Impossible Odds

story, but he effectively communicated his mindset when he took off the Mine Risk Education bracelet and used it to fasten a front bipod to the barrel of a machine gun.
    Well, I thought, s o much for winning hearts and minds. More than anything so far, that little detail made everything I hoped to accomplish in Africa just seem ridiculous. If we were truly dealing with people who could take our help with one hand and do this to us with the other, then what was the point of my presence there? I reached out for my usual internal assurance that the work was worthwhile even if many local people didn’t acknowledge it. Our work could be called infidel propaganda and every other hateful thing a person could dream up, but surely some of these men had relatives we had saved from the land mines and other unexploded munitions littering the region. The fact that every one of them had at least one relative with one or more limbs blown off was a virtual certainty. Surely, I thought, no matter what they think of Americans or Westerners in general, everybody can agree on thedesirability of keeping one’s arms and legs? Then I remembered the Islamist punishment for theft. So maybe not.
    When I was able to exchange a few words with Poul about it, I whispered to him, “Poul, that boy’s bracelet—”
    “Yeah. I know. I saw it.”
    “It’s from our—”
    “I know.”
    “But he must have—”
    “I know, Jess.”
    “I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
    “Welcome to the club. Listen. We have to establish some ground rules.”
    “For what?”
    “To keep up our spirits. You know, places we will not allow ourselves to go, not with each other and not with ourselves.”
    Ground rules to guide our thinking? This was one my dad would understand. So there in plain sight of these armed men and their constant shouting spats we whispered our way through the resolution until we fleshed out the general idea: You can acknowledge feeling fear and loneliness. You can get mad, bored, resentful, anything at all. But despair is the one big no-no. Despair isn’t just a mood or a state of mind, it’s a disease and it can kill you by making you give up. Despair is a killer as sure as the Black Plague.
    We agreed not to allow hopelessness into our conversation, and neither would we permit it in our thinking. We resolved not to indulge in a single moment of it, because while it couldn’t be of any positive use, it could surely start either of us down a path to disaster.
    So. Good, then. No despair. It’s a fine idea, to be sure. But we all recognize how easy it is to say that, yes?
    I was still longing for the fundamental dignity of feeling reasonably clean; the filth covering us only added to the demoralizationwe were trying to combat. When at last they relented and allowed us a bucket of washing water, though, I was pushed into the next concern: how to wash myself and maintain a reasonable level of modesty.
    It was a matter of common sense—there were a couple of dozen males milling around the Banda place, most were loaded on khat, and they all appeared capable of rape if the notion struck them. I couldn’t leave the camp, so what to do? Bathe with my clothing on?
    The best solution I could come up with was to take my small share of the bathing water and carry the little bucket over to a deep depression in the earth that allowed me to stay down out of sight from ground level, if I squatted low enough. So with the men close by in all directions, I undressed down in that hole and ran water over myself as well as I could, spending more energy in watching out for any male who showed too much interest than I did in the bathing itself. When I finally ran out of water and was ready to climb back out, I felt as if was a notch or two cleaner, but the anxiety of the experience made the payoff of getting clean hardly worth the effort or the risk.
    Next a new man arrived on the scene and came over to introduce himself. He was an older man who walked with a slight bend to his spine, and when he opened his mouth to speak it was obvious his top teeth were missing. But he spoke passable English and told us his name was Jabreel.
    Jabreel identified himself as a “neutral translator” from Mogadishu. The strangest thing about Jabreel was that he immediately began to ingratiate himself with us; it was unlike anything we’d experienced in this place. Then there was the idea of a “neutral translator” and whatever that might actually mean.
    “These