less than a dollar a day, and even rubbish is a commercial commodity to be fought over. A place where someone worth kidnapping or with anything worth stealing, would need an escort of at least six armed men for a journey of a few hundred yards.

 

In Mogadishu’s canyons of bomb-blasted ruins, old Cinzano signs remain pinned to Swiss cheese walls and telephone poles lean at ominous angles like voodoo totems, the stubs of their severed tops long since stripped of wires to sell on the black market. The once languid boulevards are now awash with garbage and sand .

 

Here and there in the city’s maze of dusty streets and alleyways, our pledge-makers would come across gun-toting young tribesmen chewing the narcotic leaf qat. It gives a buzz similar to cocaine and makes the gunmen edgy and, at times, mad.

 

Allahi Ahmed Sakariye, is only 11, but already his life is driven by two things: the daily search for food and surviving these coked-up gunmen.

 

“I saw this militiaman lift his gun,†he says, miming perfectly the action of cocking an assault rifle. “The bullet went in here,†he continues, pointing to his temple, before describing how the victim fell, blood pumping from his head.

 

On their walkabout, our pledge-makers might also come across the likes of 12-year-old Hussein. In 1992, his family fled famine in the village of Coryoley in the Lower Shabeelle region south of Mogadishu.

 

Famine took Hussein’s father, his mother and his five brothers and sisters. For the past 10 years he has lived with his grandmother in a shack of sticks and plastic bags. Now his only interest is football. “But it’s sometimes too dangerous to play on the street,†he admits.

 

In Mogadishu, where unemployment runs at almost 90%, poverty, as our pledge-makers understand it, has moved to a dehumanising dimension that they would barely comprehend.

 

What future can they offer the likes of 18-year-old Mahamut Issa Abdi? When not crammed into a displaced persons’ camp, he spends all day in the searing heat, smashing the foundations of what remains of the United States embassy here, in order to retrieve the steel rods used to reinforce the concrete.

 

For three years Mahamut had been doing this. Not to do it would be to watch his family starve and die.

 

“I earn 1000 Somali shillings (three pence) for each rod. I get about 20 rods a day but I have to give half of them to the gunman who controls the area I work,†he says.

 

Making the peace that Somalia, and countries like it, need to begin tackling the poverty that cripples them is not easy, but it is where it must start.

 

Late last year a new transitional government was formed to bring peace to Somalia, but it has been unable to return from exile in neighbouring Kenya as it is too dangerous.

 

George W Bush has said that Somalia is full of terrorism. He is right, Somalia is full of terrorism, but not the al-Qaeda variety to which he was referring. Just the familiar African type, that dangerous marriage of guns and hunger. Combating this axis of evil would be a battle worth fighting.

 

 

By: David Pratt Posted: 25th/April/2005