It's not easy growing up in Wajir.
Perhaps that's why you give up on hard work right away and become an adult without going through the carefree, free, and dreamy years of childhood.
There's little to dream about when your father puts a cowhide whip in your hands at the age of five to drive skeletal cows to the watering hole, the only pool of water six kilometers from home.
Carefree is not having time to play soccer with your peers, not being accepted at school not because of a lack of will or talent, but because you don't have shoes.
It's seeing your older brother leave home to join the Somali youth group Al Shabaab across the border.
And dreams?
There is no room for imagination on the edge of a nothingness called desert. They are all desires that are all too real, even at the age of ten: chicken and fries, a pack of cigarettes, a cell phone. Some are content with a plate of beans a week, a drag on a cigarette, peeking at a game from the doorway of the pub where kids are not allowed.

Moko and Kali are always there, outside the Ngamia Club.
They laugh, joke, and tease each other, then become serious and sad when a pot-bellied man in a suit and tie walks by and they ask him for twenty shillings for a plate of beans, an unfiltered Rooster cigarette “for my dad who's a shepherd,” or a Coca-Cola.
They keep a watchful eye out for the police, especially when it starts to get dark.
Some games end too late.
“It's not like that in Nairobi, there are places where they let you in even if you're small. Just ask a man to take you with him.”
“Here comes the smart one!” Moko jumps up, turning abruptly and recognizing his friend Hussein.
“And how do you convince him, mister Know-It-All?”
“There are adults who are much worse off than us, rookie... just give him a hundred shillings and tell everyone you're his son. I did it!”
Hussein draws strength from his eleven years, one more than his two companions in misfortune, but also from having lived for three months with his mother in Eastleigh, the Somali neighborhood of Nairobi.

She brought home a different man every night. None of them were his father, but any one of them could have been.
One day she sent him back to Wajir, to his grandparents.
“In Nairobi, there's everything a boy needs, everything is there waiting for you. All you need is money.”
One evening, Hussein's grandfather, drunk on chang'aa, slipped into his bed and tried to rape him. Fortunately, his grandmother noticed and knocked him out with a pot.
Since then, he stays out until at least midnight, when he knows the old man won't wake up until the rooster crows.
And the rooster sleeps with Hussein.
An 18-year-old on a motorcycle gave him a small bottle with a brown, sticky substance at the bottom.
“Breathe through your nose and mouth.”
Dizziness, vertigo, nausea, electricity in his body.
But also a little lightheartedness, freedom, dreams.

Now he has to fork out fifty shillings to get that little bottle.
Sometimes he thinks it's disgusting, sometimes he would kill his grandfather to get one.
But maybe his grandfather would kill him anyway.
That evening, Hussein, Moko, and Ali were waiting for the Champions League semi-final: Liverpool vs. Barcelona.
Beer and bets were flowing at the Ngamia Club.
Everyone was a Liverpool fan, but no one believed in a miracle.
Everyone except Big Tumbo, who was taking bets on Barcelona.
“It's an easy win, Barcelona will qualify, take half of what you bet!”
Big Tumbo has money, with all the cows and shacks he owns. And he's not one to joke around, especially before he's drunk.
When Liverpool scored the fourth goal, the pub was full of incredulous, enthusiastic but desperate fans.
Some had lost their entire week's wages, others had bet two or three goats.

Big Tumbo slipped into the latrine, counted the money and realized it was more than two hundred thousand.
He came out and tried to shake off his disappointment, while the song “You'll Never Walk Alone” blared from the TV.
Moko, Kali, and Hussein were listening too, cheering and yawning, clinging to the bars of a window.
“I'll buy everyone a round of Guinness!”
He eagerly downed a pint and took advantage of the crowd at the bar to make a run for it with his precious loot.
He left the pub with the bundle held together by a rubber band in one hand and his car keys in the other. Caught up in the heat of the moment, he didn't see the root of the only plant in the parking lot in the dark and tripped over it. Unfortunately, the corner of the rear fender of his Toyota Hi-Lux was right in the direction of his huge bald head.
A sharp blow to the back of his head, right in the groove of the middle temporal artery.
Everything went dark, silent, terminal.
The bundle flew behind one of the Hi-Lux's wheels.
Moko saw the whole scene and pulled Kali from the grate, while Hussein, who was taller, continued to chant “iugnevauaccalon... iugnevauaccalon.”
“Hey, where are you going...”
Instinctively, the gang leader follows the two who run breathlessly out of the parking lot, onto the road leading to the hardware store, turn into the rag alley and take shelter in the cave formed by two sheets of metal wedged between the columns of a building under construction.
“Now take us to Nairobi and we'll buy everything a boy needs, because that's where he's waiting for us,” said Moko, panting.
Before Hussein could ask what kind of hallucinogenic scorpion had stung him, Moko pulled the wad of cash from the pocket of his torn Bermuda shorts.
He divided it into roughly three parts.
“Count!”
“I can only count to twenty,” said Kali.
“After twenty, remember one and start again.”

As the three counted in pagan silence, watched only by a live but badly decomposed cat, outside the parking lot there was pandemonium unlike anything seen at the final whistle of the Liverpool-Barcelona match.
There were at least a dozen of them around Big Tumbo's lifeless body.
It looked like a rugby scrum.
“Fuck, he's not breathing!”
“Who cares, where's the money?”
“He doesn't have it in his pockets.”
“He might have put it in the car.”
“Where are the keys?”
“Look around... fuck... there were so many of them.”
A thunderous voice lashed the humid air of yet another sultry, rainless night.
“Whoever finds the keys, hand them over immediately, the vehicle is under seizure.”
The deputy police chief was off duty, but he returned immediately.
The crowd thinned out.
For a few minutes, everyone wandered around the parking lot with their eyes down and the light from their cell phones following them.
Then some headed home, others to their cars, and still others returned to the pub.
An hour and a half later, an ambulance arrived to take away Big Tumbo's body, and the deputy police chief took the car to the station.
Moko: 88,000
Hussein: 67,000
Kali: 2 times 20,000 + 9,000
Total: 204,000 shillings, in whatever denominations exist in Kenya.
“When does the first matatu leave for Nairobi?”
“At 5:30, but the ticket office opens at 4.”
“What time is it now?”
“Who knows... it was almost 1:00 a.m. when everyone was singing.”
They stopped by Hussein's house, where he grabbed a backpack, a pair of sunglasses, and a felted sweater. Then they went to Moko's father's barn, where they drank water without dead flies in it and took a hat and a small horoma knife. Finally, they stopped by Kali's house, but stayed outside because a candle was lit inside.
At 4:30 a.m., they bought three tickets to Nairobi for 5,400 shillings.
The ticket clerk didn't bat an eyelid, nor did the Madogashi Sacco conductor.
“In Garissa, you have to change and take the express to Nairobi. You'll arrive in Sonko before midnight, if all goes well.”
Yes, if all goes well. Two days earlier, at around the same time, a matatu with 22 people on board traveling from Garissa to Wajir had crashed into the trailer of a truck stopped on the side of the road. Fourteen people lost their lives. Among them was Kali's aunt.

(end of first episode – to be continued tomorrow)
Photo: Leni Frau