stones.
The battlefield was different here. It was mobile, a fluid stain in the empty quadrant of the south of the country. Her previous postings had been further from the fighting, and an army, British or American, had been either on site or nearby. In Gariseb they had no backup; the British army base was almost five hundred kilometres away. The violence from which the casualties were envoys could easily reach out and engulf them. Even as they ate their lunch of goat or camel in lime and chilli she would keep an eye on the door of the mess tent, expecting the snouts of AKs to appear at any moment. At night she slept fully clothed, a full army-issue Osprey water bottle beside her bed in case she had to flee into the desert.
It was two months before she acclimatised. In the afternoons, when the heat was at its peak, she would stand in the spiky shadow thrown by an Acacia mellifera , the sweet-thorn tree. The ground was pitted with tracks – the tiny Vs of dik-diks, the unmistakeable tyre tread of a puff adder, hopefully now far away. The fissure valleys that surrounded camp had been cut by rivers, long dried up. She imagined lions lurking behind the ridge, watching her.
‘Don’t even try to understand this situation,’ Andy told her on one of those nights when they both stood outside, waiting for the cool of evening to offer respite. ‘You’ll get nowhere.’
She understood well enough. She had the advantage of a specialist weekend seminar, held in a village whose name she was sworn not to repeat, located in one of the flat minor shires north-west of London. There she had sat in a Chequers-like mansion surrounded by people like her, plucked ripe on the professional tree, who two weeks later would pitch up in Manila or Lahore or Erbil, all of them looking wistfully out the window, already nostalgic for the moral certainties, forty kinds of yoghurt and imported sauvignon blanc of home.
There, experts informed her that Gariseb was located in a blasted vector of semi-arid scrubland, seasonally desertified, between four countries. To the north was a stable country of water and vine-choked terrazas. To the north-west, a newly formed nation that had split from its larger cousin, and was busy prospecting for oil. To the east was a country that had imploded, ungovernable, a ‘failed state’, a ‘haven for international terrorism’ in US State Department-speak.
In the failed state/haven, aid workers were taken as spies and informants and were at risk of being shot on sight. To the west, in the newly formed country, aid was still vital to the project of nation-building, and welcome. But there, in the last two months, old rivalries between the major ethic groups of the country, the Bora and the Nisa, had erupted. Pockets of random, non-state violence – a cattle raid here, a shoot-up there about profits made from a palm wine shebeen – had left hundreds of young men dead.
The conflict seemed to have taken its cue from the landscape. It was gaunt, half-hearted. The real war was in Gikayo, a hundred kilometres away, and in the coastal city of Gao, which looked out into the Arabian sea.
In Gariseb the days started at 6am. The sun appeared without warning, a clouded disk that had been hovering in the sky all night. But within a minute it charged, heraldic, into the equatorial sky. She took three bucket showers a day. The dust clumped in her nostrils; if she blew them in the arid air the tissue came away black.
At night the shadows were stone. She stood on the perimeter of the light thrown by the generator’s striplights. Sometimes she thought she saw shapes, bundle-sized, moving from thorn tree to rock; child goat-herders on the outskirts of their employers’ land, straggling behind their quick-trotting charges.
The land was heartless. Or rather, it could have little use for them, for anyone. This indifference was so absolute it was almost cleansing. The brassy ridges of the hills broadcast a curious pulsing intent,
The battlefield was different here. It was mobile, a fluid stain in the empty quadrant of the south of the country. Her previous postings had been further from the fighting, and an army, British or American, had been either on site or nearby. In Gariseb they had no backup; the British army base was almost five hundred kilometres away. The violence from which the casualties were envoys could easily reach out and engulf them. Even as they ate their lunch of goat or camel in lime and chilli she would keep an eye on the door of the mess tent, expecting the snouts of AKs to appear at any moment. At night she slept fully clothed, a full army-issue Osprey water bottle beside her bed in case she had to flee into the desert.
It was two months before she acclimatised. In the afternoons, when the heat was at its peak, she would stand in the spiky shadow thrown by an Acacia mellifera , the sweet-thorn tree. The ground was pitted with tracks – the tiny Vs of dik-diks, the unmistakeable tyre tread of a puff adder, hopefully now far away. The fissure valleys that surrounded camp had been cut by rivers, long dried up. She imagined lions lurking behind the ridge, watching her.
‘Don’t even try to understand this situation,’ Andy told her on one of those nights when they both stood outside, waiting for the cool of evening to offer respite. ‘You’ll get nowhere.’
She understood well enough. She had the advantage of a specialist weekend seminar, held in a village whose name she was sworn not to repeat, located in one of the flat minor shires north-west of London. There she had sat in a Chequers-like mansion surrounded by people like her, plucked ripe on the professional tree, who two weeks later would pitch up in Manila or Lahore or Erbil, all of them looking wistfully out the window, already nostalgic for the moral certainties, forty kinds of yoghurt and imported sauvignon blanc of home.
There, experts informed her that Gariseb was located in a blasted vector of semi-arid scrubland, seasonally desertified, between four countries. To the north was a stable country of water and vine-choked terrazas. To the north-west, a newly formed nation that had split from its larger cousin, and was busy prospecting for oil. To the east was a country that had imploded, ungovernable, a ‘failed state’, a ‘haven for international terrorism’ in US State Department-speak.
In the failed state/haven, aid workers were taken as spies and informants and were at risk of being shot on sight. To the west, in the newly formed country, aid was still vital to the project of nation-building, and welcome. But there, in the last two months, old rivalries between the major ethic groups of the country, the Bora and the Nisa, had erupted. Pockets of random, non-state violence – a cattle raid here, a shoot-up there about profits made from a palm wine shebeen – had left hundreds of young men dead.
The conflict seemed to have taken its cue from the landscape. It was gaunt, half-hearted. The real war was in Gikayo, a hundred kilometres away, and in the coastal city of Gao, which looked out into the Arabian sea.
In Gariseb the days started at 6am. The sun appeared without warning, a clouded disk that had been hovering in the sky all night. But within a minute it charged, heraldic, into the equatorial sky. She took three bucket showers a day. The dust clumped in her nostrils; if she blew them in the arid air the tissue came away black.
At night the shadows were stone. She stood on the perimeter of the light thrown by the generator’s striplights. Sometimes she thought she saw shapes, bundle-sized, moving from thorn tree to rock; child goat-herders on the outskirts of their employers’ land, straggling behind their quick-trotting charges.
The land was heartless. Or rather, it could have little use for them, for anyone. This indifference was so absolute it was almost cleansing. The brassy ridges of the hills broadcast a curious pulsing intent,
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