Djibouti

It's true that the tiny nation of Djibouti, the former French Somaliland, is sometimes considered a joke. The Ethiopians, in particular, like sitting up on their cool plateau and snickering about their eastern neighbor (and outlet to the sea), where summer temperatures routinely hit 125 degrees. These winter days, the coastal heat doesn't rise much above 90, though, and as torpid backwaters go, I've seen worse. Port Sudan comes to mind.

Djibouti will never be the Riviera of the Horn of Africa, as the local boosters would like to believe. The land and climate are just too harsh. But its strategic location has ensured a certain level of prosperity, and the easy-going Somalis, Afars and a few left-over French go along and get along, and Joe and I are enjoying our one-week visit here. (Joe wants to come back sometime and ride the decrepit train down from Ethiopia; most freight is now hauled by truck.)

We're here to research a spy thriller I plan to write about an intelligence officer at Camp Lemonier, the U.S. military "anti-terrorism" base established in 2002. The 500-acre base is run by the Navy and houses a multi-service task force of 1,500 military and civilian personnel. They gather intelligence and coordinate anti-radical-Islamist operations in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. We could see the base, next to the airport, when our Ethiopian Airlines flight landed on Wednesday.

We have observed that few Americans ever venture off the self-contained base, and that figures in my plot. In my story, one U.S. intelligence officer, a linguist, connects with some local people, off-base, and his life gets interesting. (We've seen plenty of French Foreign Legionaires in bars and restaurants in Djibouti City---they train near here---but only a handful of Americans.)

It's a good thing that Joe speaks French. English is of limited use here, and my Somali and Afar are poor. It's the French who pretty much keep Djibouti and its 700,000 inhabitants afloat, donating over half the national budget. NATO needs a stable friend to ensure open shipping lanes on the Suez-Red Sea route. And the U.S., which pays an undisclosed amount (thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars) for leasing Camp Lemonier, is now a major underwriter, too.
(Today the request I made last week to the U.S. Embassy for an interview with the political or public affairs officer was politely turned down. I have not been accredited as a journalist with the Djibutian government, and that could take time. Yeah yeah.)

Except during the midday heat, Djibouti City has a pleasant feel to it. The "French Quarter" has a shaded central square with hotels and cafes around it. The buildings are mostly Moorish arcaded structures with louvered windows up above, many of the windows sealed since the (merciful) advent of air-conditioning. On Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath, we walked around the nearly deserted streets and looked at the fall of the sunlight on the whitewashed houses. It was quite beautiful, a kind of Saracenic-Edward Hopper scene. (Hopper:" All I ever wanted in life was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.")

Our hotel, the Ali Sabieh, is a cool and comfortable oasis ($80 a night) a few blocks from the square, with a friendly staff---the night clerk addresses us as "bro"---and a good Italian restaurant on the ground floor. Since nearly everything is imported, Djibouti is a bit expensive. The butter we spread on our morning baguette comes from Normandy. There's a Sheraton out by the city's murky beach on the Arabian Sea where rooms go for $180. We hiked out there to spot Americans and of course to arch a supercilious eyebrow. But the people baking (on astroturf!) around the hotel pool all looked and sounded French. Also, Djibouti City's one "upscale" hotel looked disconcertingly like a $39.95 Days Inn in Orlando.

Djibouti City's productivity index is not what it might be (if the French ever cut them off, these people would be in trouble), chiefly on account of "chat." Or, as it's sometimes spelled, "qat," or "khat," and pronounced with an Arabic guttural. Nearly every Djiboutian male is addicted to this mild narcotic leaf, as are a few women. Every afternoon around one, the chat plane lands from Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Distribution is swift to hundreds of stalls throughout the city, and male Djibutians settle in for their three or four hours of "grazing" and getting stoned. They are stunningly unselfconscious about it all. Workers do it, taxi drivers do it, cops do it. Walk through the "African Quarter" of the city, and nearly every man's cheek bulges with chat as they chomp and chew and squeeze away, washing it all down with water or Coca Cola.

Many are soon glassy-eyed and then stay that way. Around the main market, by Hamoudi Mosque, men lounge on sheets of cardboard among the dust and flies, and as you pass they look up and grin and say, "Bonjour," or "Heeeyyy!" Joe says "bonjour" or "heeeyyy" back and asks if he can take a picture. Some guys say sure, some waggle a finger nuh-uh. He's got some great, appalling shots, and they will show up on the blog after we get to Bangkok February 29.

Although we always like to sample the local cuisine, we've left chat alone---partly because we've heard that the first time you try it it can give you the trots. Why invite that when inadvertence is just around the corner? Anyway, the chat phenomenon here---as well as in Eastern Ethiopia---is no endless Summer of Love. Men here spend an estimated 20 percent of their incomes on chat, and wives and children sometimes go hungry. It's a terrible social problem, yet any government that tried to do anything about it would face revolt.

Nor have we spent much time visiting what Lonely Planet rather sweetly calls Djibouti's "disheveled nightlife." For reasons of scholarship, we did make a quick Saturday-night tour of two clubs, the Golden and the Marais. My perhaps clouded recollection of after-dark dishevelment up on the plateau in the early sixties is that it was somewhat more elegant than this, more Cole Porter-like---"love that's only slightly spoiled." These Djibouti gals seem to have been coached by Donald Trump. It could be the lower altitude, or maybe we just live in a crasser time. Joe and I did not linger among the blue lights, perfumed air, disco-beat thwump, and six-dollar bottles of beer. Doing so could only have led to disappointment on multiple levels.