blueprints

The Three Goat Story | 131
into a more or less permanent home to 275,000 refugees, most of whom
traveled for weeks by bus and car, on foot and camelback, in searing heat
and the red dust that covers everything in the badlands north of Dadaab.
The border has been closed since early 2007, but in the first half of 2009,
more than five thousand new refugees arrived every month to live in tents
and endure chronic shortages of running water, electricity, and toilets. Each
month, seven hundred babies are born in the camp, and thousands of teenagers
have spent their lives in what one aid worker called a fenceless prison.
The Kenyan government does not allow refugees to move about the country.
Thus there is nowhere to go and nothing to do; with unemployment
running at 80 percent, parents fear their children will return to a homeland
they have never seen to fight a war that goes on and on.
It is the forgotten war. No doubt the lasting image of Somalia for many
Americans comes from the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, a failed operation to
root out a powerful warlord that cost the lives of hundreds of Somali militiamen
and civilians and eighteen American soldiers. It was a military and
political fiasco for the Clinton administration, recounted in Mark Bowden’s
best-selling Black Hawk Down and later brought to the screen by Ridley
Scott. The conflict prompted the White House to withdraw troops from
Somalia and made it reluctant to employ force to stave off humanitarian
catastrophes in Bosnia and Rwanda. A disaster-relief specialist involved in
the planning for military action in Bosnia and Somalia told me that it was
possible to make a difference in Bosnia, not Somalia; after the Battle of
Mogadishu Americans largely forgot about Somalia.
However, another image of the war-torn country had formed by the
time we arrived in June 2009; Somali pirates were seizing ships in the Gulf
of Aden, prominently the Maersk Alabama, an American container ship carrying
five thousand metric tons of supplies for refugee camps in Kenya,
Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The pirates held the
captain hostage in a covered lifeboat, setting the stage for a drama on the
high seas. Days passed as an American warship sailed into the Gulf and television
crews camped outside the captain’s house in Vermont. When Navy
SEALs shot three of the pirates and freed the captain, there was the sort of
jubilation in America that in earlier ages might have attended the death of
Blackbeard or Captain Kidd. In Dadaab, where rations had to be reduced
by five hundred calories a day, a relief worker pulled aside a local leader.
“You know your brothers are doing this to you, don’t you?” he said. The
refugee smiled, shrugged his shoulders, filled his canvas sack with grain.