Impossible Odds

bare hands. How could that be a problem?
    You can fight ignorance with education and you can ease poverty with financial opportunity, but as we’ve all heard it said, stupidity isn’t fixable. Boy, was that ever playing out in front of me. A few dollars worth of cooking and eating utensils would have benefited the health of everyone there, but for that you might have to forgo a few mouthfuls of khat, and that would be asking too much.
    I couldn’t find any compassion in myself for these men, and that was unusual for me. But their conduct wasn’t just the result of poverty; it was sheer idiocy to force a large group of people to eat from what amounted to a common bowl. It would have been astounding not to be sick.
    There was no way to judge how the others felt. Their khat use numbed them to their true condition. It also seemed to numb them to everything that didn’t have to do with guzzling soft drinks, chain-smoking cigarettes, and babbling hyperventilated monologues at one another while nobody seemed to listen. It’s a strange drug. Give a man enough khat to chew and he can go completely paranoid over what your motives may be or what you “meant” bywhat you just said—all the while remaining unconcerned about bleeding from a wound.
    The other assault on our health was the dismaying fact that Poul and I had to make do with scraps of cookie wrappers or bits of cloth for toilet tissue. The indigenous plants out there don’t provide paperlike leaves, so their method of cleaning up after defecation was that method mentioned earlier, using a combination of water and their bare fingers. If they washed afterward at all, I didn’t see them, and it would have been with the tainted diesel water anyway.
    Strange, Jessica, you’ve got a bad tummyache  . . .
    Poul wasn’t on any medication when we were taken, and so far he was doing a bit better, but we’d both been subjected to the same foul conditions. His body was objecting as well.
    I heard a commotion over near the vehicles and saw about ten of the guards standing helplessly around. After a few moments I realized the friction was over keys being locked inside the car. Poul lifted his head off the sleeping mat and asked me what was going on.
    “They’ve locked their keys inside the car.” I sniffed. “It’s official. We’ve been kidnapped by the world’s dumbest pirates.” The joke wasn’t funny, but we laughed about it for a long time just because of the subtle defiance in it and because it felt so good to have an emotion that didn’t involve concealing terror or swallowing outrage.
    But then, as if one moment of levity magnetically attracted its opposite, Abdi started getting repeated calls on his cell phone, and each call left him more upset than the last. Abdi’s ring tone itself was no help, being a recording of a Somali news report. Amid the words we didn’t know there was always one we did: “Kalishnikov,” a more formal name for the AK-47. We were surrounded by the weapons, and the terrible guns were to be seen everywherein Somalia. I suppose anybody in that country would recognize the word.
    We knew it wasn’t good for Abdi to get upset because any time he did, somebody had to pay. Jabreel made himself scarce while Abdi cooed reassurance into the phone, then hung up and found somebody to scream at, only to be interrupted when another call came in and the process repeated.
    Kalishnikov. Down Africa way, you might say we’ve all got a little Russian in us, when it comes to the daily awareness of this particular killing weapon. Aficionados the world over appreciate its ability to deliver massive killing force, something that is especially nice when the forces of individual liberty are beset by forces of tyranny. The darker reality is criminals love them for their power to transform anyone—even a child—into a true force of doom.
    All of this and more springs to mind for anyone who’s been down there long enough to notice that the scenery might change a dozen ways, but yet another AK-47 was never far away. And there was seldom only one.
    We could tell by Abdi’s level of deference it was the Chairman calling each time—Abdi was never obsequious unless he was high enough to feel benevolent and had plenty of khat left over for later, or when he was talking to his boss.
    Suddenly I didn’t feel the need to figure out what every word Abdi was speaking might mean. It was probably better not to know the details. We’d already heard