Along Somali Coast, Deadly Waters Exact a Small but Grievous Toll

By MARC LACEY

HAFUN, Somalia, Jan. 12 - Mahado Muse spoke in a monotone, recalling the moment the water poured into her seaside house here on the easternmost point in Africa, a few hours after the tsunami waves stormed through Asia. With just a moment to act, she grabbed her little girl but could not manage to carry her older son, Mohamed, who drowned.

Ms. Muse had a hand over her face as she recounted the events from a shack where she is now mourning little Mohamed's death. She said she could not get the awful moment out of her head, the split second in which she was forced to choose one child over another.

As far as its death toll goes, Somalia escaped from the raging sea relatively unscathed. The tsunami that has taken more than 150,000 lives in Asia was greatly reduced as it crashed onto the shores of the country with the longest coastline in Africa. The authorities estimate that Somalia suffered 300 deaths, although the number of missing people exceeds that figure and there is no real government in the country to tally the numbers.

Hafun, a patch of land jutting out into the Indian Ocean near the Horn of Africa's tip, was one of the worst-hit places. Most of the town was leveled. When the waters receded, 19 people were found dead and another 132 were missing, minimal compared with Asia but a sizable trauma for a close-knit town of 3,000.

"Hafun is like the villages in Sri Lanka and Indonesia that got hit so hard," said Maulid Warfa, a spokesman for the World Food Program. "But there was no government for the people of Hafun to turn to. Nobody cries for them. Hafun is like a forgotten dot on the map."

Hafun, which depends on fishing, lost the only mechanic in town, a man known universally as Ali Mechanic, who somehow kept the aging engines on fishing boats running. Ali Mechanic's young son, a boy who hung around his father and might have taken up his trade one day, was swept away in the ocean as well.

Even if Ali Mechanic had survived, he would have had far less business. Scores of fishing boats were destroyed by the waves, some of them dragged a mile inland.

Ali Mohamed Ali was fishing when the tsunami arrived, and he and his brother were thrown overboard. They both grabbed a raft but the brother, Jama, eventually slipped off and disappeared. Mr. Ali managed to hang on, for several days, in the sea. He said he survived by eating some dates that had been in his pocket. Another fisherman rescued him, groggy but still alive.

"I'll have to go fishing again," Mr. Ali said. "But not now. It's too soon."

Somalis are used to suffering. Their country has stumbled along in anarchy since the last national government fell in 1991. Several years of drought have decimated the livestock population, especially the camels that are such an integral part of the lifestyle of the nomads. And now a tsunami from far away has come crashing to shore.

It took days after Dec. 26 for the people of Hafun to manage to get word out that their town had been submerged. There are other villages farther south, closer to Mogadishu, that relief workers have not yet reached because of clan warfare.

As for Hafun, it lost its mosque, a seaside structure made of concrete. Sheik Ahmed Da'ar, the local imam, sat in the sand one afternoon this week beside the ruins and lamented the fact that God had visited such wrath on the people of Hafun and that the people had not seemed to get the message.

What disturbed him is that the people of Hafun were not coming to what was left of the mosque in large numbers after the disaster. Some were probably scared of being so close to the sea. Some were undoubtedly busy rebuilding their lives, preferring to pray at home. But Sheik Ahmed was frustrated that more people were not interested in hearing his message that their own sinful behavior had prompted the sea to swell.

"This was God's act," he said. "It was his order for this to happen. It happened because he wanted it to happen to the people here."

Source: New York Times, Jan. 12, 2005