Word: somali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...drinking water runs out about 16 hours into the voyage, with the coast of Libya far behind and the old wooden boat chugging through the Mediterranean toward Sicily. But Abdi Salan Mohammed Hassan - a gangly, gentle, 23-year-old Somali man crammed into the open 12-m boat with scores of other Africans, all trying to smuggle themselves into Europe - isn't worried. It has taken him eight months to travel a 4,500-km route from Mogadishu and begin this perilous October crossing, and along the way he has gone without food and water plenty of times. His optimism...
...needs money to pay for his trip, and manages to raise $2,000 - as much as an average Somali earns in three or four years - by selling the small vegetable stall his parents passed on to him before his 20th birthday. He gets advice on the best escape route from someone in the neighborhood whose relative has just made the journey. In the past, fleeing Somalis would travel by boat through the Suez Canal, but now that Egypt has tightened its border controls, the preferred route is overland to Libya, then by boat. His mother tries to talk...
...most direct route to Libya, but learns it is too dangerous for a Somali to travel there without proper documentation. For more than a month, he goes every other day to the Sudanese consulate to request an entry visa. Finally an official makes it clear that if he doesn't want to wait indefinitely, it will cost some extra cash. He slips the official $100, pays another $90 to a uniformed man at the border, and after four days on the bus arrives in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. It is April 8. He catches a city bus to the International...
...Federal Government's standoff with a religious group in Waco, Texas. But the experience that perhaps marked him most came six months later, in October 1993, in downtown Mogadishu. He and his troops were there when 18 soldiers died in an effort to snatch a Somali warlord--a tough day immortalized in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down. Boykin told a Florida audience last year that he collapsed in his bunk that day, angry that God had let him down. "There is no God," Boykin sobbed in the wake of their deaths. "If there was a God, he would...
...knew that my god was bigger than his," said Lieut. General William Boykin, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, referring to a Somali warlord he once crossed swords with. The echo of a famous dog-food commercial was unintentional, we must hope. Presumably, Boykin's God does not eat Ken-L Ration. But maybe Boykin does so himself, because he's a mighty frisky fella...