Keeping Hope Alive

by Hawa Abdi

  One day we received a young boy who had been shot at one of these checkpoints. He’d run away when the soldiers pulled their guns, but they’d shot him in the back anyhow, a bullet ripping through his intestines and forcing him to walk on his hands and knees. Somehow, with his intestines hanging out, he made it down the Afgoye Road to us. We don’t know how long it took him to travel the 24 kilometers, although we do know that sometimes he hid in the bush from the soldiers; other times he fell unconscious, onto the sand.

  How that boy wanted to live! He asked us for help, crying softly. I gave him some antipain and antishock medication and cleaned his wound as best I could, but the bullet had damaged so much. While I sat with him and asked him questions, to understand what had happened, his brothers and friends were searching the countryside for him, carrying his photo. We stood together while he screamed. “Don’t cry—if you die, die normally,” someone said to him. “It is no problem to die.”

  I stepped outside for a moment, worried about what I could do. We couldn’t operate: We had no blood bank and no one on duty, and without anesthesia, the boy would die of shock. We sat together with him until his cries stopped and his breathing became ragged. When the time came, we took his photo, in the hopes that we could find his family and tell them the news. Then we dressed him in the karfan and buried him in our place, just 300 meters away from the hospital. He was our first casualty.

  When his desperate friends finally came to our place, Deqo brought them tea and showed them our photo. They cried when they saw it, and we took them to visit the small grave. A short time after, we would bury beside him another young, wounded boy, whose mother had carried him to us on her back.

  My regular patients no longer came to me; they stayed home, hoping to resist the heavy shelling in the Mogadishu streets or the unpredictable violence in the bush. Late one night, government troops invaded a home about 3 kilometers from our place. The family came to me the next morning, around eight o’clock, pushing a young woman in a donkey cart. “Mama Hawa, help me!” she cried when I saw them out front. We brought her inside, and I gently pulled away the blanket that covered her.

  Since the other doctors were on duty, I called them to see the wounds. A gunshot to her stomach had shattered her pelvic bone; half of her bladder was gone, and somehow her intestines had come out through the wounds, like a flower. One of the doctors ran away, and the other turned to me and said, “Hawa, we’ll have to send her to Mogadishu, and the road is blocked by checkpoints.” We argued for a while, but he was right; I went back to talk with the family.

  The woman’s sister told me what had happened. “Lie down,” said one of the stupid soldiers when he walked into her room. She refused, knowing he’d rape her, and she threw sand in his face. He shot her in the stomach and ran out of the home, back into the bush. The family waited all night, praying, as they tried to stop the bleeding themselves. When they believed they would be safe, they came to me.

  I explained the situation, and the mother and father, who were listening with the sisters and brother, all fell to the floor, crying for me to help them. Finally, they decided to go back to their home. My eyes ached as I told them that I was sorry.

  Mortality is a cup of juice that every person in the world will drink. Sometimes, I know, the best you can hope for is to die without begging someone, without saying to him, “No, don’t do that, please, I will do whatever you want.” That young woman did not accept being made into a victim by the soldiers. She died with dignity.

  The people fleeing the violence came to us with nowhere else to go and nowhere they could return, so we cleared out the beds from the empty hospital wards, so more people could stay. When that space became full, we cleared out our small café and other rooms, and finally families began sleeping under the trees. These were not poor families—some were dressed well, carrying food and money. All they were missing was peace. Since Ethiopia, Uganda, Djibouti, and several European states opened their borders to Somali refugees, many people stayed with us for just a few weeks. Those who had no money or no transportation remained.

  It was a difficult, tense time. The light to our corridor was always on, and every time we heard a rumor, we prayed it was wrong. One night, the government collected forty-three Issaq men, dug a big hole near the seaside, and then buried all of the men in it. They shot some men before they buried them, but most were still alive. One of the men did not die of suffocation; he crawled out of the dirt and found his way to us, and that’s how we know what happened.

  I came home after work one day to see a strange car parked outside, among some of my patients’. I assumed it belonged to one of their relatives, and I went inside to see Aden and to get our lunch. When we had finished eating and I was preparing to go back to the clinic, we heard a sharp knock—goa-goa-goa—at our door. “Open!” we heard, and Aden jumped up from his chair and headed toward the back of the apartment.

  I opened the door. “Aden Mohamed?” A government soldier pushed past me, two others behind him, and he kicked Aden’s empty chair. “Come out,” he said. “Get your car keys. You are coming with us.” I looked in the doorway to see Deqo, Amina, and little Ahmed staring with shocked eyes, unable to understand that their father was being targeted because of his clan. It was the first time a gun had been brought into our home; as my eyes gravitated to the AK-47, Aden walked back out of our bedroom, gasping.

  Deqo ran for his asthma medicine and Amina caught Aden’s leg: “Father!” One of the soldiers kicked her sharply in the side, and she fell down, crying. She scrambled back near Ahmed as the soldier pushed Aden through the door. “Drive it,” said one of the soldiers, pointing to our car. “We will go together.”

  We were helpless as they left us, Aden grinding the gears of the car. They sped off toward Mogadishu, and we walked into the clinic to search for some help.

  Since it was a Thursday afternoon and few people were working, I didn’t know how we would find someone to help us. One of my patients offered to drive me to find him, and before I left, I went into the bedroom and grabbed a suitcase full of money from patient fees. I feared that those corrupt soldiers would return to our house, looking for money and valuables. I had no choice but to leave the children behind with the other adults. We stopped at the post office, where I called a friend who was a member of Siad Barre’s clan.

  He agreed to meet us at the police station, and we spoke to the authorities together. Before I left them to continue the conversation privately, I asked for their help. “Please,” I said, “my husband was put here, and he has done nothing wrong.” We sat in a waiting room, wondering if they would keep him, release him, or kill him, and finally, at eight o’clock, Aden came walking out the front door, looking shocked but unharmed.

  We gave the suitcase to our friend for safekeeping and returned home to find all the children in the sitting room, crying. It was impossible to understand what had happened, let alone to explain it. “The car is still gone,” I said, “but we don’t need a car. We need your father with us, alive, and here he is—he is fine!”

  “We don’t need a car!” shouted Amina. She was still rubbing her left side, which would bother her all her life.

  While the children slept, Aden and I sat up all that night, worried that the men would come back for us. In the morning Aden went to his friends, searching for the car, I know, and searching for a reason why the men had bothered him. “Do they have any concrete evidence that I committed a crime?” he asked me later that night, pacing.

  While we were not disturbed again, in some significant ways, our life changed after that: Aden never returned to work, which meant, for the children, more time to spend with their father on the farm. Deqo, who was closest to Aden, was especially glad. There is sometimes no clear distinction between peace and war. Deqo, Amina, Ahmed, and their cousins still studied and they still played, chasing one another into the bush and drawing huge circles, with sticks, in the sand. We still had our cows in those days, which meant that mealtimes were stil
l crowded and chaotic as the children sat, five of them hovered over each plate, scooping up the stewed meat and porridge and giggling and swatting when their hands touched. Next door, in the hospital, the expectant and new mothers were not thinking of clan division and violence—just of the pain and effort of childbirth, and the relief and delight of motherhood.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Collapse

  On January 26, 1991, the United Somali Congress invaded the state house, driving Siad Barre and his men into the streets. We listened to the radio in disbelief, hearing that government soldiers had raided the national bank, killing the guards who tried to refuse them entry and loading the contents of the vaults into trucks waiting outside. Would Siad Barre be killed? Who would take his place? As we sat, asking questions, our cousin drove Amina and Ahmed, who were just ten and eight years old, to their primary school in Afgoye—even farther from the fighting. Everyone had an opinion about what would happen, but I tried to speak calmly for the sake of the children.

  “I have school, too,” said sixteen-year-old Deqo, who’d been studying for weeks in preparation for her final exams that day.

  “Today,” I said, “Mogadishu is fighting.”

  “I’ve been working too hard to stay! I’m going!”

  Though I forbade her, she ignored me and walked out the door, as hotheaded as I am and as hardheaded as her father. I returned to the hospital for a while, but sometime after she left, the radio was reporting heavy shelling near Villa Somalia, which was also near Deqo’s school. “God help her!” I cried. Two of our cousins took our pickup and went to find her. Right after they left, one patient came to me to say, “Siad Barre collected all his soldiers and gave them all the government weapons. He only said to use them against the Hawiye and the Issaq.”

  “Oh,” I said. “If these clans fight, Somalia will be destroyed.”

  Though the streets were chaotic, they were open; our cousins drove to Deqo’s usual bus stop and found Deqo standing, shaken, waiting for a bus that did not come. On the way back out to our place, they passed many of Deqo’s schoolmates, who recognized our pickup and ran toward it. They took everyone it could hold and brought them all back to our place.

  A crowd had gathered under the trees, and our helpers brought lunch outside, so we could try to make sense of the situation. “Let’s go to Siad Barre,” I proposed to some of the people who were gathered with us.

  “No, Hawa, it is too late,” said one. “We already tried, and he’s refused us. If one of us comes to him to reason with him, he will immediately kill us.”

  The Afgoye Road was so crowded with cars and people fleeing the city that Amina and Ahmed waited for hours to be picked up from school. They finally joined us, sitting cross-legged on the carpets with some of their friends, listening to adults and asking too many questions.

  “There are some people who don’t believe in the government, and that has made a problem,” I explained. “That’s why there is fighting.”

  “Are we going to school tomorrow?” asked Ahmed.

  “No,” I said.

  “Will we have school next week?”

  “Insha’allah,” I said. God willing. How could we have seen the future? Aden climbed up on our roof to shout “Get out!” to Siad Barre’s men—his government officials, his relatives, and members of his clan—as a huge line of cars and pickup trucks traveled west up the Afgoye Road and away to Nairobi, the capital city of neighboring Kenya. He waved his hands as the trucks, filled with government money, passed him by. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out!”

  By 2 p.m., when a group of us joined him on the roof, it was a different scene. Driving in the opposite direction, toward Mogadishu, were big buses filled with the clans that had long been persecuted by Siad Barre’s regime. Young boys hung out the windows, gleefully waving green leaves and Somali flags. “Come back!” they yelled, and my children waved down to them. “Come back to Mogadishu! Come back!”

  “God is great,” I said, looking at Aden. “Maybe there will be peace.”

  While we waited for peace, while we prayed for it, the sound of the shelling continued day after day, along with the rattle of machine gun fire. As people streamed down the roads away from the city, many stopped in our place, asking for water or for treatment. Many were Darod, members of Siad Barre’s clan, coming to us on their way south to cities such as Merca, Brava, Kismayo, anywhere. We began giving the families our just-harvested maize, sorghum, and sesame to cook for themselves. Some began building makeshift homes from the sticks in the area, the way their parents and grandparents had done. By the middle of 1991, we had 800 families living with us—more than 4,000 people.

  The stories they brought into our lives shook the children, who imagined mortars crashing through metal roofs, killing sleeping families beneath. “I will never go to Mogadishu again,” declared Deqo one day as I was worrying about one of the workers we’d sent into the city to try to find more supplies. “You should never go again either.”

  The violence began during the long, dry season, so as Mogadishu emptied of resources, its people fled. When a woman became sick, she came to us not just with her small children but with her whole family—elders and cousins. We knew that the number of people wounded by the senseless violence was going up and up; it seemed only natural that the problems we could solve—like giving someone a place to stay and some small feeling of safety—should be solved.

  I shook Deqo from bed every morning at three, when she joined her cousins in an assembly line to make chapati, a type of bread, for all the needy families. They were the chefs! Amina and Ahmed watched as the older children prepared the charcoal and put down the baskets, one, two, three, and then took them out, one, two, three. Then they’d do it again and again, until seven in the morning, when I came to distribute the breakfast.

  “How many people do you have in your family?” I’d ask each person. She’d tell me, or sometimes she’d try to cheat me. “We are six,” the mother of one, or two, would say. Sometimes, if we refused them, they argued, their eyes narrow, their hands clawing.

  Food prices were high, the market stalls bare; people still trapped or waiting inside the city became desperate. When you are hungry, you have nothing to lose: Mothers walking slowly down the Afgoye Road stopped holding their children’s hands or looking for oncoming traffic. Entire families were killed this way, hit by cars driven wildly by the bush people who had stolen them. Still, they continued. “Better we die walking than collapse of hunger,” one mother told me.

  Our farm staff had stored our sorghum in 50-kilogram sacks, and with so many hungry people to feed, we went through about twenty sacks each day. We also began rationing our meat very carefully, trying, always, to make it through until things improved. We gave food first to the children and then to the weakest adults. We boiled the bones twice, sometimes three times, but even so, our store was finished earlier than we’d planned.

  One morning, during food distribution, I left Deqo and the other children and walked straight out to the edge of my land, far from the shouting and fighting. I looked back at this distance, to see what I had created. I forced myself to look: my hospital, with its pink walls; my small café made of sticks. Why had God given me such riches in a place where nothing could grow? I leaned back against a tree, feeling the tree bark digging through my white coat to my spine as I cried.

  When I was eight years old, I used to walk 4 kilometers to the river every morning and afternoon to collect water in a canister, which I strapped to my back. Although the village girls often walked down in a group, I liked making the journey alone, so I could daydream along the way. Pulling water from a river is not as easy as it seems—when the dry season comes, the only way to get what you need is to dig for it, your knees sinking down into the muck, your bottom raised, your fingernails full of sand. The groundwater will then pool up into the canister, you will shake the canister so that the dirt falls to the bottom, and you will return home with enough water to fill the teakettle an
d the cooking pot.

  I remember jabbing into the riverbed with my fingers, building a small mound of sopping sand next to me, and hearing a man’s sharp voice above me. “Get up! Get up!” I couldn’t see him, so at first I thought that someone else was in danger. “Get up! Get up!” came the voice again, closer, closer, and I stood up and looked around, seeing no one. Then a pair of strange, rough hands were on me, tossing my small body up onto the bank like a sack of maize.

  Since my eyes were fixed on the man who had scrambled up the riverbank after me, I heard the roar of the water before I saw it: a wall of white water swallowing the sand pile I’d created.

  “You could have been killed!” said the man, his hot breath in my face. “What are you doing here? Where is your home?” The rains had come early from the Ethiopian highlands, he said.

  Looking down at the churning river, seeing big branches, some taller than I, snap like twigs, I began to cry. “Lafole,” I said.

  “It is a miracle that I was sent for you here,” said the man, still gasping from his effort of throwing me up the bank. Though he was stern, he took pity on me, helping me fill my jug at a well I hadn’t known about. Then he walked past me and back toward the bush. “God is great!” said Ayeyo when I finally returned home. “This man has saved your life!”

  I still felt the danger in my eardrums and my cheeks as she spoke. Afterward, each time I made my way back to the river, I carried a sharp stone of fear close to my heart. My eyes moved across the sand with new suspicion, and even the birds seemed menacing. For months, I would return home, place the water at Ayeyo’s feet, sit down next to the canister, and cry.

  “A woman’s work,” Ayeyo had said, “cannot be done by anyone else.” I had tasted life’s first bitterness, she said, a sign of wisdom. But in 1991, when the rush of people came to us, there was no salvation in sight.