The USAID Guest House and the consultants/USAID staff who stayed there
After about a week at the Aruba Hotel (during my first trip) I was informed that space was available at the Guest House and that if I wanted to change a USAID car would pick me up with my luggage and assist in the transfer. I had no hesitation about making the change, though in the week or so that I was at the Hotel I managed to meet a number of interesting consultants and businessmen. In fact, the Aruba Hotel proved to be quite a nerve center for UN and European donor agencies and in making the switch I was moving into a more limited circle made up largely of people working for USAID. When I left the hotel for work each morning there were vehicles from UNICEF and UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees) waiting for their passengers. Though there were trade-offs in this change, I also felt quite alone and lonely at the hotel and was eager for more on-going interactions.
The USAID guest house was located in the vicinity of K4 ( Kilometer 4 from city center), near the Somali Radio station, the president’s palace, both of which were extremely well guarded, some embassies and donor agency offices. It was an older more settled area of town, with purple bouganvella flowing over the walls, and streets that were reasonably well paved. The Guest House surrounded by a high wall, (like all other buildings in the area) was across the street from a private school and was situated on a hill with a good commanding view of the neighborhood. When the vehicle stopped for clearance from the guards at the gate, I noticed the row of barbed wire and broken glass affixed to the top of the wall, for security I presumed.
Although the Guest House was highly touted as the place to stay, I was initially disappointed by the building. The facility was old, the rooms were actually smaller than my hotel room, air conditioning was weak, the lighting poor and there were no private bathrooms. The walled compound included the Guest House and several cottages, occupied by long-termers (e.g. USAID employees and long term consultants). In many ways the Guest House reminded me of life in a college dorm; lots of people around and opportunities for conversation and also challenges to carving out personal and work time at night.
However, there proved to be some important advantages. One was that we had a Somali cook (Hawa) who prepared breakfast and dinners for the guests and my first dinner there was my best meal by far. I learned later that the guests could request special dishes including lobster, roast goat, etc. Hawa’s desserts were provided by the commissary (an very important institution) and included American pre- packaged cakes (e.g. yellow cake, angel cake, chocolate cake) to which one only needed to add water and eggs before baking. Hawa also used packaged frosting to top off the cakes.
During the course of several stays there, I met some consultants only once and I also met those whose return visits coincided with mine. Some really nice professional relationships were developed as a result. Dinner hours were filled with interesting conversations with the other guests about their work, or about life in Somalia in general.
The consultants The consultants I met, some of whom I socialized with, included:
Ed Nelson, a white Kenyan with Cooper Lybrand in Nairobi who was advising the Ministry of Finance on currency exchange and stabilization. His meetings at the Ministry were only several hours long, but he had to stay four days during each trip because there were only two flights a week between Nairobi and Mogadishu. In my first encounter with him, he asked whether I would make him tea. I explained that when the cook was off we were all responsible for taking care of our own needs in the kitchen. He sheepishly explained that he never went into the kitchen in his house and he didn’t know how to turn on the stove. White, privileged Kenyan I thought, and showed him how to turn on the gas and then oriented him to other kitchen appliances. Thereafter he made his own tea. We had many interesting conversations and came to feel he was a good chap. Ed lived the good life of privilege in Kenya; 5 servants in Nairobi, country house with 300 acres in the highlands where he raised horses, etc;
Sherrill, a young blonde attractive woman trainee with the State Department, who was being rotated through different sections of the Embassy. This was her first State Department overseas assignment and before too long she hooked up with and subsequently married a Naval Attache at the Embassy. We all envied her up-scale and beautifully furnished house which had been assigned to them because they had “representational” responsibilities. Sherrill was an important source of information about the Embassy pecking order, which also existed among USAID personnel;
A young couple living in the cottages who sometimes joined up for meals. He was the American ambassador’s pilot who was in the interim flying a leased plane. The Ambassador was to get a small plane that would allow him to get around the country, have his own source of information and stay in touch with what was going on.
Allison Spitz and Karen Peake, from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to help establish a 5 year supply line and warehousing system for USAID donated contraceptives. Our visits overlapped a number of times and I was always so glad to see them and follow their saga of estimating contraceptive needs and working with the Ministry of Health to set up a system for managing the inventory of contraceptives. Perhaps their most challenging task was convincing the ministry that all the contraceptives in the warehouse ( probably donated by the UN system) had to be destroyed because they had passed their expiration dates by a few years, and the condoms had all deteriorated from the heat. The bonfire built to destroy the drugs and condoms almost caused an international incident as all the appropriate authorities had not been notified, leaving them in a high state of consternation for several days. Allison and Karen were great fun and we had many laughs together.
A demographer and systems analyst from the US Census Bureau to assist the Ministry of Planning to prepare for the country’s national census. Their job was to make sure that the donated computers in a newly built air-conditioned room were kept covered and protected from dust and sand, train the Somalis in their use and also figure out a way to count the country’s very large nomadic population, (probably more than 80%). The census took several years to plan and execute and during certain periods the nomads had to remain in place so they would neither be missed nor double counted. When a couple of years later the results were finally reported, the President repudiated them because he alleged that too few Somalis had been counted. It was rumored that he needed a larger population for standing against the Ethiopians and also for better leverage with the donors. Nevertheless, USAID used the 6 million figure in all its reports.
Paula, a young very intense USAID intern working in the Food program. She was all work and no play and in many ways lonely and isolated in her job. Worst of all she was rigid and couldn’t abide things that were not on the up and up….and that just was not the ways things worked in Somalia. USAID donated surplus US food to the Somalis and the revenue from the sale of the food provided a Somali government match for development projects, as many projects required. It was a huge program, hard to track and subject to considerable mismanagement and corruption. It was not uncommon for truckloads of donated food to “disappear”. The sacks the food came in were marked, “donated by the US government in friendship with the Somali people” and had many additional uses, including dish towels in the guest house.
The two Dans, Engineers from the US Bureau of Reclamation working on the Juba River Valley Reclamation project. They were both employees of the Bureau who accepted 2-3 year overseas assignments to advance their careers, in one instance, and up their retirement pay, in another. Dan 1 was younger, of Czech origins married to a woman from Brazil who lived in cottages that were part of the compound but ate dinner with us. Erisema, Dan’s wife was lovely but extremely lonely in Somalia. They were both foreigners in the American orbit, but Erisema felt it more as she was home all day. Dan 2 was supposed to head the project and came out to Somalia a few months before his wife, at which point they would move into permanent housing. They were a decent, resourceful couple from the mid-west, both really handy with their hands. Dan 2 experienced many frustrations with the project, delays in the arrival of his staff and major disagreements with his Somali counterparts about his mission and the pace of the work. The Somalis wanted the Juba River dam built and the Americans wanted a series of studies done first. Dan once confided to me that he didn’t think that Americans really wanted to build the dam. In addition to frustrations at work, they remained at the guest house much longer than anticipated as they experienced major problems with the completion of their house, near the Lido which they finally abandoned for one closer to the USAID mission. In the meantime, however, tracking the progress of construction of his house gave us excuses for weekend trips to the Lido.
Dorothy, an Irish nurse-midwife working up north to train traditional birth attendants in safe delivery practices, and Zande, a South African midwife about 60 years old doing the same work in the southern region (Baidoa). Poor Zande, ran afoul of Somali policies on foreign adoptions (no Somali child could be adopted by foreigners and leave the country) and thought she had all the details worked out (primarily bribing the right officials) but the child was taken away from her at the airport as they were getting ready to depart, and the child’s mother imprisoned. Eventually, Zande was able to leave the country, but would never be allowed to return. She remained in Kenya for several months hoping the child could join her, without success;
An expert in animal husbandry to help improve the health of the Somali livestock and thus its exports (on the hoof) to Saudi Arabia,
An archeological team of 6 from U of North Carolina on their return from a surface investigation of the Juba River Valley, with their specimens on display and drying all over the porch and guest house sitting room, and
Monteze and Alan Synder, a husband-wife team, she a consultant and he a USAID economic development staff person, who came to Somalia after three years in Bamako, Mali. Their descriptions of Bamako made me glad that I was working in Somalia. Couldn’t get over her enthusiasm about the bright sunlight, cleanliness and less seedy feeling to Mogadishu. Everything is relative, I concluded.
Later when our project established its own guest house, most of the consultants there were people related to the Family Health and Child spacing project, an even smaller orbit within the USAID world.
The American military presence In addition to the USAID world, however, there were a number of American military personnel in Somalia training and assisting the Somali military. This was the period of the cold war and as Ethiopia joined the Soviet orbit, and the war between Ethiopia and Somalia continued, the Americans increased their courtship of the Somalis. It was rumored that American assistance to Somalia (combining military and development assistance) was the highest per capita in the world. It seemed like a most unlikely place for such American interest, but fears of Soviet domination (even in the Horn of Africa) led to strange decisions and even stranger bedfellows.
My contacts with the world of the military were very limited. Our paths crossed in the commissary, at the pool and later at the Club and Golf course. Mainly, we met at movies shown outside on the back of the wall of the RWA ( Recreation and Welfare Association) clubhouse. Usually the movies were B minus shoot em ups and adventure tales, and after awhile I stopped going because the movies were so bad. But clearly they reflected the tastes of the military personnel more so than the development types. It was also apparent that military assistance preceded development assistance in the country, and that the move to development showed the American seriousness with strengthening the country ( or so the thinking went).
From time to time we heard of military maneuvers and the arrival of high level officers. In spite of these occasional rumors, however, I knew little about the military presence, except that I knew that there was one and that it was viewed as an important mission. The military personnel were mainly single men in the country for fairly short tours of duty. A few of the officers were there with their wives.
A third group of people consisted of development professionals associated with non-US development progams, mainly British, French, Scandinavian and Italian. Our interactions with them usually occurred at recreational and social events usually sponsored by the embassies. A running club organized by a number of young development professionals did cut across nationalities and managed to foster to some cross-national socializing. Otherwise, you tended to meet only professionals from other countries working on allied projects.