The Dude ‘du Jour’ of Somalia

First came the coffee. Then, the handshake. We had an agreement. In a matter of days I was transported from upper Manhattan to a place with no name, situated at the very edge of the world. Somalia, a place of seemingly endless death, tribal warfare and thousand-year-old vendettas. Utterly flummoxed and breathtakingly out of my element, I felt like a complete, confused, quixotic impostor. Mine is the story of an American surgeon stunningly unprepared for the events in which he was about to engage.