I was raped working as a scientist in the essential oil industry. Local women endure much worse.
By Anjanette DeCarlo, PhD. Founder Save Frankincense
What I had thought was serendipity turned out to be a setup. It was a hot, dry day in September 2016 when my former student came to greet me and my three colleagues at our modest hotel. Our trip to Somaliland had been funded by a UK company to investigate a chemical component in their frankincense supply. My student told us excitedly that he had just run into a “friend” on the street, who happened to be the largest frankincense supplier in Somalia.
Moments later, Barkhad Hassan walked in and introduced himself in a thick British accent, inviting us to dinner at the hotel to hear more about the work he was doing with his company, Asli Maydi. Because our team had come to this breakaway republic in the Horn of Africa to conduct research on the trees, we considered this a surprisingly fortuitous opportunity.
At dinner, with us as a captive audience, Mr. Hassan theatrically displayed his company paperwork: trading licenses and ancient-looking documents that he said were ancestral land rights. The land where frankincense grows in Somaliland is communal, but the trees are privately owned; he explained that his family has some ownership of one plot of trees. He said it was his mission to overturn the old aristocracy of frankincense-owning families, priding himself on being “a man of the people.” After dinner, he bade us farewell, informing us that he was past time to chew khat (a stimulant) with his men.
We took a moment to try to make sense of what we’d just experienced, one of us breaking our bewildered silence by saying, “I don’t know what exactly is going on, but this guy is someone big.” I was charmed by Hassan, as were my colleagues. It’s not every day I meet someone whose passion for frankincense matches my own. I was drawn to him immediately—later, I would be ashamed for having ever been attracted to him.
As it would often be with circumstances involving Hassan, this meeting was no coincidence. Unbeknownst to me, he had been stalking me even before I got off the plane in Somaliland, and had told my student—who was in fact working for him—to fake the run-in on the street. Hassan’s perfectly staged theatrics would suck me into what shortly became a tumultuous and dangerous spiral of lies, deceit, and eventually, sexual assault.
