The woman spotted her and swaggered slowly toward the nearest rail and, once within shouting distance, leaned out over the water and called, “This the boat for sale?” “This is the one,” Munroe yelled, and the woman pointed down the coast toward another boat headed their way. “My man is coming to check her.” This was the start of a negotiation as predictable as it would be tedious, part of the drawn-out haggling innate to a culture that placed little value on the concept of time; and in the wait, as the approaching boat grew larger and the sun rose higher and began to heat the air, the conversation with Amber, the proposal of driving from Djibouti to Garacad, tumbled around inside her head. To most in the Western world, Somalia was a single lawless piece of dirt where the battle of Mogadishu and warlords and pirates and starving children all blended into one big impoverished blemish on the map. But geopolitically, Somalia wasn’t one country, it was four or five. For Amber and Natan, the problems would begin on the other side of Somaliland, the northwesternmost territory, which operated autonomously as an unrecognized nation with its own government, laws, and currency, and a serene prosperity far removed from televised images of lawlessness; would begin after they’d crossed into the neutral zones that were neither Somaliland nor Puntland and then get worse when they crossed into Puntland itself, a territory that straddled the middle of Somalia and operated as an independent state without any formal declaration of separation.
