Inside the Mind of a Nomad
I met Muhumed Abdi Elmi in the desert of Somaliland while reporting this story for NPR, which just aired. I am convinced that nomads are the world’s biggest badasses.
They spend half the year walking with their animals to find water. They used to spend the whole year doing that but, like most of us, they have gotten lazy through the ages. Where they walk in Somalia is an absolutely inhospitable place where only turtles seem to thrive. Nomads — be them women, men or children — have much work to do herding their animals. Wake up really early, for one. At the end of the day, hack off a bunch of really prickly branches and build a corral for the animals so they can’t escape and so a lion can’t eat them. Tie together the corral with reeds or string. Dig holes for each branch in hard desert earth. Then make a fire, eat something or maybe not, and go to sleep on the ground on top of a reed mat.
Nomads have historically been warriors, though they’ve toned it down in this age. They do carry spears just in case another nomad is like, “Dude, you are taking my water/branch, I found this first, I am going to kill you!” or in case a lion attacks them or a hyena attacks their child.
Muhumed, the man in the photograph, was yelling at us as we first took a picture of his approaching camel herd. We were at a well. “WHY ARE YOU PHOTOGRAPHING ME? I AM SUFFERING! YOU ARE EXPLOITING MY SUFFERING!” he yelled in Somali at my guide Mohamed Amin. Then he told Mohamed that he had been circling the well all day looking for someone to give him the $1 it cost to rent a trough for watering his camels. No one wanted to give him the money or share the well for that matter. I gave him the money. He is traveling with a cousin or something, and actually lives normally in Ethiopia, like many Somali nomads.
Hero Q&A
Translated by Mohamed Amin Jibril
Emily: Tell me about yourself.
Muhumed: I am a pastoralist and I take care of camels and sheep. We want water. We are on the well but we have no access to it because we can’t pay the rent. I have children but because of this terrible drought, I decided not to send my children to take care of the camels. Because I think I am more capable of handling this task. I have more experience than my children, I know where to find water and grass. That’s why I left my children.
Before we were in Ethiopia, where there was not enough water. It was a bad drought. We sleep wearing our shoes and clothes. We couldn’t even find enough water to bathe. Day and night, we are sweating, and by now we have dried up completely.
Seven months we don’t see our families. In these seven months we didn’t go back to where we live permanently in Ethiopia. We are now on our way.
We passed here this morning and saw the water but we couldn’t afford to rent a trough. We didn’t know anyone here. Later we doubled back. We wanted water. That’s our main problem.
Emily: Has there ever been a drought this bad?
Muhumed: Not since the drought of Daba-Dheer. We were young camel herders. (Geer-Jire is a Somali word that specifically means 20-25 year old herders.) Like the camels, we ate leaves of trees and we were just collecting them. The little camels couldn’t get any milk from their mothers teets, so we had to hit their teets to get the milk to come out.
Emily: What’s the problem, I mean, why is there a drought, do you know?
Muhumed: Drought and colonialists have happened to us. We try everything to survive the drought. We go wherever we can to survive and we do whatever we can to survive. We go to anyone we think we can get help from, and the others we just pass.
There’s a certain way to survive on semi-arid land. The environment has different seasons and sometimes organizations come and help the people. They are given wheat, rice, and some other food.
Emily: Do you have any ideas for solving the drought?
Muhumed: We are pastoralists, we are just like our animals, what we know best is how to care for our animals, but we don’t know anything else. But we think about how we can deal with this drought, and we submit our ideas to the local government. Their job is to either help people or call for help from someone else. We tell them, ‘It’s your job to fight against the drought.’
But we the pastoralists, we are just scattered throughout the country. We are just struggling to care for our animals. We’re just running after the clouds of rain. We are on our way to where we’re from originally, where we have heard that there is rain.