by Hawa Abdi
We were lucky, I suppose, that we had little money to steal. While people who had put their money in the bank now had nothing, all our money had been put into materials for the hospital or the farm. We still had some gold, however: some that my mother had given me before she died and some that I bought when my children were young. I gave 150 grams to one of my cousins, who took it to Mogadishu to sell. He brought back the money in a bucket, covered with a layer of plastic wrap and a pile of bananas and mangos from Bakara Market. We spent that money on sorghum, which we struggled to find in the empty markets, and which would last us another forty days.
When that, too, dwindled, we were forced to divide the camp into two groups. One morning, we gave group A the chapati—three for every person—and the next morning, group B got their portion. For about three months, it was the best we could do to ward off starvation, as the families were still coming, by ten, by twenty—sometimes as many as sixty people in a day. Most of them were from the Darod clan—Siad Barre’s relatives, fleeing the violent backlash from the other groups like the Hawiye, who had been persecuted by the regime and now sought revenge.
Since it was no longer safe to drive to Mogadishu, where a car could be stolen or one could be shot, I took a bus to the UNICEF office, to ask for help. The representative that I met wrote a letter, and soon after, their white trucks showed up with sacks of a nutritious porridge. Since we had run out of sorghum for chapati, we began to distribute dry portions of the cereal. Every child came, bringing his round cup, to get his part, and when the families saw what we were able to provide, they blessed us. They could divide a kilo of porridge into several sections, and then water it down further, so they had twice as much to eat.
While porridge, rice, beans, and oil filled bellies, those who had been starving for weeks could not be saved. When the sickest people tried to eat, they suffered from debilitating, bloody diarrhea, and we had no hydration solution to give them to restore their health. At the height of the crisis, we were losing fifty people per day. Unlike natural disasters that hit without warning, famine crawls up onto a society in the same way that a single person starves: It starts with the body, and then it gets into the mind. Then, as bones dig into skin and weak muscles droop, the body turns against itself and everything shuts down.
We needed to bury the dead as quickly as we could. An Arabic organization donated cases of karfan to cover the bodies. Near the place where we buried our first few patients, our farm workers and some of the other young, strong men in the camp began digging a big grave. We had no money to pay them, but an extra portion of porridge gave them the strength to continue.
As the world heard of the disaster in Somalia, many international aid organizations sent in ships full of food, medical supplies, and plastic sheets for shelter. Most were blocked by the warlords who had laid claim to the airports, seaports, and roads, capturing the food aid that managed to come in, selling it in the market at a much higher rate, and using the money to buy more weapons or qat. In the countryside, we waited, shaking our heads and apologizing for having nothing to give.
We sent our tractor to a local water catchment tank three times a day, carrying back, each time, eighteen drums of water to distribute. The children set up a kind of roadside stand, and they brought with them whatever supplies we could afford to give the displaced people—milk or water, sometimes one of their chapati. One afternoon, when a man walking in our direction fell into the road, Amina and some of the other children tried to help, fetching some milk from our home to bring out to him. But by the time they came back, the man was already dead.
“You have to get up and help someone else who needs you,” I told Amina as she cried. I could offer little comfort, little explanation. Sometimes I turned to the Holy Qur’an, which teaches that if you are poor, God is testing your perseverance, and that if you have something, God is testing your generosity. While we cannot shield our children from everything, I did insist they stay away from the grave diggers, at least while they were eating or working. Since children are curious, wanting to help—wanting, at least, to see—Deqo and Amina had to chase Ahmed away from the growing graveyard.
The fighting continued, and by November 1991, civil war broke out between the followers of two warlords controlling Mogadishu, both from Hawiye sub-clans: the Habr Gidir, led by Mohamed Farrah Aidid; and the Abgal, led by Ali Mahdi Mohamed. Mogadishu was divided into two, with a Green Line splitting the city into north and south. Everyone had a gun, openly taking whatever he wanted. Terrified people fled the explosions, running out of the city gates in big crowds until it seemed there could be no one left. For a while, the popular joke was that only the dogs and cats remained in Mogadishu—food for the uneducated people who now ruled the city alongside the mental patients, who had been turned loose when their hospitals had been shut down. “They are in charge now,” we said, shaking our heads at the endless violence.
While the Habr Gidir and the Abgal warlords hated each other, they shared the common goal of wanting to profit from the international aid groups. Years later, one of my security guards would tell me that with bribes of money and qat, he was recruited to defend Mogadishu port. “Our mission was: Shoot down every ship coming in with donations,” he said. The ships and their precious food turned around, back toward safety, while hundreds of thousands of our people starved to death. These warlords are responsible. Criminals.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Why Do You Want to Do This?
Talk among the village elders turned to AK-47s and “technicals,” which were pickup trucks with heavy machine guns bolted to the top. It was another new language for Somalia. Still, the deadliest weapon in those days was the car, barreling through the Mogadishu streets with punctured tires, or screeching along on iron rims. One of these cars hit a young Darod girl and shattered the bones of her leg. Afraid that the Hawiye militiamen would kill her for belonging to Siad Barre’s clan, she limped along the road and hid in the bush near our place for weeks, eating grass and growing thin and hysterical. Someone told us what had happened, and for days, hospital volunteers tried to convince her to come for treatment. Finally, they brought her in, and we gave her a bed and medicine for her pain. I couldn’t promise to fix her bones, which had already begun to fuse together in a very crooked way, but I said that I would try.
Representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who had been working on relief efforts since the start of the conflict, had begun visiting me in my camp in early 1991. I admired their commitment, struggling to deliver food and medicine to us at a time when militiamen were sending heavy mortars out to the ocean, sinking some ships and sending so many back. In our camp, ICRC built Somalia’s eighty-eighth feeding kitchen; they drove to me a few times a week on their tours of the other refugee camps in the area. As busy as we were, I always made time for their team, which included a Somali man named Hussein Salad, who worked at the side of a tall Belgian man named Wim Van Boxelaere.
We often had long talks—about the state of the world, travel, philosophy—as I showed them our work and the people we were helping. One day, Hussein Salad asked me a question that was hard to answer. “Why do you want to do this, to collect people like this in your place?”
As a means of explanation, I led them into the hospital. As the number of the starving people had grown, surpassing the number of the wounded people, we’d had no choice but to lay patients on cheap mattresses or blankets along the hospital corridors. We walked past suffering children whose anxious loved ones swatted flies from their faces, and into the room where the girl with the broken leg lay. Wim was shocked to see how a leg could heal like that, so crooked, the bone jutting out somehow unnaturally, covered in skin. He cried when he saw how the girl’s life had been crushed by violence and fear, and then, turning his big, kind face to me, he took out a paper and wrote an immediate donation—rice, oil, and beans. He hugged me when he left, calling me Mama Hawa, promising that he would return.
Wim was true to h
is word. In the weeks that followed, ICRC gave us a standing weekly donation of fifty sacks of maize, twenty cartons of oil, and twenty sacks of beans; they began to give us medicine as well. Often he and Hussein came to deliver the goods themselves, along with a woman named Dahabo who was the head of all the feeding centers in the area. While they worked hard, sometimes they also just came to relax and to visit. Wim especially loved to see the families and the children in our makeshift orphanage; he often sat down to talk with them. He never seemed as big as he did when he was crouched down next to these small, small children; somehow, in those moments, he became one of them.
The ICRC delegation told us, time and again, that they liked our place because it seemed calm. While it was sometimes hard for me to look beyond the chaos to what they saw, I was happy to think that, with us, they could relax. When they came, I welcomed them into our hospital’s meeting room, trying to offer the best we had: fresh fish from the seaside, coffee and tea, and after the harvest, slices of watermelon—juicy and sweet. Wim found a big shell while walking along the beach, and he brought it back to the meeting room, to use as an ashtray for the afternoons when, for a few minutes, we were friends talking about our families, our countries, and the politics of the area. We would all admit that we talked too much about politics, but it was hard to escape. Whenever ICRC traveled in our area, they were accompanied by heavy security, and Wim worried about what would happen in the night.
“If people come to loot this food, you give it to them,” he told me. “We will give you more.” At that time, in the camp, we had our own two, very good guards, who helped with security in the clinic and with water distribution. Sometimes they tried to negotiate with the local warlords, but Wim didn’t like to hear that. “If they want to loot your food, don’t fight with them,” he said. “Even if the rice is stolen, it will go into the market, which will lower its price.”
One day, when the fighting was especially bad in Mogadishu, a group of ICRC staff came to us. “There are two hundred more people who came to me today,” I told Wim, shaking my head, “and many of them are wounded.” There was nothing more to say about the situation, which every day became worse and worse. The only way Wim knew how to respond was to give more—two hundred sacks of rice, one hundred jerrycans of oil. I remember that day well. It was a Monday.
That Wednesday afternoon, after I’d finished my rounds in the clinic, I took the bus to Mogadishu to pick up some supplies for the camp. I got off at my typical bus stop, and as I was walking toward the market, I saw two ambulances, with flashing lights and honking horns, going straight to Medina hospital. I didn’t think anything of it. At the market I greeted the shopkeeper, who knew people in my camp. “Oh!” he shouted. “Did you hear about your friend?”
“What friend?”
“Those ICRC people. Hey!” The man nudged his neighbor. “Who was it?”
“The Belgian man,” the other man said. Wim. I worried all that afternoon, as I walked through the market, buying the medicine and the supplies that I could take by the Afgoye-bound bus before evening fell. I sat on the bus, among the slumping mothers and the nervous young men squirming in their seats, thinking of Wim turning away from the girl with the broken leg with tears in his eyes. The war had brought people from across the world to help us, but we could not shield them from the violence.
The news was on the radio by the time I came home; before evening prayers, the children and some of our staff came in to listen. That morning, Wim had been working at Martini hospital, where the biggest stockpile of ICRC food was located. A man came into the storehouse with a gun, pulling it on Wim. A Somali elder jumped in front of him, hoping to shield him, but was killed instantly. The same bullet had seriously wounded Wim as well.
That night, we couldn’t sleep. We made a big postcard: Don’t give up. Come back. Mogadishu is crying for you. Everyone is praying for you. The next morning I was back on the bus with the postcard. I went straight to Medina hospital, where I knew one doctor working in the surgery department. “What has happened?” I asked when I walked in. “Where is Wim?”
“Oh,” he said sadly. He showed me back to a room where a man lay under a white sheet, covered totally. “You see? That is Wim. His brother has come to get him—they’re bringing him to Belgium.” I held my breath, wanting to reach out to him, to know if he was conscious or unconscious, but I didn’t want to disturb him. Next to us, my colleague said, was the dead body of the man who had given his life to save Wim.
As Wim flew over Italy on his way home, he passed away. When we heard the news, we cried, knowing that this kind man, supporting Somalia in so many ways, was killed by those he was trying to save. We could not see then how we would mourn the tragedy of Wim’s death and the death of so many like him, but we knew it was a heavy blow to the confidence of the international community, and a sign of the danger for foreigners who came to Somalia as friends. How would people want to help us when we killed the best people who were brave enough to try, and in the process, we killed our own people as well?
“Don’t give up on us,” I told Hussein Salad when he came back to the camp.
“This is our job,” he insisted.
Many months later, Wim’s mother and father came to Somalia, to see the work that their son had done for us. Hussein Salad brought them to us, wearing a black suit, as Europeans do. We offered them juice and sat under the trees together, and Aden stood up to make a speech. “Wim was one of our men,” he said. “He was a part of our body. What has happened, we are all sorry.” We brought them to the meeting room where we used to sit, and I gave his mother the big shell that he used as an ashtray. Together we visited the orphan children, who had worked with a few of our volunteers to make a sign: WIM DEDICATED HIS LIFE FOR OUR WELFARE, it said, and when his mother saw it, she turned around, looking for her husband, saying, “Come see what they wrote, these children!”
Before she left, we embraced, and we cried together. “Wim always said he had very good relations with Dr. Hawa,” she said. “You were, for him, a calm place.” Years later, when we received more funding, I created a small nursing school inside the hospital: The Wim Van Boxelaere Nursing School. It still exists today.
For us, the days were the easiest because we had expectations: rounds and scheduled surgeries and meetings and feedings and visits from international delegations. We feared the quiet nights, after the aid workers and their bodyguards returned to their compounds in Mogadishu and armed boys and men ran up and down the Afgoye Road like ants: swarming the checkpoints and then scattering into the bush to attack defenseless families, raping the women and tying up the animals to take them away.
A group of Hawiye militiamen lived near our place—some of the boys had visited our farm as children; Aden had given them rides on our tractor. They came one night like ghosts and stole all fifteen of our cows—the only livestock remaining on our farm at the time. Aden, who had many friends in their clan, made a few phone calls and tracked down twelve of the cows before they reached Bakara Market for sale. “These are mine,” Aden told the boys, hoping to shame them. Though it took us another two months to find the other three cows, those eventually returned to us as well. At night, some of our older boys began sleeping by the pen for security purposes.
We were so vulnerable—a village of persecuted minority groups and women, wondering whether the people from the surrounding area would attack us. Our only security was the two guards and our band of boys—eight, ten, twelve years old—some of whom kept watch on our verandas. While they had no weapons, they were able to stay up all night, huddled in packs. They were the first ones to hear the crackle of gunfire in the distance or the sound of a car cascading into the area, its lights and motor off, as a way to be undetected: someone coming to us in search of money, of food, of children to rape.
We heard about rape almost every day; we did everything possible to protect Deqo and Amina, just seventeen and thirteen, and all their friends. For five months I slept in the hospital every nig
ht; our guests brought their girls to us so they, too, could sleep under lock and key. Some nights, we had as many as fifty girls sleeping in a spare room in the hospital, almost shoulder to shoulder, and another fifty in our bedroom. During Ramadan, they ate a small meal together after dark and then huddled up in their blankets, gossiping and teasing one another in hushed voices as they tried to sleep. It was too dangerous for them to go outside to the toilet, and Deqo was so afraid that she slept with her shoes on, so she could run faster if she had to.
“Nothing bad will happen to us here,” I told her one night, sitting on her pile of blankets. While it was a hollow promise, it sometimes helped her sleep.
Amina never slept. If I sat down to get some air on an outside bench, in between late-night rounds in the hospital, I saw her small shadow in the distance moments later. “Go back,” I told her as she ran out to meet me. “I’ll be in soon.”
Late one night I treated a man who belonged to a clan called Galgale that had been especially persecuted in our area. I gave the man food and a bed, and I discharged him in the early, early morning, before dawn. “Don’t go through the main road, go this way, through the bush,” I told him. “Save your life.”
By eleven o’clock that morning, thirty-five young men carrying heavy guns were standing outside our hospital; they’d heard about the Galgale man. They tried to enter, but one of my nurses struggled against them, insisting that guns were not allowed in our place. I heard the noise, came out of an examining room, and met them outside. “We don’t have anyone here,” I told them. “This is a hospital. We have only two mothers who are delivering babies.”
Trying to reason with a starving, qat-fueled boy holding an AK-47 is impossible. “You lie,” he said, his shoulders twitching up and down. “We’ll search room by room, so we know you’re telling the truth.”