by Hawa Abdi
Aden worked in the other storage area, supervising the committee of two storekeepers and twelve cooks, who were stirring in the big oil drums twice a day—early in the morning and at night. The cooks had to register how many sacks of rice they’d cooked by bringing the empty bags to Aden or the other storekeepers. Some of the people we hired cheated us, saying that they were cooking but really taking the rice to feed their own families. When that happened, we had another group of workers investigate; if the person was found guilty, he was relieved of his job.
I tried to reassure people that things would improve, but looking back, I know that I was exhausted and depressed. We were awake around the clock; the only difference between day and night was that, by day, aid workers and journalists flooded my place. While I knew it was important to talk with them, to make the world aware of what was happening, sometimes I had no words. “I have to rest,” I would apologize. “I have many surgeries tomorrow.”
The sheikh came to me one morning when I was eating a small bit of porridge among the others. “Ai-Hawa, you know, I have everything for you,” he told me, using the term of endearment for aunt. “When you die, I can provide you paradise. Now, while you’re alive, I can give you everything you want.”
“That is true?” I asked, running my finger along the bottom of the bowl. “So what do you want?”
“I want you to give me half of your land,” he said. He explained to me that he had as many as a hundred people wanting to stay with him, and I saw, at that moment, about twenty-five of those hundred standing nearby, watching and waiting.
I put down the container, which one of my helpers took to give to someone else. “I have given you your share, but the people living here are my guests, as you are my guest,” I said. “I cannot give you the land.”
He did not argue with me, but his followers appealed to my husband: “Aden, you are great. God has given you the pleasure of the sheikh. We will provide the building material for the sheikh’s house, if you will provide us the land.” Against my knowledge, they began assembling their supplies for the sheikh’s house—one man provided stones, another cement, another wood.
Khadija came to me when she heard what I had told the sheikh, afraid that God would punish us for my defiance. “Take a look at all of this here,” she sobbed. “All of it, it will be burned.”
“You are just destroying yourself,” said another one of my relatives, who came with Khadija.
“This is crazy,” I said. “Nothing will happen to us.”
I’d just left for Mogadishu a few days later when I noticed a group of pickup trucks coming in the other direction. When I looked behind me and saw them turning into my place, I asked my driver to turn around. We gained speed and passed them, and I was standing at the gate by the time the cars pulled over. “Tell those cars to stop,” I told the guards, who went ahead of me to meet them.
The first car was driven by a man who’d come to deliver stones. “Those stones belong to the sheikh,” he argued when he was turned away. But since the land belonged to me, I had the final say.
Aden came to me that night, furious. “Hawa, do you want the sheikh to destroy us?”
The bones of my legs were aching, and I could barely open my eyes. “I gave him money and food,” I told Aden. “Did this man raise you? Your father is more powerful—he can bless you and curse you, not this man.”
I didn’t understand what had changed for Aden—how he could follow with such devotion, after living, for years, as I did. “He is not a small god,” I told Aden. “If God is seeing everything, then there is no fear that we’ll suffer.” Aden didn’t return to our bed that night, and soon after, the sheikh took his wives, children, and helpers to another place, in Mogadishu. Aden began to spend more and more time in Mogadishu rather than in the camp; he began staying some nights in Mogadishu as well. While I felt his absence as much as the children did, I refused to discuss the matter with anyone. The only explanation I could give my children was the truth: There was a 6 p.m. curfew in Mogadishu, and important business was keeping their father from coming home at night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Today We Are Happy
Sleep was impossible, as all the pillars holding up our world were collapsing. I battled the exhaustion, drinking tea, my stomach like an angry fist. My body felt so heavy I didn’t think much about losing weight, and although Faduma Duale and the other nurses often had to help me to my feet, I insisted that I was strong enough to make rounds on my own.
One afternoon I went to ask the cook to put aside a portion of the cow we’d slaughtered, so I could give it to a Saudi Arabian delegation that had come to the camp. Then I staggered back to my room to lie down for a while, worried that I wouldn’t be able to join them for the meeting. My mind told my legs to move, and I was able to swing them over to the side of the bed; with Faduma Duale behind me, I was able to walk. I came in to the hospital meeting room, welcoming the men and thanking them for coming.
“Oh, the doctor’s situation is like this?” asked the head of the delegation. “She’s the worst of the starving people!” Embarrassed, I greeted them, sinking down into a chair. We talked about the situation in my country and about how help from others had saved so many lives. The man distributed a little bit of money to each of the cooks who were serving the meal, and later, after I returned to my bed, he gave the elders enough money to help us buy some more meat, some milk, some medicine.
Aden returned to our room a few nights later, wanting to talk. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia,” he said.
He has gone mad, I thought. All around us, people were falling down, dying of starvation. I myself had spent the day in bed again, relying on the other doctors to handle emergencies. They’d come into my room to update me on the situation. “Aden,” I said, “I’m sick now. You can’t leave me. Who will see after the children?”
“The sheikh will go to Saudi Arabia, and I have to go after him,” he said.
“What about your children?” Though I was shocked, I felt too weak to try to argue or to try to convince him to stay. He left me lying in that bed, feeling more helpless than I had in years. I knew that the pressure on him was great and that the deep fear we felt when he was kidnapped years earlier was still just as real. Still, when I heard his footsteps going down the stairs to where Deqo was working in the storage area, I got to my feet to try to stop him. What would he tell Deqo? He would need money to travel; maybe he would go after the suitcase that we kept in the back of the storage closet. Deqo had the only key.
I felt a shooting pain in my back as I rushed down the stairs. “Give me the money,” I told Deqo when I saw them both there together.
“I already gave him two thousand dollars,” she said, confused, concerned. For a moment we stood there, the three of us, while Aden was silent. Finally I went back up the stairs to my bed. I suppose Aden left sometime soon after.
I later found out that as Aden drove to the small airport in Wanlaweyn accompanied by one of our relatives and Kahiye, our eldest nephew, the car had been shot at by a group of men who’d heard Aden’s accent and mistakenly identified him as part of a Darod subclan. Aden had immediately turned the car around, and everyone in the camp had come running when they saw the shattered window and bullet-pocked door, worried that someone had been hit. While Kahiye was safe, Aden and our relative, who had each been wounded in their legs, were admitted to the hospital immediately. No bones were broken. Our relative was discharged, and another hospital bed was brought into the room where I lay. For nine days, Aden lay in the bed beside me, saying little; I was so sick and so angry that I pretended to sleep. I did not ask him to reconsider his decision, and he did not offer.
How could a man leave his family like this, at a time like this? I could hear Deqo cry to him, “Father, don’t go!” Amina and Ahmed did also; I don’t know how he explained his decision to them.
By the time he left for a second time, I could no longer hold even small food in my stomach. I began vomiting, vo
miting, vomiting continuously, and when my staff or aid workers came, they had to meet with me in my room, sometimes sitting down on the extra bed the staff had brought in for Aden. I finally agreed to an examination by old friend, a Burundian doctor who had been working with us. He shook his head when he saw me, calling to me in the comforting Italian of our earliest days at Digfer: “Ah, dottora, dottora.” While ICRC brought the blood, urine, and stool samples to Nairobi for analysis, I lay in my bed, imagining the people in the area laughing at me, thinking that since I had kicked out the big sheikh, I would never recover.
When the results came back a few weeks later, my friend diagnosed me with a gallbladder infection and severe anemia. He prescribed some medicine and vitamins and a diet with only boiled meat—nothing roasted. Looking back now, I think my sickness was not just malnutrition but a nervous depression. My country, my family, and now my body had failed, as I remained in that bed, on the second floor of my own hospital.
Since the room was above our two delivery rooms, I could often hear what was happening below through the open windows. One night we had with us three women in labor at the same time. The two nurses who were working—one who had received just on-the-job training and the other an American missionary—were together in one room when the third woman cried out: “Help me! I’m going to die!”
The only other person down there was Deqo, who ran in. “You have to wait,” she said. “They are coming soon. I’m not a doctor.”
The woman howled and screamed. “I don’t care if you’re a kid,” she said. “Do something!”
So Deqo, who had watched me for so long, tried to examine the woman as I had, and she saw the baby’s position. Around 4 a.m., she came to my bedside. “Mama, I did it,” she said. “The woman downstairs delivered normally. The child is alive.”
I rolled over in my bed. My daughter had been just thirteen when she’d witnessed her first surgery; she’d fainted when I opened that woman’s abdomen and showed her the tumor. For years after, she would read my books, saying, “Let me help you!” Now she was a confident young woman, managing the medicine in the camp and the patients’ treatment besides. While it was hard to imagine her standing on her own two feet when I could not, she had done so, and oh, how happy she was.
I insisted that a qualified midwife supervise her, but as long as that was the case, I was glad to know she was helping in the hospital. The work took her mind off her search for Aden. We knew that while he and the sheikh waited to travel to Saudi Arabia, they were in Nairobi. They had found an apartment in the neighborhood of Eastleigh, where the wealthy Somalis who had escaped the war had begun building up apartment buildings and their own sprawling markets. At night, she called every phone number we had. Most times she got no answer, or a woman responded, saying, “Aden is not in.”
She called and called, always hearing the same thing: “He’s not in.”
“You have to stop searching,” I told her. “Otherwise you will feel bad.”
“Why did you refuse my father?” she asked. “What happened to make him go?”
“Please, Deqo, do you see around? There are children here whose fathers have died,” I said. “They are still living, searching for some work, finding happiness. Please, forget your father.”
She shook her head and walked out of the room. “I cannot forget.”
God is great—the medicine, the vitamins, and the diet worked, and I became healthy, able again to stand to meet the demands of the camp and the hospital. As Deqo worked and Ahmed played with his cousins and the other children in the camp, Amina was my shadow, following me as I made my rounds and visited patients, or else sitting on an empty examining table in the outpatient clinic, watching people come and go. She was sitting there one day when we received a man who had been injured in a car accident. He was bleeding from the head and holding his gun. Faduma Duale met him at the door, along with another nurse. “Please, this is a hospital,” said Faduma Duale calmly. “Please give the gun to your friend to hold.”
The man, clearly in shock, kept the gun and waved it at them. “Will you treat me or not?” he asked. “I’m bleeding to death.”
Amina stared at Faduma Duale, who said, “Okay, okay, we will treat you.” The two nurses tried to be calm, to convince the man to sit, so they could examine his wound, but his mind was not normal. He started shooting off the gun in the hospital, blowing holes through the ceiling and sending everyone—patients, staff, and my daughter—running. Only one lady remained. Though she was able to walk, she was too scared to move! She just lay on the bed, pumping her arms up and down like she was running in place. “God help me,” she repeated, “God help me.”
By the time I came out, the guy had already left for the bush. We all walked back into the room to see the woman still pumping, still crying out. Finally, one of our nurses had to stand over her and shout: “Maria, you’re okay, everyone is okay. Now shut up!”
Amina remembers that day as one of the funniest days in the hospital, and you know, I can see why. These are the types of stories that we usually tell one another during darker times, to make each other laugh. They are stories of our lives, for while Somali poetry may be as lyrical as a flute, our humor is dark, blunt. We lived to see another day, so for Maria to cry and thrash, says Amina, is something silly indeed.
I stopped arguing with my sisters and tried to accept that my point of view was different than theirs. Asha became sick—weak and very thin—so I gave her money to go to Nairobi, to stay with Aden there and to search for treatment. Maybe eventually she could find some place to work, I thought.
For a while, our area was calm. “You see?” I said to my patients. “We don’t have any bad relations with all these people who are fighting.” Aidid and his men had control of about two-thirds of Somalia by this time, including most of Mogadishu and our area. Then came rumors that Siad Barre’s men, the Somali National Front, were leaving their base in Kismayo, trying to recapture the capital city. One afternoon someone told me that we’d be attacked. How he knew this, I don’t know. Was it true? If it was, where would we run?
“God, my God,” I prayed, “I have nowhere to go.” I didn’t say anything to anyone else, although I locked every door of the hospital and put the guards on alert.
Around eight o’clock that night, a jeep full of armed men came into my camp from one side, and many other cars came racing in from the other direction. One of them crashed hard into the jeep. We heard the terrible noises from inside the hospital, and then we heard the voices of the people living in the camp: “Please bring stretchers!” “Take these people who cannot move!”
The man who had been in the first jeep, in the position to shoot, had been decapitated. People from the other car were also dead, and since gunfire had broken out after the accident, many, many were wounded.
The anesthetist was still with us at that time. Thinking of the many, many sutures the men would need, I began shouting orders. “I’m going into surgery!” I said. We would not have enough supplies, but we would do our best. “Bring everyone to us!” Soon all the victims, alive and dead, had been carried by stretcher to the clearing near the outpatient clinic. Some of the wounded people were screaming and moaning, but others kept quiet, just looking at me. “Deqo!” I shouted. “Find the most severe ones in there, and have the guards bring them in to me.”
Deqo and Amina knew that during an accident, they should look for people who were too sick or too injured to yell—those were the ones in the worst condition, the ones who needed immediate treatment. Deqo walked up to the clearing, shocked by the sight of so much injury—heads almost severed, bullet holes in every place. One man with a wounded leg thrashed silently; as Deqo approached him to help, he grabbed her leg, digging his long, sharp nails through her skin. He died that way, hanging on.
There is a Somali superstition that if someone holds on to you while he is dying, that part of your body will be buried with him. If he catches your hand, for example, your hand will be cut off. “AAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Deqo screamed as he clung to her, and she kept screaming until everyone came running. I rushed out of surgery even, and we held her together, in a big group, as her screams turned to sobs.
“Mama Hawa, I cannot keep running like this all the time,” said Kahiye a few days later. “I can defend myself like the other boys my age. I can get a gun. I can drive a car.”
I told Kahiye that a gun was not a solution, but I knew then that I could no longer keep my children in such a dangerous situation. Kenya had opened its doors to refugees, so we made arrangements with ICRC to fly all the children to Nairobi. While Aden had left for Saudi Arabia by this point, Asha could meet us at the apartment he’d rented in Eastleigh. I contacted a local school that would accept them, and we prepared to leave.
“Work as I work,” I told Faduma Duale. “You know the hospital and the camp. You know the farm, so you can see how they are producing.” While we could not communicate by telephone, Bakara Market had a CB radio, and I could find another in Nairobi somehow.
The children and I landed at the Nairobi airport in April 1992 and we took a taxi to the Eastleigh apartment. Asha was inside the bathroom when we arrived, and when she walked out and saw us, her face did not change. “Asha, you have to see after these children,” I said. “I have to go back to the camp in four days. If something happens to me, please stay with them, and make sure they get a good education.” I had brought with me, in my dress, a small bit of gold tied up in one section and a wad of U.S. dollars tied up in another. “Buy the clothes and the books so they could go to school.”