by Hawa Abdi
“Those people, you killed most of them already, and the remaining, they fled,” I said. “They are not here. They aren’t staying with me.”
“Let us in,” he said, shaking his gun on his shoulder. One of our midwives walked out of the hospital and, seeing what was happening, darted quickly back inside.
If we let these men into the hospital, they would start raping our girls. I looked into the boy’s wild, red eyes and tried to reason with him as I would with any of my children. “The people who are here are my guests. Do you see?” I stopped and sighed. “I am treating your people. How can you come to me to think that I would keep your enemy? We’re not living together? We’re not the same people?”
“Let us in!” he shouted, moving closer.
“The only way you can enter is if you kill me first,” I said.
One of the other men spoke up. “She is right,” he said. He held out his AK-47 to me as a gesture of apology. “Please excuse us,” he said. The boy stepped back but kept the same stare.
“You’re mistaken,” I said, holding up my hand. “I don’t know how to use this. Take it back, but don’t come another time to my place.”
Sometimes when I remember this time, I remember a conversation I had with a journalist, who had asked me the same question that Hussein Salad had asked: “Why do you want to do this?”
I tried to explain, but the journalist had her own theory. “I think you are a little bit crazy,” she said. I can see that talking directly to these young men was practically asking them to kill me. But if the poor people I protected died in front of me for no reason, I could not live anyhow.
We received word that an organization called Swedish Church Relief would make a huge donation to our camp—100 tons, enough rice to fill fifteen trucks. As we waited, I imagined the heavy, heavy sacks of rice coming from across the ocean. One day a man who was helping me with security came to discuss the matter. “We will handle the transportation contract,” he said.
“It’s not my choice—if someone is donating, it’s their job,” I said. “If you want the business, it’s up to you to go to them and ask.”
But he did not want to ask. “If you don’t give us the contract now, we’ll loot all this rice,” he said. “It will never go to your place.”
“Ask or not—it’s up to you,” I told him. Although I acted as if I didn’t care about his threats, I worried that we would be victim to the violence that had stopped so many other aid organizations. I went to the port in our white Toyota Corolla, a driver and two security guards to accompany me, to oversee our food’s arrival and to make sure that it was loaded properly onto our trucks. We passed through the city unquestioned, though we could hear some gunfire once we passed through the port’s gate and into the warehouse. Still, everything went smoothly, and we followed the caravan heading out of the city and along the Afgoye Road.
Along the way, 100 meters in front of us, a big ball of light flashed, shaking the earth with explosions. Our driver jerked the wheel back and forth, trying to pull beside the truck in front of us to see what had happened. We continued this way for about 2 kilometers, weaving, until someone ahead sent one salvo as a sign to turn around, and the entire convoy stopped. Still jittery, my driver stepped on the gas, passing the trucks to get us back to the camp, to safety. But as we passed the front of the line, I saw a technical car (an improvised fighting vehicle) stopped on the road next to a truck swarmed by militiamen. When they saw us go past them, they turned their guns on us.
“Run! Run!” I slouched down in the middle of the backseat, my heart pounding. It was a car chase like those I had seen in films, although I closed my eyes.
“We can shoot back!” shouted the security guards.
“No!” I screamed, as I heard pah-pah-pah-pah-pah.
We pulled into the local office of Swedish Church Relief, and the technical kept driving. Finally, we were safe. “I’m sorry, what has happened?” asked one of their employees, who came to greet us at the car. “We heard that Mogadishu is under fire.”
I received a phone call at their compound: It was from my own security man, who had threatened to loot me. “How are you?” he asked. “Are you safe?”
“Yes,” I said in disbelief. Was he responsible for the attack? And if so, how could he lie to me this way, pretending to care about my well-being? When we finally returned to the camp, we passed along the way one of the trucks, which had skidded to the side of the road. When we looked back and saw that the food inside was gone, we feared that other trucks had met a similar fate. Still, we counted thirteen trucks when we arrived, and as we stood outside, talking, the security guy came to me. “How are you?” he asked again. This time, I ignored him.
Growing up in the bush, I learned that hungry animals ran and fought without any care for their children or the other wild animals that might eat them. War changes people’s logic in the same way, sending them after the food that belonged to needy people. I had not changed my own logic, so I did not expect that the people who knew me, whom I helped and who were working by my side, could steal from me. Sometimes, though, I was wrong, and the wartime logic prevailed.
Seventy tons of food remained: by far, the biggest donation we had ever received. Was it enough to risk my life? What about the lives of my children, who were living among the people fighting over such things? What if they were kidnapped? I had no money to buy their safety—only a parched farm scattered with people in need.
The next day, Aden and I began sawing oil drums in two; each half became a cooking pot, which sat on the fire. We cooked twenty 50-kilogram sacks of rice a day, so that donation, our biggest, lasted us seventy days. Two months and ten days.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Danger from Within
One night, while I was making final rounds in the hospital and Aden was out with his friends, Ahmed heard a group of cars roll into the camp. He ran to Deqo, pushing her awake. “They’re here,” he said. “What do we do?”
They came to me together in their bare feet. I heard Ahmed’s small voice first. “They’re here,” he told me. “They’re here.”
Shaking, Deqo stood behind Ahmed with her hands on his shoulders. “We’re going to run,” she said.
“No one can move,” I told her firmly. “You have to stay here and wait with me.”
“I’m taking my brother,” she said, and pulled him away, out the door, and into the night. I turned around to the next patient, who was resting comfortably. If Ahmed was right, I thought, I should not run after them. I had to trust that Deqo knew the way in the bush. As I walked up to the second floor to check on the other girls, I prayed that Ahmed had imagined the noise.
I heard the door downstairs open and slam; from the window I could see men standing outside their still-running cars, guns pulled. Then I heard shrieks inside the hospital—it was one of our nurses, calling for help. By this time Amina had pulled on her shoes; so had her cousins. “Stay here,” I told them. “But if you hear shooting, take Mama Asha and run for the bush.”
I took the back stairs down to the outpatient clinic, and when I entered, I saw one man standing guard while, out of sight, I could hear at least two others beating that crying nurse in an examining room. “Don’t beat me, my brother!” she wailed. “I am your sister! I am of the same clan!” Another nurse told me that she had been captured while walking through the surgery department with a box of injections.
I ran into the hallway. “Don’t beat my daughter! I am Dr. Hawa! What do you want?”
One of the men walked up to me, holding his gun. “You are not Dr. Hawa—there is a fat, old woman who owns this place.”
“It is mine,” I said, glaring at him, and when I did, he took the handle of his rifle and slammed the back of the gun into my side. I didn’t feel the first blow, but I was doubled over by the second one.
“You have some fakash,” he said, using a pejorative word for a rival clan. “Open this door.” I jiggled the handle on the glass door to our washroom, wh
ere doctors scrubbed their hands before surgery. It was locked, and I didn’t have the key. Panicked, I tried to break the glass with my hand. The man stopped me. “You will hurt yourself,” he said.
At that moment, the sound of gunfire outside sent the men running out through the doors to meet the others. “Mama Hawa,” screamed the nurse who had been beaten, “They want to kill you! We have to run!” One of patients crawled out of a fuel drum that she’d been hiding in since the men came in. “They asked me to show them where you stored the money and food,” she cried, shaking her head. “I told them I was only a patient!”
We assumed they would come back to kill us, but before we could run, I first had to search the hospital, to make sure that there was no one around—I ran through the rooms, trying not to stop at each place where they had broken down doors. I called out, but there was no one else hiding—just two patients who were of the Hawiye clan, like the men, and who preferred to stay in their hospital beds.
We left around midnight, but with no moon, it was too dark to know exactly where we were, other than under rustling trees. The gunfire was still continuing as we crept silently into the bush, wondering if another group of men had come to the area, to attack the men who had attacked us. We finally sat, my mind numb as I prayed to God to save my children. The rattling finally stopped, and we could hear the cars pull away. Only then did I begin to feel the sharp pain in my side, but I stood up anyway, holding the nurse’s hand as we walked.
“Deqo! Amina! Ahmed! Kahiye! Su’ado! Dahabo! Abdi Karim!” I called the children’s names, one by one, and again, but I got no answer. Again I called, faster, my voice growing louder as my fear for their safety overtook my fear of being discovered. Could it have been possible that some of the men came during the gunfight to take the children? We waited for hours, suffering this way. Then the sky lightened, and I heard a small voice.
“Hey, did they leave?” It was Deqo.
“Hooyo, hooyo, come out,” I said, using the Somali term of endearment that we all use so often. “It’s safe, hooyo.” Shouting was difficult, my entire side tight with pain, but I couldn’t stop as I heard the rustling and saw the children, one by one. They’d been afraid that I had been held hostage, calling out to them with a gun to my head, one of the boys explained. But that all was forgotten, and they were giddy, breathless, even laughing—big, gulping laughs.
“Can we go home?” asked Amina, but I was too afraid that the men were still in the area. “No,” I said. “We’ll wait for a while.” So we sat together in the dirt, the youngest children lying on my lap, and they told me their story:
They waited in the bush for what felt like forever, trembling and hushing one another, whispering about what could happen. First, one girl wanted to use the toilet, and within the next hour, they all had to go, squirming as they felt their bladders throb. Finally, they decided that they’d go at once, crouching down under a group of low bushes. But the sound of the splash on the ground was loud, and the boys came out, yelling at them to stop. We all laughed, and when they told the story again, we laughed again. Then we fell quiet for a while, and some of them fell asleep. Deqo told me softly that she’d cried out when she heard the explosions, sure that I had been killed. “I’m here, hooyo,” I said.
When the sun was high enough, we stood up together, although my body was so stiff I could barely walk. I pulled away my clothes to see that my side had bruised from the blow. I showed the place to Ahmed. “My son, you see how they hit me yesterday?”
He began to cry, and I cursed myself for saying that. I, too, was in shock. I was trying so hard to amuse the children that I ignored what they really needed, which was to be far away from the danger. I consoled Ahmed for a moment and then made him laugh by showing him the stiff way I walked. After a few minutes of effort, we both felt better.
When we reached our place, we saw several donkey carts outside the front door: One family from the neighborhood had heard the gunfight, thought that we were gone, and began going through our things. Some had even climbed up the outside of our apartment, hoping to steal our roof.
When they saw us, they spoke quickly. “How are you?” one of the men asked. “Are you safe?”
“Yes, we are safe,” I told him. He hid his face, and along with the rest of his family, he left. I walked into each of the rooms ahead of the children, picking up the first precious things that I saw and setting them, as best I could, in their right places—on shelves and tables, or inside the pocket of my filthy white jacket. In my bedroom, I saw that our pillowcases had been split open. I fumbled around until, on the floor, I found two untouched pillows, and in one, the 500,000 Somali shillings I’d stuffed inside months earlier. In their haste, they had forgotten to look behind the bed.
I asked the cook to make some tea, and as she lit the fire outside, I washed my face and hands. I came back to the veranda, but before I could sit down to drink, I saw some of the men who had attacked us standing in front of me, wearing different clothes.
“We heard on the radio that something happened here last night,” said one, whom I remembered running past on my way to the bush. I sipped my tea without offering them any—something that was rare for me—and I listened as they lied and offered to protect me. To them I was not a doctor who deserved respect but a stupid, rich woman that they could both cheat and rob. I didn’t tell them that I knew they’d called strangers to help them break into the hospital and to attack my nurses. Instead I watched, in the broad daylight, as they lied to my face.
After they left, I called a meeting of the area’s elders, who’d supported my work before the war and who did their best to support the displaced people as the need had grown. “I came here to help you—to assist your wives’ labor, to treat your children, and your people are attacking me?” I said. “If you can’t help protect us, I’ll have to stop these things.”
They acknowledged the problem and assembled fifteen young men—the oldest was thirty, the youngest, nineteen—who would live in our place and serve as our guards. They all brought with them their own weapons, which were the same heavy guns, the government guns, now in the hands of the different rebel groups. Since they were still young and undisciplined, about four of the elders began to stay with us as well, to direct the guards and prevent petty arguments from breaking out among them. I was relieved by the decision, although I insisted on one thing: “We will never allow guns in the hospital,” I said.
When they left, I sat under the trees for a while, watching from afar as the children laughed and played. I thanked God for keeping us safe somehow, and for the blessing of memory, which dulls fear but not laughter. For me, the real blessing was remembering the warmth of eleven children gathered around me, whispering, nuzzling, or resting their heads on my aching knees. That was the reason why I had the strength to greet a morning just as unknown as that blackest of nights.
By the middle of 1992, most people who had the means to flee Somalia left, and we had with us just half the number that we’d cared for in the terrible early days. Now we had a total of 460 families—some were the original residents, and others were new, from Baidoa and Burr to the north and Mogadishu and Merca to the south. Among them was Sharif’s sheikh, who had recently come to us from the south, in search of a home. Out of respect for my family, I gave him two rooms above our outpatient clinic. He brought his own cook and attracted a crowd of followers. I was amazed to see how people treated the sheikh as a small god, and how he encouraged this. “If you obey me, I will protect you,” he would tell the people, and the people believed.
Aden also behaved sometimes as if this one person—“my beloved Sheikh”—could save us or destroy us. I reminded him sometimes that we’d met in a place where people didn’t believe in God. “The people in the Soviet Union were living normally, in good condition,” I said. But I was no match for the friends who flocked to him, exclaiming how lucky he was to have the big sheikh with him.
It was a chaotic time not just for us but for the whole a
rea; thousands of other internally displaced people, or IDPs, as the aid organizations called them, lived in neighboring camps along the Afgoye Road. Many of our new neighbors came to us each morning—280 families from one side, 300 from another—to line up with our residents for food distribution. Managing the crowds was difficult, but with our new guards keeping order, people mostly respected one another. We still had some troubles, of course—when the sun was hot, and water was especially scarce, people grew impatient, wanting to be first, to take everything.
Clan hatred and suspicion were on the lips of many from the moment they signed our camp’s registry. “She is caring for Darod people,” a son would say to a mother, which caused suspicion, then arguments, then attacks. To change people’s attitudes, we created a rule with no exceptions: In our place, we are all Somali. If you want to identify by your clan, you can’t stay.
One troublemaking family was given three warnings, but when they continued to fight with their neighbors, the guards gathered mother, father, and two children, and put them and their belongings outside the camp.
They apologized and protested, but I refused to hear them. “If I allowed you to continue fighting,” I said, “then everyone would do it.” They returned many more times to beg, until finally the elders agreed to hear their case. After some deliberation, they decided that the family could reenter the camp on the condition that the parents apologized to their own children, to the neighbor family they’d offended, and finally, to the elders. The family moved back in, and after that, they made no trouble.
We were skeptical when we turned on the radio and heard the BBC Somali service broadcast news of a cease-fire between the clans in March 1992, although for a little while, aid organizations that had been unable to unload supplies in Mogadishu were rerouted to Merca, where shipments could land and eventually reach us. Since everything from a box of bandages to a 50-kilo sack of rice had to be locked up, we set up two new storage areas—one for food donations, and another, in a place that was once meant to be a reception area, for medicine. At first, Deqo was in charge of the medicine; although she was just seventeen years old, we trusted her to meet the trucks that came in, keep track of the donations, and give out the proper supplies to the nurses or midwives who needed something. In time, that storage area would become a small pharmacy run by Aden and Khadija, which patients could visit with prescriptions written by me or by some of the other doctors.