The man sat cross-legged in the dust. His feet were caked in greyish mud. He did not move. He sat and he stared. Children played around him. They kicked an old tennis ball, and sat on yellow, plastic jerry cans and rode them like horses. He did not flinch.
“He has mental problems,” Sainab, a refugee worker said. “He lives here with his mother.”
Three kilometres out of Hargeisa, down a dusty road, past the NGOs and the ministry of justice and the presidential house, another track diverges. The asphalt stops and it becomes rock and mud. Soon shelters are seen – hundreds of them, then thousands. They are fashioned out of food packaging, tarpaulins and branches of trees. They are built where any space can be found. It is here where the victims of years of civil war, disease and hunger came to find refuge. They started coming almost two decades ago. Most never left. They are still coming.
There are now almost 30,000 here, in the place locals call the State House. Once it was a hub of the British administration who held a protectorate status over this place, Somaliland, until the 1960s. Then it became part of Somalia. Then it declared independence and it went to war to prove it. Now it is a nowhere land – a place which the international community refuses to recognise as a country.
The man in the dust came with his mother during the war with Somalia which saw most of Hargiesa bombed to the ground. The monument to that is a Russian MIG fighter jet elevated on a plinth near the town centre. Somalilanders will say they shot it down. Others will say it just crashed.
The mother stooped through the limply hanging corrugated iron door. She came out of the shade. She held a walking stick and looked up into the sun. She asked a young man to help her sit down.
“We have nothing,” she squeaked, barely audible. “We don’t have anything to eat.”
She looked at her son.
“I am too old to work.”
Sometimes the neighbors will help them. Sometimes they will offer the pair food. But not often. The old woman knows, they too are often starving.
