A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) by Jonny Steinberg Read Free Book Online Page A

self-rebuke, for he tells me that he remembers neither her name nor her nationality.
    “When I think of her,” he says, “the only word that comes to my mind is
gaal.
” In Somali,
gaal
means “white person.” “Whenever she came to our place, I would know long before she arrived, because a group of children would run up to me saying, ‘Your
gaal
is coming, your
gaal
is coming.’ ”
    Arranging for Yindy’s medical care was the first of many things Asad’s
gaal
did. She had a large
balbalo
built for Yindy, while the other refugees had only tents. A pipe was extended under the ground to provide water to the
balbalo,
when the other refugees had to form long lines at the water pump. Fresh food was brought to Yindy twice a week; the other refugees had to queue for their dry rations for six hours each day.
    It was certainly a blessing, albeit a mixed one. Whether Asad could have kept foraging for himself and Yindy indefinitely, as he had during their time on the Somali side of the border, is doubtful. It is quite possible that the nameless
gaal
saved Asad’s and Yindy’s lives. And yet, their special treatment marked them: their piped water and fresh food made them objects of envy; their
balbalo
was an advertisement that they were just a disabled woman and a child and were thus defenseless. As sunset approached, Yindy’s fear would rise. She was terrified of the night, and her terror, Asad recalls, did not abate for all of the two years that they lived in Liboi.
    —
    Not long after they arrived, Yindy sent a very reluctant Asad off to a madrassa that had been established just a two-minute walk from their tent. To his dismay, he was trapped there each day from eight o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon, another tyrant barking reams of holy text into his ears.
    “The method was not the same as in Mogadishu,” Asad says. “There was no
loox,
no ink. We would all sit, and the teacher would come to each of us in turn. He would shout a passage out from the Koran once, then pause for a few moments, then shout it again. You would have to repeat it. He would count the mistakes you made and then beat you once for every mistake.”
    Asad loathed school, but he also clung to it gratefully, for it marked him as a boy who was not an idiot.
    “I do not remember when they began arriving,” he says, “but at some point, nomadic children from the countryside started coming into Liboi. You would get much-older children, people already well into their teens, who could not read Arabic or Somali or anything else, and who therefore could not go to school. These people were a laughingstock. We called them
reer baadiye
—‘from the bush.’ Nobody wanted to be
reer baadiye,
and so children learned from other children how to read to save their dignity.”
    The educational institutions that emerged at Liboi were a riot of fragments. Asad went to a makeshift madrassa that had no writing materials. But many of the kids he played with in the early evenings received a very different education. Into the vacuum left by the absence of schools in the camp stepped a host of entrepreneurs. Two men who claimed to have been math teachers in Mogadishu established classes to teach children basic arithmetic. Soon after that, piles of material arrived from UNICEF: alphabet books, storybooks, exercise books. Camp leaders assigned refugees who had lived clerical lives back home to use these books to teach.
    “The majority of the children around me understood the Latin alphabet and could read basic Somali,” Asad tells me. “So I was somewhere between an educated child and
reer baadiye.
I had to make distance between myself and
reer baadiye.
It was a question of pride and shame. Whatever material was going around, I would look at, I would ask questions.
    “It was not just me. It was a thing between children. A young child would ask an older child, a child a foot taller than him, ‘What is two times two?’ The question would be