For three hours cinematographer Matt Davis and I have been sitting in a hot shipping container which serves as a military official's office in Mogadishu airport. Being here is not optional – we've been told we are not allowed to leave. Three and a half hours earlier we had wrapped up an interview with Somalia's drought envoy, Abdirahman Abdishakur, a senior official who was key to our story about the current hunger crisis.
We were filming a sequence of the envoy's car driving away through a checkpoint when an African Union soldier walked up to Matt and started berating him for filming the checkpoint. Matt tried to explain he was filming the car not the soldiers but the officer wouldn't buy it. He dragged us back to his office and demanded to see the footage.
We offered to delete anything that would compromise the security of operations at Mogadishu's highly secure airport compound, which two days earlier had come under attack by Al Shabaab militants. That wasn't good enough, he insisted. He flung wild accusations at us – including that we were spies. It was quite maddening when all we were doing was trying to film a story about the longest drought in the country's history which has killed more than 40-thousand people.
Eventually – at the six-hour mark — we got to the bottom of his problem. In the background of one of Matt's shots of the car driving away an African Union soldier was sitting next to a Somali woman. It was apparently an inappropriate and possibly compromising situation for the soldier. We agreed to delete that image but they insisted on taking our camera's SD card. We eventually got the non-offending shots back but it wasn't without a lot of yelling, placating, and waiting. As we walked out of the shipping container we were fuming. Welcome to Mogadishu, we thought. This was only our second day in the country.
I had been wanting to do this story since last year when aid agencies began warning that Somalia was on the brink of famine, yet most Australians had no idea there was a deadly crisis unfolding on the Horn of Africa. This was one of the most challenging assignments I've ever done – from logistics, to security threats, to heartbreaking stories from the people who, despite hardship beyond what you or I could comprehend, are resilient, determined, and, for the most part, extremely kind.
Somalia is one of the most dangerous places on earth. The Al Qaeda affiliate terrorist group Al Shabaab controls large chunks of the country, and regularly carries out attacks in Mogadishu. We spent a lot of time trying to work out how to do this trip safely. Matt and I have done hostile environment courses, we did a thorough risk assessment, and I spoke to more than a dozen journalists and aid workers who had been to Somalia recently to get the lay of the land. Ultimately, we decided it was risky, but doable.
From Mogadishu, we flew down to Dolow, south-western Somalia where more than 150-thousand people have fled to camps from areas decimated by the drought, and often under the oppressive control of Al Shabaab. We were hosted by the World Food Program and travelled everywhere in armoured Land Rovers with two truck loads of armed guards.
Looking at a map, the tiny town of Dolow is under government control, and Al Shabaab controlled territory is more than 100 kilometres away. But the area in between is classified as "mixed control", a bit like no man's land. I asked our lead security guard how far away Al Shabaab are likely to be, "200 kilometres?" I asked. He laughed out loud. "More like 20," he said.
Al Shabaab is an insurgent group that imposes taxes on the populations it controls, forcibly recruits soldiers, and inflicts brutal punishments on those who don't obey. The insurgents live among the community, and sometimes people don't even know who is and who isn't a supporter of the militant group. The drought envoy, Abdirahman Abdishakur, had a cabinet colleague who was killed by his niece. "When you live that reality, you don't know who you trust," he said.
For security reasons, we were only able to stay at any one location for an hour or two before we had to move, in the hope that if any "bad guys" found out we were there and wanted to come and cause problems, we would be gone by the time they mobilised. This made doing a character-driven story – where you need to spend time with people to truly get to know them and film their lives – incredibly difficult.
On the first half day we filmed in a stabilisation clinic, a place which truly broke my heart. The 20-bed ward had 30 patients, and every day the doctors and nurses have to make the devastating decision about which starving child gets a bed, and which one can hopefully be treated as an outpatient and still survive.
The mothers there were incredibly strong – the first mum I met was Hafey, mother to nine kids, she was with her youngest Kalson, a two-year-old girl who had been dangerously ill.
Her shoulder blades and spine were clearly visible through her skin, which was covered in a flaky rash. She also had oedema – a condition where the body swells up as it doesn't have enough nutrients because the child hasn't had enough food to eat. The nurse said that if her mum had waited a day or two longer to bring her in she probably wouldn't have survived. What broke me was when the nurse told be how much she weighed – 6.9kgs. That is half of what my healthy two-year-old daughter weighs. I can't understand how in 2023 there are still children starving to death.
Hafey and Kalson's dad, Aden, however were happy because their daughter was getting treatment, and in the five days she had been in the clinic she had gone from being fed through a tube in her nose to drinking from a cup herself. I spent a lot of time thinking about the mums and kids who don't make it to the clinic.
On the second day in Dolow we went to an Internally Displaced People's camp where 30,000 people have fled drought and conflict. While we are filming at a communal water point where people are lining up with jerry cans, we saw a caravan of two dozen people on the horizon walking towards the camp on foot, with a number of children riding in donkey carts.
One of them was 30-year-old Aisha, who arrived with two of her kids – one-year-old Hamdo and two-year-old Mohamed. She has walked 300 km over 10 days. While we are talking she told me how there wasn't enough room in the donkey cart for her three and four-year-old daughters so she had to leave them behind with her husband. What an impossible choice for a mother to make – rather than watch four children starving, she leaves with the two youngest in the hope she can at least get help for them.
While we were talking, Aisha had been sitting down and was covered in a big colourful hijab. It was only when she got up and went to walk away that I caught a glimpse of her dress underneath. "Are you pregnant?" I asked. "Yes, seven months". Our security minders forced us to leave yet I couldn't believe I was walking away from this woman who had just walked for 300 km while pregnant. We made the decision to come back and find her again the next day.
We found Aisha in the same spot as the day before. She'd slept on a mat on the ground. All around her, new arrivals were erecting tents from branches and plastic sheets. Around 40 new huts had sprung up in the 24-hours we were away. We talked about her life back in her village under the oppressive control of Al Shabaab, how sleeping on the ground for 10 days had left her with a sore back, and how carrying her one-year-old daughter Hamdo, on the walk had left her with severe shoulder pain. Nevertheless, she was relieved to be in the camp, and said she was looking forward to giving birth to her fifth child in two months.
The conversation was all very serious until Hamdo started squeezing and hitting the microphone we had clipped to Aisha's hijab for the interview. For the first time Aisha smiled and we both laughed. Hamdo made me laugh a lot – she saw me sitting near a blanket and stomped over and grabbed it and walked away, staring at me as if to say "hey, that's mine!". She was sucking on a packet of Plumpy Sup – a nutritious peanut-based food that aid groups give to malnourished kids – and got a bit of it smeared on her arm. She came over to try to wipe it on her mum and again Aisha and I laughed. It was a nice reminder that kids, no matter where they are, will be kids.
Just as we were saying goodbye to Aisha our minder came up and told us – with an enormous sense of urgency – that we had to leave right now. One of our security guards had overheard a man on a phone telling someone that there were two foreigners in the camp and giving our exact location. We had no idea who the man was or who he was talking to but with Al Shabaab not far away our security team didn't want to take any chances and we were rushed into the armoured cars and driven away.
The trip was beset with highs and lows. After south-western Somalia we flew north to the relatively peaceful but drought-wracked territory of Somaliland. Somaliland declared itself independent from Somalia in 1991 but hasn't been internationally recognised.
The sense of freedom in the capital Hargeisa compared to Mogadishu was stark. For us, there was no need for armoured cars – we did have two armed security guards every time we left the city, but I think that was more for the purpose of job creation than actual security threat.
We spent three days filming with a family of pastoralists whose goat herd has been decimated by the drought. The father, Saleban, has only one third of his goats left – the rest had died during the drought. He has seven children to feed. He's a nomadic pastoralist so he lives in a makeshift tent in what feels like the middle of nowhere. The only place we could sleep while we stayed there was on the floor of a school in the nearest village.
Saleban quickly became one of our favourite people on the shoot. He let us into his world – we walked with him for hours while he took his goats to find water. He showed us how he has to hit tree branches with a stick to try to dislodge any remaining leaves so his goats have something to eat – all the grass and pasture died months ago. It's all back-breaking work, and Matt Davis did an utterly commendable job keeping up with Saleban and filming in the crappiest of conditions.
Matt had to pack the smallest kit because of the 20kg baggage limits on the internal UN flights, so he shot the whole story on two very basic DSLR kits and a drone, the latter of which died halfway through the shoot after getting pummelled by a desert dust storm. The filming conditions were among the worst we've ever experienced. Dust got into every bit of equipment. The temperature was in the high 30s every day, there was pretty much no shade. And as you can imagine filming during a hunger crisis there isn't a lot of good food around in most places. I am not complaining about any of this. We only had to live in those conditions for three weeks. Saleban and his family and millions of others battle this reality every day, with no end in sight.
We had spent nearly a day filming with the hospitable and animated Saleban when we sat down to do a formal interview. Having watched his daily routine I was struck by how challenging his life was, but it was only during the interview that the true depth of his hardship became apparent. He told us that since the drought started, his wife, and two of his children had died. He pointed over my shoulder to where the two children are buried. Later he took us over there, to a dry mound of earth covered in sticks.
I couldn't help but think later on, when the Somali Government and UN released an official death toll estimate for this crisis – 43,000 to date – that I'm pretty sure the deaths of Saleban's wife and two children would not have been officially recorded anywhere, which makes me wonder if that number is a gross underestimate.
We left Saleban and headed back to Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, to get some final general shots of the market before we flew out. We'd been away for three weeks and desperately wanted to go home. As Matt was filming a construction site, I saw a towering soldier walk towards Matt, and pull out his handcuffs. Just as I started to say "Hey Matt….." the soldier whacked the handcuffs against Matts wrist but stopped them just before they clicked shut. All both of us were thinking was, "F..k! If we get detained we are going to miss our flight home".
Another round of explaining, arguing, and placating and the soldier let us go, and we quickly got in the car and headed to the airport.
Watch Somalia: A Story of Survival on YouTube and ABC iview.
For more information on how to help visit the World Food Programme Somalia Emergency, Trocaire and Plan International.
