It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (39 page)

“I’m Dr. Verma,” she announced, with no enthusiasm. “Everything looks fine.”

“Am I really pregnant?” I asked.

“Yes, you are.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have any questions?” she asked.

I had dutifully read a few chapters of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
and had perused the Internet for the obvious dos and don’ts of pregnancy: what not to eat, when the nausea would kick in, etc. “Can I still go to the gym?” I asked, half-knowing I would continue to go with or without her consent.

“Yes, light exercise. Don’t let your body overheat too much, don’t sweat too much. Keep your heart rate moderate.” I was relieved I would be able to hold on to one of my rituals.

“I am on my way to Senegal next week.”

She looked at me askance. “I would advise you not to travel. Flights have radiation that is not good for the embryo at this stage. It could be harmful.”

The words were like daggers in my heart. No travel? Impossible. “Really?” I asked skeptically. “I have never heard of that before. For how long is there a risk period involved with flying?” I was convinced it must have been an Indian folktale.

“The first three months are the most sensitive. And for the duration of your pregnancy, I would limit all long-haul flights—flights over six hours—to a minimum.” I tried to contain my shock. No one had ever told me to limit my travel before. “And there is malaria in Senegal. Do you have to go to Senegal now?”

Claustrophobia set in. “Yes.” The words flew out of my mouth. It was a knee-jerk reaction. “I cannot cancel now.” As I said the words, I realized that to someone outside my profession, to whom journalism was just a job, I probably sounded insane, being willing to possibly jeopardize my pregnancy for a ten-day
Times
assignment.

“There is a risk you can lose the pregnancy if you get malaria in Senegal. And I would advise you not to take antimalaria tablets while pregnant.”

With every sentence I felt a part of myself dying. My life was being taken over by a microscopic union of Paul and me growing inside my uterus, and I had yet to feel that overwhelming joy all these women talked about when they talked about pregnancy.

“I can use bug spray,” I started, and before I finished the sentence I realized that bug spray, too, might be harmful to an unborn child.

“You can use citronella,” Dr. Verma said.

I left the hospital in a cloud of defeat.

I went to Senegal in mid-May, enveloped by the exhaustion and nausea of my first trimester. I left a certain amount of the risk of malaria, of the radiation of flying, and of whether I could handle a physically challenging assignment in the hands of fate. After all, it was the philosophy that had governed much of my life. I thought often about Elizabeth and of how she had traipsed through the Korengal Valley laden with body armor for her entire second trimester, and I suddenly understood why she had forced herself to keep working throughout her pregnancy: because in a sense, our work was our life. It defined who we were, it wasn’t just a job we did for a living, and I needed to hold on to that for as long as I could.

With the exception of military embeds, I took on all my regular assignments, hiding my burgeoning belly beneath loose-fitting shirts, cargo pants, and sometimes, fortunately, the necessary
hijab.
I convinced myself that if I didn’t tell anyone, I wouldn’t have to compromise my life. I was adamant that my editors and colleagues were not to know until I could no longer hide it—I feared editors would deny me work on account of my pregnancy. I had fought hard to reach a place where I had a consistent stream of assignments, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t written off with the girth of my belly.

I went from Senegal to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, and at four months Paul and I broke the news to my parents while on vacation in Rhode Island. No one could believe that Paul had actually managed to persuade me to pause long enough to have a baby when I barely stopped moving long enough to do my laundry. At four and a half months Doctors Without Borders sent me to photograph its medical outreach for victims of the drought consuming the Horn of Africa and Kenya—from the Turkana region to the Somali refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya. Halfway through the assignment, working in remote African villages, I could no longer button my pants. I was almost five months pregnant. The nausea and exhaustion were gone, my energy level had returned, and I was eating normally, though I was careful to avoid harmful bacteria, which in remote Africa meant eating bread, rice, bananas, and protein bars I carried from home.

As I was finishing up my two-week assignment, I sensed that I had just been skimming around the edges with my coverage of the drought. All the refugees I was photographing in Dadaab were fleeing the drought in Somalia; I needed to go to Somalia in order to photograph the real story, what had been causing them to seek refuge. It was a fundamental missing piece among the images I had photographed. While my assignment with Doctors Without Borders was finished, the story would also be syndicated through my photo agency for other publications around the world. I would have felt like an irresponsible or misleading journalist had I only half-completed my coverage of the story of the drought—that is, if I didn’t go to Somalia and expose the heart of the crisis. For me, it was because few journalists went to Somalia that I felt it was important to go. But that meant traveling at five months pregnant, less than six months after being very publicly kidnapped in Libya, to Mogadishu, the kidnapping capital of the world.

In many ways Somalia was a failed state: anarchic, violent, impoverished, its land overrun by the Shabaab, a fundamentalist militia group that terrorized civilians and kidnapped people for exorbitant ransoms. The only reason they didn’t enter Mogadishu was the presence of African Union peacekeepers. Somalia was one of the few places on earth that I was actually scared to visit, as I repeatedly imagined a fate like that of the American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu’s streets in 1993. And I knew that if anything ever happened to me in Somalia so soon after Libya, I would surely be written off by my editors and peers as a crazy, irresponsible photographer, making it impossible to justify myself. But journalistically Somalia was a fundamental part of the story, and I didn’t want to start compromising my professional instincts before I had a baby.

I started sending e-mails to colleagues who had recently been in Mogadishu: Tyler, who had been one of the first to cover the story powerfully for the
New York Times
, and John Moore, a photographer with Getty Images whom Tyler and I had traveled with in Libya. They both passed along contacts for Mohammed, the main fixer in Mogadishu. For $1,000 per day, Mohammed could arrange a room in his guesthouse, an interpreter, a driver, and a militia of anywhere from four to eight gunmen to accompany me each time I wanted to travel out of the guesthouse. Tyler and John both spoke very highly of Mohammed; they explained that he went to great lengths to prepare each shooting excursion outside the sanctuary of the guesthouse and took no task lightly. They said what I knew already: that Mogadishu was unpredictable, that it looked scarier from the outside, and that the chances were that the trip would go fine—unless it didn’t.

Beyond the security risk, both Tyler and John recounted something very worrisome: that they had gotten horrible stomach ailments from the food at the guesthouse, which I worried might cause harm to the baby.
Just bring Cipro
, they said, the pharmaceutical elixir of choice for many of us, which basically microwaved the body free of bacteria. But I wasn’t allowed to take Cipro. I still hadn’t told my colleagues I was pregnant.

I needed just two to three bacteria-free days on the ground to visit the hospitals, which were allegedly swarming with drought victims, with at least a handful of children dying each day from diarrhea, dehydration, and complications from diseases that often accompanied malnutrition. And I needed to visit the camps for the internally displaced, which were sprouting up all over Mogadishu, populated by people from other parts of the country. Nothing would happen in a few days, I reassured myself, especially if I ate only bananas, bread, and Pure Protein Bars. I had two more orders of business before I could book my flight: I had to call Paul—even though I had pretty much decided on going—and make sure he felt comfortable with my decision. For the first time I actually felt that I needed his permission to risk my life, because I would also be risking the life of our baby.

Paul and I talked through the potential risks involved, and he asked me to limit my stay in Mogadishu to as few days as possible in order to get the images I needed to complete the story. I finished my assignment for Doctors Without Borders in Kenya, and Jamie, my
Newsweek
editor, offered me some expense money to publish the work from Somalia. In the days of decreased magazine budgets, this was the next best thing to an assignment.

Somali children try to feed biscuits to a woman suffering from dehydration and hunger moments after she arrived at a reception center the morning after crossing from Somalia into Kenya to flee a prolonged drought, August 20, 2011. Dadaab, with roughly four hundred thousand refugees, is the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is grossly over capacity, and the refugees experience an ever shrinking access to essential services such as water, sanitation, food, and shelter, in part because they have been sharing their rations with the new arrivals.

Something strange happened once I arrived in Kenya: The baby—whom I had been imagining for weeks as an avocado-pit-sized embryo, based on regular updates from the BabyCenter app—started kicking. He came to life as a little person inside me as I entered Somalia, the land ridden with death. He was very active, and suddenly I was acutely aware of him all the time.

Once I got to Mogadishu, I went to the guesthouse to meet with Mohammed. He looked at me, shrouded in my flowing black
abaya
and matching head scarf, and smiled: “You look Somali! We don’t have to worry about you!” Mohammed didn’t think I was in great danger of being kidnapped.

I went right to work, starting with Banadir Hospital, the main hospital in the city. In Africa white people were often presumed to be aid workers, doctors, people there to help in a very immediate way with medicine or food distribution. I walked into the main foyer of the hospital and was immediately overwhelmed by the scene. Throngs of hollow-faced Somali women and children filled the wards, littered the halls, lying prostrate and listless anywhere they could find the space. Their sunken eyes pierced my white skin with hope: They thought I was a doctor who had come to save them from their fate. All I had was my camera. Somali medical reserves were tapped. The hospitals had only a few doctors, a few more nurses, and little medicine. Most people were simply given IVs of rehydrating fluids and left to recover, to wither, to die. They shared beds, rested on the floors. I had never seen a situation that bad, with little interest from the international aid community. Somalia was simply too dangerous for foreign aid workers, and so the people were left to their own resources. As dangerous as it was, I knew I had made the right journalistic decision by going to Mogadishu.

I went to the upstairs ward to look around. I always felt horrible photographing people in such states of misery, but I hoped my images, in bringing greater awareness of the desperation, might also bring food and medical aid. I worked quickly, deliberately, abiding by Mohammed’s instructions to not linger very long anywhere in order to avoid the risk of kidnap. I had spent my career navigating dangerous assignments based on risk calculation, and I wanted to trust that ability, even though I was pregnant. Our kidnapping in Libya did weigh heavily upon me. I was constantly fighting against a freshly developed fear, a new reflex to finish my work that very second and get on the first plane out of Somalia. But I was holding on to my identity, my freedom, what I had been working toward my entire adult life—as well as panic that it was all about to disappear with the birth of my child.