Impossible Odds

was simple: The term “child soldier” was a misnomer. This boy’s childhood was long gone. He had a khat user’s black holes where his eyes ought to have been. I had no doubt he was capable of forgetting why we were kidnapped in the first place and killing us for his own amusement. Even if he could control his impulses, he and all the other armed men were so offhanded in the handling of their weapons that even now with the terror ride over, my experience of the fear of accidental death through lunatic carelessness was at least as bad as the fear of execution.
    I asked for permission to use the “toilet,” and upon receiving a grunt of affirmation, tried to ask if there was any toilet paper. Nobody had any idea what I meant. I knew the cultural custom was to use a small bottle of water and one’s bare fingers, but as a Westerner the idea was highly unattractive. I wound up tearing the cardboard liner of the cookie package into strips. After that there was nothing more to do but pick a bush. Within the coming days I would end up ripping my thin scarf into narrow strips for personal use, one strip at a time.
    Fortunately, the men all appeared to be ignoring me for the moment, so I selected a bush for its remote location and walked over to it shaking with nerves, trying to watch from the corner of my eyes for any men who had followed me. This began a daily grind of petty humiliations over my need for personal privacy and the general lack of it.
    At the bush I looked out and saw a nearby road that ran away, tantalizingly away. I won’t deny it occurred to me to run, an instinctive impulse. But in the next moment I also realized any escape attempt on my part would only leave Poul to their revenge. As for me, out there in the middle of nowhere without identification oreven money for bribes, there was no such thing as a lone escape. Any such attempt would fail. A minute later I turned my back on the road, the beautiful road, and resumed my place among the squabbling Somali kidnappers. I could only hope Poul would feel the same loyalty if the idea of bolting occurred to him.
    The skies opened up, and a chilling rain began to pour, quickly soaking us. We weren’t given any form of shelter, and were left to a single sleeping mat. They made me lie down on half of the mat and pull the other half up over me, but that made little difference. I was already drenched and freezing. This new element of discomfort plunged me into that place where the distinction between the mind and the body blurs. I discovered the odd fact that shivering from the cold somehow made the shivering from fear feel much worse. I curled into a ball and felt my muscles tightening like weighted ropes.
    Although I couldn’t talk with Poul, I knew he wasn’t being treated any better than I was. My emotions were running the gamut. Even though I was grateful to have someone for company in this thing because enduring it alone would be worse, I also wanted to slap him and scream. He had repeatedly met my concerns over this trip with casual dismissals, as did some of my colleagues. In those moments I felt a strong sense of betrayal.
    It felt as if my life as a “good girl” had sent me down the wrong path, leaving me eager to cooperate instead of eager to use common sense. I racked my brain to answer why I went along with this moronic plan to stick our toes over the Green Line and put ourselves in grabbing range of people who either saw us as nothing more than an economic opportunity worth killing over or regarded our very existence as an affront to their ideas of the Deity.
    Had my willingness to replace my judgment with his been some sort of father figure thing? Not only was Poul of my father’s generation, but throughout most of my lifetime he had lived inAfrica. He and his wife had raised their child there without major mishaps or deadly cultural conflicts. I guess when it came down to it, I had simply decided he knew Africa’s people better than I did.
    But Poul’s career had largely played out at a time when the hegemony of Western culture and ingrained fear of American military might have restrained the hands of many would-be attackers. In more recent years, the psychological barriers had become walls filled with holes.
    The view of my new world was clear from the low vantage point of a kidnap victim on that soaking mat. What we had failed to realize in taking this trip was the simple but vital fact that although our organization had been