Ashley Hamer writing in Roads and Kingdoms:
High up on a steep, rocky hillside, thin, young men clamber deftly among the branches of small trees. Each of them—t-shirts torn and feet wrapped in cloth against the thorns—carries a basket and chisel.
A sticky sap seeps from slices in the bark of these Boswellia frereana and carterii trees, which grow wild in the rugged hills of Somaliland, a fragile, self-declared territory in northern Somalia. Over several weeks, the sap will harden into clots of amber resin called frankincense...[more]