by Hawa Abdi
We had no choice but to look past the danger and try to move ahead, knowing that finding some common ground with the warlords was a matter of survival. The American troops, however, saw these complicated relationships as barriers to their mission. Since the militiamen representing the warlords’ interests felt similarly about the U.S. presence, I feared we would never know peace.
In March, UNOSOM organized a conference on humanitarian assistance in Somalia; I was invited to attend on behalf of my hospital, and they paid my way to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There, a large group of intellectuals, organizers, executives, and representatives from donor countries assembled to hear from the people like me, who were working on the ground. I felt disoriented and weak as I walked into the hotel with a delegation of Somali women. As we sat together and talked, I was sorry to hear so many people quarreling over politics and jumping to their own clan’s defense.
In one session, each person in attendance was given four minutes to talk on the subject of peace and reconciliation—the theme for another conference happening in Addis Ababa, which the leaders of fifteen different factions in Somalia would attend. When it was my turn, I shook my head. “I’m not going to talk for four minutes,” I said. “I’ll just keep quiet.”
“Please give the lady the time to say whatever she wants,” said one woman who helped organize the conference.
I took their microphone, looked out at the audience, and said, “No one of you is any better than another. You have all destroyed Somalia.” I took a deep breath. “First, you government representatives brought your trucks to the national bank and took all the money, every car, every engine, everything good. I witnessed it—I live beside that road.
“Then, after you left, this other group of you came, and you raped all of the mothers and the daughters; you took the small money they were hiding underneath their pillows and stole their future. This is the way you support your country, going after one another? You’re all bandits—you’re not real Somalis.”
I described the children suffering and the mothers who came, wanting something, when I had nothing to give. “The poor people who sent me here are waiting for you—they need peace,” I said. “I will go back. What will I say when I go? Will you decide something to make Somalia a better place?”
I sat back down among my old friends from Kiev and my colleagues from Mogadishu. As they hugged me, the anger that powered that speech still felt hot in my face. I remembered everything—I couldn’t stand sitting there, among these people who were all pretending to do something good. Later, as I spoke directly with representatives from some of the donor countries, I felt relieved that I had told the truth. I feared God only, not these corrupt people; I would not praise them, and I would not keep quiet.
In the next few days, several journalists came to me, asking me questions about the situation in Somalia. One afternoon I spoke with a television reporter from Djibouti, and that night, the phone in my room rang. Aden had seen the speech on television, and he’d called to tell me that he and the sheikh were coming back to Mogadishu. “When you finish the conference, meet me in Djibouti,” he said. “We will return together.”
It was the first time I’d heard his voice in a year. I felt a mix of love and hatred for this man, who I had decided could not have loved me, if he left me when I was so sick. “No,” I told him. “I will go straight home.”
When you’re hit the same way again and again, your body learns how to defend itself. If you hit me in the arm while I am relaxed, the blow will cause me pain. The next time, my muscle will be tight and ready. “What can I do, Aden?” I said. “I have to go back and do my job. You do what you want.”
The donors at the conference pledged more than $130 million toward the rebuilding of Somalia; at a different conference, held just days later, the warlords signed an agreement on disarmament and the establishment of a transitional government. I returned home hopeful, thinking that, finally, we could move forward. We had not been able to find peace among the warlords with each one saying, “I’m powerful, I can do everything.” Everyone wants to be president, but there is just one chair. It is impossible for everyone to sit in it.
A few weeks later, I was back at the camp, praying in my bedroom, when Khadija ran in, sweating. I told her to leave, to wait until I had finished, and when I opened my door, she was still there, breathing heavily. “Aden has come!” she said. “Aden has come!”
I walked downstairs, and we met on the veranda. His face hadn’t changed, but he had gained weight—I knew that in Saudi Arabia, where there are few jobs, people often sit around all day, drinking fruit smoothies. He carried with him a stack of papers, and as he shuffled through them, he explained that he had been trying to connect the camp with several rich men. Nothing had come of his meetings, he said, but he was optimistic.
He didn’t act as though he had been far away for long, and he didn’t apologize for leaving me.
“Okay, Aden, I have no problem,” I said. We didn’t discuss what had happened between us; I would accept him only because I didn’t want our children to suffer without a family intact. I wouldn’t fight him or beg for an apology. Somali people, you know, are very proud.
Some of the relief workers saw this pride when they tried to throw food from their cars to starving children, and to their shock, many of the starving children refused it. A similar thing happened in our camp once, when a delegation from Bangladesh was visiting. When they asked me how such desperate people could leave food on the ground, I tried to explain that we were still strong in our hearts, even if our bodies and our clothes told a different story.
“You know,” I said, “if you want to give these people something, give it from your hand to their hand.”
We wanted so badly to feel human, we were grateful to those who recognized our work. In April, ICRC financed the drilling of a well on our property by an American man working with a Somali engineer. They brought over a drill from a local businessman, and within three days, they’d gone 220 meters deep to get us plenty of sweet water, which would go into a 250-drum water tank for the camp and a 40-drum tank for the hospital. They built pipes out to the camp, so people could bring their jerrycans, and they also ran piping into the hospital, so we could scrub up before operations.
But while the humanitarian situation improved somewhat in 1993, politically we were unraveling. The ceasefire that the warlords signed didn’t bring a moment of peace, and they now used foreign peacekeepers as targets. Aidid broadcast his hatred of Western intervention on Radio Mogadishu, accusing the UN of coming to colonialize Somalia. In early June, a group of Aidid’s militiamen ambushed and killed twenty-four Pakistani UN troops, and wounded many, many others, during an inspection of one of Aidid’s storehouses. The news was disturbing, shameful. We whispered among one another, wondering what would come of it. I sat down one evening, when I couldn’t sleep, to write a letter to an American diplomat, trying to explain our position. “Please, we are sorry, but I am begging you not to seek revenge,” I wrote. “We have suffered enough, we’ve seen enough death. Retaliation is not good.” I sent another to the UNOSOM office.
While I hesitated to turn on the radio for the latest news, we did need to be informed. That’s how we learned how the UN fought back: passing an emergency resolution that authorized “all necessary measures” to stop such violence against UNOSOM staff. Then they issued a warrant for Aidid’s arrest and showered Bakara Market with flyers that offered a $25,000 reward for information about him.
“Dr. Hawa, we came here to help you, and now we can’t even go outside our base,” said a U.S. official one afternoon, when a group of them came to meet with me. They, too, were searching for some information about Aidid. “Why are your people terrorizing us?”
“You are just going after Aidid, and Somalis don’t like one-sided people,” I said. “We have fifteen warlords. If you stood up and said, ‘We want all the warlords,’ the people would capture them for you. But if you leave fourteen and search for just o
ne, they will stand up and fight you.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” he asked.
“Please,” I said, stirring my tea. “Take them all, together.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
One Wrong Decision
Deqo thrived in the camp, teaching in the school and assisting in the hospital. While she learned a lot doing this, it was not what I had envisioned for my daughter. I had spoken with some people about university for her and for my sister Amina’s eldest daughter, Su’ado, who was, like Deqo, nearing age twenty. I knew it would be expensive, so I brought another 500 grams of my gold from my hiding place inside my room; the women who sold it returned to me with about $9,000 U.S. Convinced that this would be enough, I bought plane tickets to Nairobi for the two girls and for me, so we could find a way for them to study. Leaving the rest of the children behind, I checked us into a cheap hotel in Eastleigh and called every number our friends had given us.
Since I had not paid for my own studies, I was shocked to learn the price of sending our children away. I was told that a year of tuition at one British university was about $38,000—similar to the cost of some private universities in America, where Deqo had wanted to go from the start. At the University of Nairobi Medical School, the cost of one year was about $11,000 for each girl, plus housing. Even that was too much for us to sustain.
I found a Russian charity organization that offered scholarships, and finally, I saw a way. Tuition and housing for the two girls at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, through their program, would be about $6,000 U.S. a year, plus an additional $2,400 for food. Remembering the Russian books in my home library and my tough professors, I sent the charity a fax, listing Deqo and Su’ado’s birth dates and academic information, and explaining why they wanted to study. When we received word that the girls were accepted, I asked that they’d also send a visa for Aden, who could enroll them before classes started at the beginning of September.
The Moscow my children would enter in 1993 was a far different place than the one I had known. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was deep economic trouble, social unrest, and political turmoil. “Please, Hawa,” cried my cousin. “Don’t send your children to that place!”
I called Aden at the camp. While he agreed that it was dangerous for the girls to go there, we both believed it was right. I left the girls with my cousin and returned to the camp to work and to ask for financial help from family members, friends, and even some of the ICRC staff. Once all the arrangements had been made, I began to worry.
I tried listening to my inner voice, as my mother had advised, but I found that instead of giving me comfort, the noise kept me up late into the night. What was I doing, I wondered, sending these girls so far away, to a place that was so violent and cold? The Russians I knew had advised me, and they’d cared for me as if I were their child. Would my girls have the same experience? Would they come home well educated and unspoiled, as I had?
The questions were not answered by the time Aden had to leave to take them. He stopped first in Nairobi to meet them, and they went together to Cairo, to get their plane to Moscow—the same route that we took in the 1960s. I went to the airport to see him off. While we were waiting, he saw two young women he knew and stopped to talk with them. I was too distracted to talk, so I excused myself and went to sit in an empty row of seats with my eyes closed. I stood for a while after saying good-bye, watching through the window as his bus drove out to the airplane.
For the next month, I suffered. We had no way of communicating, and the radio broadcast the frightening news that the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, had dissolved the parliament. What to do, other than to pray and wait? Finally, Aden called me from Nairobi, where he had landed and where he was planning to stay. “Our daughters are okay,” he told me. When he saw me next, he would give me their photo. I could call the school from the Mogadishu post office and ask to speak with Deqo directly.
When I asked about the security in the school, Aden said that he hadn’t seen any guards, but that it didn’t seem to be a problem. He’d asked a taxi driver about the political situation. “We don’t care,” the driver had said. “We are not part of the government. We are ordinary people—if they fight, if they make peace for us, it’s the same.”
Our food supplies became very low that September, and on October 3, I took the bus to Mogadishu for a meeting with the ICRC office. I got off at my usual stop, near Banadir hospital, when I saw, from across the street, a man wearing a white kameez, waving in his left hand a hunk of cow meat, about the size of an outstretched hand. Dozens of young boys shouted and jumped after him, cheering and repeating his terrible words: “They come to our place to bother us? We will eat their meat!” he screamed to the children, waving the hunk in their direction. “Like this! Like this!”
I was so shocked by the sound and the sight, the tone of his voice, that I couldn’t move. I stood, my legs shaking, as the children screamed after him, a sound of “Weeee-weeee-weeee-weeeee-weeeee!” The oldest, I think, was ten years old.
“Go out!” the man screamed, and the children echoed, “Go out! Go out!”
“Go from our country!” said the man. “We will eat you like this! Like this! We will eat!”
I was shaken by the time I arrived at the ICRC office, and I stood as we discussed the rice and the oil that would come on the trucks, insha’Allah, in three days’ time.
“Please add something,” I begged. “People are coming, more and more.”
“We will try our best,” they said.
I waited for the very next bus home, and when I arrived, the radio in the hospital was on: The BBC Somali service reported that two American Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down nearby Bakara Market, and since it was the afternoon, the busiest time of day, hundreds or maybe thousands of Somali people, business owners and innocent women and children, had been killed. Some Americans had been killed as well, although no one knew how many.
The chaos was far away—we couldn’t hear the shouting or the sound of bullets—but we still felt helpless and trapped. I began visiting patients anyway, but after about twenty minutes, I called Faduma Duale and another nurse into an empty examining room. I handed Faduma my clipboard and took off my glasses. “Please see after the rest of this,” I said. I took two sedative tablets from the pharmacy, walked into my room, and slept.
When I awoke the next morning, I requested to have my breakfast in my Camp David, and some of the people living in the camp came over to talk. Most hadn’t slept the night before, awaiting word from their families. Their tired eyes were wide as they told me that a thousand Somalis had been killed in the crash and the fighting, and at least five American soldiers. Someone had heard from a relative inside Mogadishu that a group had captured the dead American soldiers, dragging their bodies through the streets. “That is inhuman,” I said. When the rumor was confirmed by the news, I would refuse to look at the photos, insisting, as I do now, that for a doctor, the human body is sacred.
In time, a crowd gathered around us. A man I knew well pushed through, sitting down near me. “You know, Hawa,” he said, “I was in Bakara Market earlier this morning. When I entered one of the shops there, I saw a woman sitting with her husband and her two sons.
“On the floor, near where the mother was preparing tea, were two dead bodies, but no one was looking at them. The men were chewing qat, and no one said anything to me.
“ ‘Who are these people?’ I asked them.
“ ‘These are my two boys,’ said the mother. ‘I had four, and now I have two remaining.’
“I was shocked,” the man said, and then stopped talking for a moment, his head down, swaying from side to side, as though he were chanting. Then he continued. “They spoke normally, they ate normally. They had no feeling. They had no sadness. The mother was not crying.”
When he lifted his head, I looked at him for a moment—his raised eyebrows, his sad, open mouth. “You know,” I told him finally, �
��the world is very complicated.”
For the next several months, until early 1994, the American soldiers stayed in their compound, and Aidid’s men tried to attack them night and day. One day, a group of the Americans returned to our place, carrying supplies to clean the hospital—mops and brooms and buckets. We’d been waiting for things to calm down before we could return to Mogadishu for supplies, so I thanked their supervisor, a tall, handsome, bald man, about thirty-five years old. “I came to say good-bye,” he said.
“I’m sorry to see you go, but I’m happy you’ve finished your tour,” I said. “Will you give me your address? I would like to send your wife a present.”
“Please, don’t do that,” he said, and went back to work. The rest of his team was particularly quiet, unloading their supplies and saying either nothing or their usual “Bye.”
The next day, I took the bus to the Mogadishu post office for my scheduled phone call with Deqo. I climbed the stairs to the top of the six-story building, one of the city’s tallest; since I was early for the appointment, I walked over to the big windows, to look out at the ocean.
I saw on the horizon many, too many, military ships, moving out straight, away from the coast, and then turning south, in the direction of Kenya. I stared for as long as I could, watching as, one by one, they passed out of my sight. Then I walked away from the window with a heavy heart, understanding finally what the American soldier was saying to me. I knew they would not return.
I waited and waited to hear Deqo’s voice, and when I finally did, I felt relieved that she was far away. She cried as I told her about the visit from the American soldiers, and about the ships, which had carried away her new friends—one had even confessed his love for her before she left for Moscow. She had felt such confidence in the Americans, for whom she translated, with whom she taught. We wouldn’t survive without their help, she said. “Please, Mama,” she said, “go to Nairobi, or come to me here.”