Chapter 1
A recently erected building, discreetly located, blended with its kind in the city of Hargeisa. It was an insignificant building to which you would give no more than a cursory glance than a lazy blandishment if you came across it. But it was an important building, a transformational structure, whose presence lifted Hargeisa to the rank of a true city, for no true city is complete without a sex clinic. The outer walls were still uncracked, its white coat pristine; the inside walls were covered with pictures of female anatomy, specifically, the female sex organ. Every picture highlighted a different part of the female sex organ, alternating from the right wall to the left wall. A curious piece of decoration, or information, depending on how you look at it, and Aaden did look at it, bemused, turning from picture to practitioner wondering what he would find next.
The practitioner was a guy shorter than Aaden, with glasses and receding curly hair, greying in spots. Aaden was his usual attractive self, sand coloured, his hair curled like submerged seaweed, though suffering showed in glimpses. He grimaced while he walked beside the short man, his gait still altered by the sexual disease dripping down his legs.
He was surprised that they didn't ask him questions, being ready to falsify his information, but this clinic took its cue from its foreign counterparts, and upheld anonymity for those who made use of their services. Fifteen year old Aaden found no obstacles to remedy, and while walking beside the practitioner, and the informative imagery, he started laughing.
'Which person that comes here needs education on female sex organs?'
He laughed again, his laugh of a rushing brook, exhilarating and spell binding, and the practitioner was momentarily too startled to respond. When he came out of stupor he asked: 'What did you say your name was again?'
'Mohamed,' Aaden answered, immediately lowering his voice.
The practitioner looked more closely at Aaden and the closer he looked the younger Aaden appeared to him.
'And how old are you?'
'Old enough to receive treatment anonymously. I thought this place was advanced to the point where they ask no questions?'
'It certainly is,' the man said hastily. 'Advanced in treatment but also in ideology. We don't want to know you, we just want to treat you. It's just here, the door on the right. And by the way, there will be a trainee with us. Hope that's okay.'
'As long as I get this fixed, you can do whatever, in whomever's presence.'
The practitioner opened the door. This was a regular treatment room with a desk, seats, a treatment table and a computer. There was a person sitting on one of the seats who recognised Aaden before Aaden recognised him.
'This is Ismail,' the practitioner said.
'Son of Harragodhe,' Aaden blurted out in surprise when he saw him.
'Aaden,' son of Harragodhe exclaimed, getting up to shake his fellow villager's hand.
The initial shocks of recognition passed and now more appropriate emotions began to settle in. Son of Harragodhe, who looked slim, stripped of most of his bodily fat, yet his lips retaining its fleshiness, stretched his lips out into a smirk. Aaden's smile was more of wariness and embarrassment. Both of their thoughts centred only on one thing.
'Why are you here, Mohamed?' the practitioner asked diplomatically, choosing to use the name given rather than the name he had just heard, and been deprived of. 'What is the matter?'
The three were now seated in a triangle. The practitioner was sitting on his computer. Aaden was sat next to it, while Ismail, son of Harragodhe, sat on the chair next to the door, with a curious gaze directed towards Aaden. Aaden, who had been stripped of the comfort of anonymity, shed confidence and security in equal measure and became awkward, shy. In short, he assumed his age.
'I don't know what I have.'
'You have a problem though. You're sick?'
'I may well be...unwell,' he said, evasively, feeling the drip excreting from his penis.
'Have you had sex with anyone?
Aaden pressed his tongue hard against one of his teeth, which he had a habit of doing when he was tense and taciturn.
'Yes.'
'Did you use protection?'
'What?'
'Did you use condoms?'
'I...I don't know what that is. What do you mean by protection?'
'I see,' said the doctor significantly. 'What do you have wrong with your penis?'
Aaden squirmed, glanced at Ismail, son of Harragodhe, who had a blank face on him, but all Aaden could see was a smirking devil.
'I have white stuff coming out of me. A constant discharge. It hurts when I walk and when I piss.'
The practitioner made some notes on his computer.
'Okay. Let's examine you. Come back behind this curtain and we'll have a look.'
'You want to look at me?'
'I'm sure I already know what you have.'
'So why do you want to look at me?' Aaden said in a near whisper. 'You want to humiliate me?'
'It's just protocol. We have to make sure what the ailment is before we can determine the medicine.'
'Just give me the strongest you have.'
'No,' the practitioner rejoined, smiling now. 'There is a protocol we have to follow.'
He stood up and went next to the treatment table.
'Come on,' he said, in a high voice, while gesturing with his head, like how people speak with children. 'Come.'
Sullen, like a reproached child, Aaden got up and ambled to the treatment table.
'Let us know when you're ready,' the practitioner said, and closed the curtain.
Aaden did not know it was going to be like this. He thought that he would simply tell the doctor what his problem was and the doctor would give him medicine. He hadn't expected the interrogation, the examination, but most of all he hadn't expected son of Harragodhe. His plans of dissimulation would be in tatters if he told and smelled blackmail in his near future. In truth he wanted to cry, or run or die, but did none of them. What he did was lay back on the treatment table with his sarong hoisted. 'Why would they wait outside if they are going to see me exposed anyway?' he asked himself, fuming.
'Ready?' the practitioner asked.
'Yes,' Aaden responded, aggressively.
They both came in, eyes discreetly averted from his exposed penis and from his accusatory look.
With gloves on the practitioner approached him.
'Let's have a look.'
He grabbed the sarong and flipped it inside out. A large stain was clearly visible. Aaden groaned from fury at his situation.
'Just like I thought,' the practitioner said happily.
'Then why not give the medicine directly instead of this charade?' Aaden hissed, barely able to control himself.
'We have to make sure.'
He took a plastic stick and looked at Aaden's penis. Aaden now experienced a rush of dread.
'It's just to make sure.'
He grabbed the oozing penis. Aaden looked from the practitioner to the smirking Ismail, son of Harragodhe, then back to the stick, moving in his direction… he started to cry. A cry more arresting than his laugh, more haunting than sorrowful, a cry that was not to end his misery, though it existed solely in order to do so, as tears are meant to stop the cause of their shedding. The sexual practitioner stopped what he was doing but he froze with the stick still inside the penis and accentuated, rather than ceased, the reason why he had started crying. The tears fell uselessly for the humiliation would not be washed away.
Hargeisa is one of the most modern cities in Somalia and as such, it can boast of some of its most trendy restaurants. In one of them, Aaden found himself with Ismail, feeling clean and reborn. The injection only took an hour to almost completely take away the drip, and with changed clothes, a changed perspective, with not a trace of his former humiliation, he was chatting merrily away with his cousin in this fine dining restaurant.
The restaurant was replete with the sheen of glass, fine woodcraft and other decorations of superb taste. Aaden had been to Hargeisa before, but still the contrast between this and his village made him more excited than he usually was.
'Warayhe! When did you start doing a job like that? I didn't know you had trained for that,' Aaden said, sipping on a virgin pina colada.
'I didn't have training,' Ismail said himself, excited that he had someone new to leech off of. His voice still had the bass of a fat man.
'No training ? Didn't you go to some medical school?'
'No. For what?'
'To look in my cock,' Aaden said softly and laughed. 'I need you to have some qualification before looking in my cock. Haha! But I still can't see the purpose of all that. If you know the disease, why do you need to look?'
'To make sure,' Ismail said, unsure, mechanically. 'That's what I'm told anyway. You have to make sure. How did you get that ?'
'Ah. It was…I wanted a cigarette, a
loosie.'
'A - loosie?' he repeated, confused for a moment and then exclaimed: 'No! You?' asked Ismail incredulously, looking at the handsome but child-like face of Aaden.
'Why?' a flaming but jocular sense of nationalism overcame Aaden. 'A Somali loosie is just as good as any other. I will not allow their bad-mouthing!'
'Why did you come to Hargeisa?'
'Hehe. Why did you? Did you leave this village for this career, in sexual disease?'
Ismail took a bite from his exotic fruit cocktail of mostly pineapple, mango and passion fruit, dripping with fruit syrup and the lovely black seeds they contained. He then told him about how he snuck out of his grandmother's house early one morning, how he hitched a ride on a truck to Hargeisa. How he made his way to his father's house. How he told his father that he would refuse to go back to the village because he wanted to make his way in this world 'as a man'. He didn't mention his new habit, but his slimmed down appearance said enough, and only spoke about needing money and how this new clinic appeared with wanted signs.
'They had a hard time finding people to do this job, and scrapped some of their requirements.'
'Like medical training?'
'Yes, like medical training,' Ismail said with a snigger. 'They decided to treat it like mechanics. People will, if they have enough heart, learn on the job like mechanics learn how to fix cars and such on the job.'
'And you learn how to fix by -'
'Hands on experience.'
There was a commotion on the other side of the restaurant. A group of young light complexioned Somali girls had gotten excited when their food was brought. They had ordered gourmet burgers for themselves but had requested that the restaurant put some traditional foods on another table. The foods were boiled camel meat, a light almost translucent sauce, with rice and dates, all in one huge colourful plate. This is another sign of a bustling city. Girls indulging in food porn - with a nationalistic tinge. All the girls had their phones out, taking pictures; making sure the pretty and colour coded hijabs were loose, making as if they were about to eat the traditional foods with their necks and hair strands showing. After a few minutes of cackle, excitement, and pornography, they went back to their table, with the burgers and fries, all in separate plates and continued their tourism in the land of their ancestry.
Aaden had been looking at this spectacle in mild disbelief.
'What language are they speaking?' he asked Ismail, as he watched the waiter take the traditional food away. 'What is that they just did ?'
Ismail took a moment to absorb their language and their looks.
'I don't know their language but what they just did, was express their Somaliness. Something we see a lot here. Foreign Somalis…' Almost imperceptibly Aaden slid him a couple dollar notes. Son of Harragodhe deftly took it while continuing to speak. '...Somalis who wish to show the Somalis back in their home countries how Somali they are in this country.'
'Our country.'
'Somalia.'
Both boys turned to watch the group of girls chatter in a strange language and eat unfamiliar foods imported from elsewhere. The comical group served as a good foil to dampen the odiousness of blackmail and the two boys enjoyed the rest of their time as family members do.
Chapter 2
In the village there were other forms of expressing somaliness, or Somalinimo, at hand. Mayloun, the young second wife of a middle aged husband, was in the middle of its matrimonial expression, enjoying the fruits and labour of her predecessor. Mayloun barely had to lift a finger because one of the fruits of the labours was the daughter born out of this first marriage. This daughter, Henna, was a sprightly, newly pubescent girl of twelve, and a nice obedient girl, who admired Mayloun's beauty, and when that happens, an easy life for the admired one follows. This girl did most of the housework, leaving Mayloun to search for pleasure, while the other more mature boy, Aaden, tended to give her hers. The household itself, the vineyard of the first wife's labours,