Perhaps the best known drink in this part of the world is Somali tea, well-featured on these pages. But there’s another, less-noticed cuppa that pops up from time to time. It’s well-known around these parts, but not as embedded in local culinary identity as Somali tea.
Sometimes you keep your head down for a bit too long, buried deep in your laptop, your creative work, your chores, and you forget to look up and press your face against the world. The humdrum becomes drudgery, the drudgery becomes dead weight, your whole environment becomes a nuisance. It’s (way, way too) easy to lose sight of the charm that’s just next to you, of opportunities for humor and grace. Herewith, in attempt to recapture that charm, and reclaim my gratitude about life overseas, are some of the things I appreciate most about living in Hargeisa.
Hiya! It’s an avalanche of a week at work as we dive headfirst into the final quarter of the year. Budgets and deliverables are staring me down from the evil depths of Excel sheets. Blech. At least the internet’s still a reliable distraction. Check out these links, and some photos from around the way! You can keep your Sudoku, your Candy Crush, even your crossword puzzles. I’ve got a new game obsession, and it feeds my inner nerd.
Over the years, Nana developed a penchant for ivy, and eventually the motif swallowed the ground floor, repeated from wallpaper to carpet to stencilling to the fake plastic garlands that hung over doorways. Where it was possible to put gold leaf, Nana put gold leaf, and mirrors covered at least one face of each room. Statuettes cluttered every surface beyond the reach of children: angels, Jesus-in-the-manger scenes, fruit and bread baskets, gold, pearl, silver, ceramic, you name it… In youth, opinions and attitudes are simply delivered to you, without your consent. When love is present before self-awareness ripens, when you find yourself yoked indelibly to someone with flawed character, you realize that it’s possible to love a person for their failures and faults, without loving the faults themselves. Think of your parents, whose social or political views may seem to you narrow or outdated. Think of the partners who simply don’t see things the way you do, sometimes, and of the work it takes to reach around those differences and love each other anyway.
If it’s camel milk you’re after, you’re in luck; head to the market at dawn or dusk and you’ll find the absolute freshest available, just after it’s milked, to cure whatever ails you. When my partner’s mother visited us earlier this year and fell ill, his father brought her fresh camel milk, with fervor of devotion, just after milking time morning and night, as she insisted it was the most effective tonic and quickest route to health. What you can hardly find unless you have the right connections, is fresh cow’s milk. Local stores carry massive canisters of the powdered variety, most often mixed into Somali tea or instant coffee. Some groceries have shelf-stable liquid milk, but this has simply been dehydrated into powder and then rehydrated again – a far cry from fresh. If you’re lucky, you’ll find non-dehydrated liquid cow’s milk in cardboard cartons in the refrigerated section of the most expensive groceries, but even that comes from abroad and, given the limitations of cold chain shipping in the region, I question its integrity. …
After more than a year of dreaming, thinking, planning, pushing and pulling, getting off track and finding the way back again, we’ve managed it at last, setting up shop in Hargeisa’s international airport. There were delays of the self-indulgent and self-doubting varieties: Is this the right path among all those others? Is it the most profitable? What about that other shiny-looking opportunity over there… Does anyone really buy t-shirts? (Turns out, to our great relief, yes they do).
outerNotes 