Mom and Dad had many adopted sons and daughters. Mom and Dad were adopted. Undeniably, Abdi loved Mom. Abdi was also one of Mom's pet names for her real son, Andy.
Abdi
His face was terribly long and depressed. There were none of the usual jokes. His driving could almost be called sedate, and while I quite enjoyed the unusually reasonable speed and careful driving I was uneasy. Nothing very much, in the normal course of things, disturbed our project driver’s panache or his gallant Bedou style of driving. We depended on his self-confidence to deliver his services, from finding cigarettes on the black market to knowing which official to bribe. Every humanitarian aid organisation has an Abdi in Somalia, a Salvatore in Haiti, a Mohamed in Indonesia, a St. Pierre in Guinea Conakry. Nothing should disturb Abdi’s cheerful confidence to produce whatever was asked for.
He had the physique of a nomad, brought up on an inadequate diet of goat’s milk, millet porridge, some meat . He was not tall, and very slender, with a very dark skin scarified skin. He came from a quite low caste Somali clan, the Afgaal, who some years later took power and ruled Mogadishu. Whenever we caught film footage of men brandishing Kalashnikovs on the top of their “technicals”, the four-wheel vehicles taken from aid workers like us and transformed into fighting machines, we peered eagerly at the screen to catch a glimpse of him. A colleague who had returned to Mogadishu briefly for Oxfam reported seeing him on the roof of a technical, turban and kikoi flying, waving and smiling at her – but they all looked the same, these men with the qat-induced grin.
At the time he worked for me, through most of the 1980s he seldom showed the extreme emotion that took him almost to the verge of lunacy. But a small transgression by a traffic (an unmentionable description of Abdi’s mother, a request for a bribe at a moment deemed unsuitable) had Abdi driving up and down wildly trying to drive over the terrified man’s foot
By Eve Hall
Abdi
His face was terribly long and depressed. There were none of the usual jokes. His driving could almost be called sedate, and while I quite enjoyed the unusually reasonable speed and careful driving I was uneasy. Nothing very much, in the normal course of things, disturbed our project driver’s panache or his gallant Bedou style of driving. We depended on his self-confidence to deliver his services, from finding cigarettes on the black market to knowing which official to bribe. Every humanitarian aid organisation has an Abdi in Somalia, a Salvatore in Haiti, a Mohamed in Indonesia, a St. Pierre in Guinea Conakry. Nothing should disturb Abdi’s cheerful confidence to produce whatever was asked for.
He had the physique of a nomad, brought up on an inadequate diet of goat’s milk, millet porridge, some meat . He was not tall, and very slender, with a very dark skin scarified skin. He came from a quite low caste Somali clan, the Afgaal, who some years later took power and ruled Mogadishu. Whenever we caught film footage of men brandishing Kalashnikovs on the top of their “technicals”, the four-wheel vehicles taken from aid workers like us and transformed into fighting machines, we peered eagerly at the screen to catch a glimpse of him. A colleague who had returned to Mogadishu briefly for Oxfam reported seeing him on the roof of a technical, turban and kikoi flying, waving and smiling at her – but they all looked the same, these men with the qat-induced grin.
At the time he worked for me, through most of the 1980s he seldom showed the extreme emotion that took him almost to the verge of lunacy. But a small transgression by a traffic (an unmentionable description of Abdi’s mother, a request for a bribe at a moment deemed unsuitable) had Abdi driving up and down wildly trying to drive over the terrified man’s foot
By Eve Hall
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