Somali children try to feed biscuits to a woman suffering from dehydration and hunger moments after she arrived at a reception center the morning after crossing from Somalia into Kenya to flee a prolonged drought, August 20, 2011. Dadaab, with roughly four hundred thousand refugees, is the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is grossly over capacity, and the refugees experience an ever shrinking access to essential services such as water, sanitation, food, and shelter, in part because they have been sharing their rations with the new arrivals.
Something strange happened once I arrived in Kenya: The baby—whom I had been imagining for weeks as an avocado-pit-sized embryo, based on regular updates from the BabyCenter app—started kicking. He came to life as a little person inside me as I entered Somalia, the land ridden with death. He was very active, and suddenly I was acutely aware of him all the time.
Once I got to Mogadishu, I went to the guesthouse to meet with Mohammed. He looked at me, shrouded in my flowing black abaya and matching head scarf, and smiled: “You look Somali! We don’t have to worry about you!” Mohammed didn’t think I was in great danger of being kidnapped.
I went right to work, starting with Banadir Hospital, the main hospital in the city. In Africa white people were often presumed to be aid workers, doctors, people there to help in a very immediate way with medicine or food distribution. I walked into the main foyer of the hospital and was immediately overwhelmed by the scene. Throngs of hollow-faced Somali women and children filled the wards, littered the halls, lying prostrate and listless anywhere they could find the space. Their sunken eyes pierced my white skin with hope: They thought I was a doctor who had come to save them from their fate. All I had was my camera. Somali medical reserves were tapped. The hospitals had only a few doctors, a few more nurses, and little medicine. Most people were simply given IVs of rehydrating fluids and left to recover, to wither, to die. They shared beds, rested on the floors. I had never seen a situation that bad, with little interest from the international aid community. Somalia was simply too dangerous for foreign aid workers, and so the people were left to their own resources. As dangerous as it was, I knew I had made the right journalistic decision by going to Mogadishu.
I went to the upstairs ward to look around. I always felt horrible photographing people in such states of misery, but I hoped my images, in bringing greater awareness of the desperation, might also bring food and medical aid. I worked quickly, deliberately, abiding by Mohammed’s instructions to not linger very long anywhere in order to avoid the risk of kidnap. I had spent my career navigating dangerous assignments based on risk calculation, and I wanted to trust that ability, even though I was pregnant. Our kidnapping in Libya did weigh heavily upon me. I was constantly fighting against a freshly developed fear, a new reflex to finish my work that very second and get on the first plane out of Somalia. But I was holding on to my identity, my freedom, what I had been working toward my entire adult life—as well as panic that it was all about to disappear with the birth of my child.
A Somali doctor checks for a heartbeat as Abbas Nishe, one and a half, struggles to fight severe malnutrition in Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, August 25, 2011. The hospital is overflowing with people sleeping on the floors throughout most wards.
I entered the third room to the left off a long, window-lined hall. A woman named Rukayo and her sister Lu prayed over Rukayo’s son, Abbas Nishe, one and a half, who was dying from complications associated with severe malnutrition. His skeletal chest pumped up and down as he labored to breathe; his eyes rolled back into his head and then forward again as he focused on his mother. I kneeled down beside the two women, introduced myself as a journalist, and asked permission to photograph. They agreed. I began shooting as the two women put their hands on Abbas’s tiny frame and then onto his mouth. Each time his eyes rolled back into his head, the women thought he was dead. To my horror, they began closing his tiny mouth with their hands, a premature death ritual evidencing a loss of hope. They were covering his eyes and closing his mouth, and as I photographed I felt my own baby kicking and twisting about in my uterus, making me acutely aware of the life inside me. It was the most incongruous, most unfair juxtaposition of life and death I had felt since I began my journey as a photographer.