I went from Senegal to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, and at four months Paul and I broke the news to my parents while on vacation in Rhode Island. No one could believe that Paul had actually managed to persuade me to pause long enough to have a baby when I barely stopped moving long enough to do my laundry. At four and a half months Doctors Without Borders sent me to photograph its medical outreach for victims of the drought consuming the Horn of Africa and Kenya—from the Turkana region to the Somali refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya. Halfway through the assignment, working in remote African villages, I could no longer button my pants. I was almost five months pregnant. The nausea and exhaustion were gone, my energy level had returned, and I was eating normally, though I was careful to avoid harmful bacteria, which in remote Africa meant eating bread, rice, bananas, and protein bars I carried from home.
As I was finishing up my two-week assignment, I sensed that I had just been skimming around the edges with my coverage of the drought. All the refugees I was photographing in Dadaab were fleeing the drought in Somalia; I needed to go to Somalia in order to photograph the real story, what had been causing them to seek refuge. It was a fundamental missing piece among the images I had photographed. While my assignment with Doctors Without Borders was finished, the story would also be syndicated through my photo agency for other publications around the world. I would have felt like an irresponsible or misleading journalist had I only half-completed my coverage of the story of the drought—that is, if I didn’t go to Somalia and expose the heart of the crisis. For me, it was because few journalists went to Somalia that I felt it was important to go. But that meant traveling at five months pregnant, less than six months after being very publicly kidnapped in Libya, to Mogadishu, the kidnapping capital of the world.
In many ways Somalia was a failed state: anarchic, violent, impoverished, its land overrun by the Shabaab, a fundamentalist militia group that terrorized civilians and kidnapped people for exorbitant ransoms. The only reason they didn’t enter Mogadishu was the presence of African Union peacekeepers. Somalia was one of the few places on earth that I was actually scared to visit, as I repeatedly imagined a fate like that of the American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu’s streets in 1993. And I knew that if anything ever happened to me in Somalia so soon after Libya, I would surely be written off by my editors and peers as a crazy, irresponsible photographer, making it impossible to justify myself. But journalistically Somalia was a fundamental part of the story, and I didn’t want to start compromising my professional instincts before I had a baby.
I started sending e-mails to colleagues who had recently been in Mogadishu: Tyler, who had been one of the first to cover the story powerfully for the New York Times, and John Moore, a photographer with Getty Images whom Tyler and I had traveled with in Libya. They both passed along contacts for Mohammed, the main fixer in Mogadishu. For $1,000 per day, Mohammed could arrange a room in his guesthouse, an interpreter, a driver, and a militia of anywhere from four to eight gunmen to accompany me each time I wanted to travel out of the guesthouse. Tyler and John both spoke very highly of Mohammed; they explained that he went to great lengths to prepare each shooting excursion outside the sanctuary of the guesthouse and took no task lightly. They said what I knew already: that Mogadishu was unpredictable, that it looked scarier from the outside, and that the chances were that the trip would go fine—unless it didn’t.
Beyond the security risk, both Tyler and John recounted something very worrisome: that they had gotten horrible stomach ailments from the food at the guesthouse, which I worried might cause harm to the baby. Just bring Cipro, they said, the pharmaceutical elixir of choice for many of us, which basically microwaved the body free of bacteria. But I wasn’t allowed to take Cipro. I still hadn’t told my colleagues I was pregnant.
I needed just two to three bacteria-free days on the ground to visit the hospitals, which were allegedly swarming with drought victims, with at least a handful of children dying each day from diarrhea, dehydration, and complications from diseases that often accompanied malnutrition. And I needed to visit the camps for the internally displaced, which were sprouting up all over Mogadishu, populated by people from other parts of the country. Nothing would happen in a few days, I reassured myself, especially if I ate only bananas, bread, and Pure Protein Bars. I had two more orders of business before I could book my flight: I had to call Paul—even though I had pretty much decided on going—and make sure he felt comfortable with my decision. For the first time I actually felt that I needed his permission to risk my life, because I would also be risking the life of our baby.
Paul and I talked through the potential risks involved, and he asked me to limit my stay in Mogadishu to as few days as possible in order to get the images I needed to complete the story. I finished my assignment for Doctors Without Borders in Kenya, and Jamie, my Newsweek editor, offered me some expense money to publish the work from Somalia. In the days of decreased magazine budgets, this was the next best thing to an assignment.