by Hawa Abdi
“I’m very busy in the camp,” I said. “You know that someone is always waiting for me. They’re sick, or they need to tell me about a problem in their house.” My children said they understood, but my words sounded hollow, even to me. I left for the airport, my heart full of regret. Maybe I should have stayed in Nairobi, protecting my children, rather than risking my life and leaving them gold and U.S. dollars for food and emergencies.
I took the flight anyway, and forty minutes after we took off, the pilot came on the loudspeaker to say that there was a problem with the engine and we’d have to return to the airport. I turned to one of my friends. “I cannot stay here—maybe we won’t leave until tomorrow,” I said. “I have to go to my children tonight, to stay with them.” So I took a taxi back to the apartment.
The next morning, Khadija came into the kitchen to ask if she could keep my soap, which I had left out in the bathroom.
“It’s the soap you’re thinking of? Take it,” I snapped. “You’ve already taken everything else.”
By the end of the 1990s, Somalia was dry in every way: I could not earn enough from the hospital to keep it open and support my children. I spoke with a Somali nurse I knew, who worked for a doctor at Kilimanjaro hospital in Eastleigh. She told him about me, explaining how many women knew me, trusted me, and liked my treatment. He invited me to join his practice, and went to the Minister of Health to apply for my work visa. While I felt conflicted about my decision, my job—and my paycheck—was set. I left Asha in the camp and returned to Nairobi to celebrate the millennium with my husband and son.
At that time, Khadija was living with her children in another part of Nairobi, so we three, after years of distance, fell into a familiar routine: breakfast together, then I prepared for work, Ahmed for school, and Aden for meetings with his friends and powerful people in his clan. While some people ask if I was bothered by the fact that I was earning the income for our family, for us, it had always been this way. We were both students when we first met, and then he was an officer, a position that didn’t pay much. I had decided at an early age that I would work and earn my own money, so I never needed to ask anyone for anything.
When I wasn’t working in Kilimanjaro hospital, women came to our apartment, as they had in the earliest days of my clinic. I divided our downstairs sitting room in half, with a waiting room on one side and the other side closed off for examinations. I called one of my nurses from the camp to come assist me; sometimes, when women were delivering at night, she would stay up so I could get some sleep. Soon I was able to send about $1,500 U.S. a month to the camp, to keep the water pumps running and the electricity on.
That April, I was invited to Arta, Djibouti, to participate in another Somali reconciliation conference. While I knew that the last several had been ineffective, including the most recent, in Cairo, I accepted anyway. Deqo would be a doctor in May, and I wanted her to work with me in a peaceful country.
A few days before I left, Aden told me that he wanted to see his relatives near Hargeisa—it would be his first trip back to the north of Somalia since he was young. That meant that Ahmed, who was in his last year of secondary school in Nairobi, would be left alone, but he was a responsible young man. He looked forward to taking Deqo’s place in Moscow, but he didn’t want to be a doctor, like his sisters. He wanted to be a pilot.
“Oh, my child, it’s too dangerous in the sky,” I told him. “You have to stay down here with me!”
People traveled to Djibouti from all over—from the diaspora as well as from within Somalia—but many of the warlords, including Aidid’s son, refused to come. I was at the reconciliation conference for weeks, restless and uncomfortable, frustrated by the oppressively hot weather and the same old arguments of clan, clan, clan. “We want only peace to rebuild our beautiful country,” I said in a session one day. “We can’t all sit in the president’s chair, but if we select someone suitable to bring us peace, that, for us, is enough.” When I finished my speech, some of the women from the diaspora hugged me.
Deqo called me one night at my hotel, and I told her that I would come to her graduation in Moscow. “I don’t need to stay here and talk with these people who don’t understand anything,” I said. I tried to reach Aden, but I couldn’t; we hadn’t spoken since he’d gone to Hargeisa.
When I got to the Djibouti airport, I learned that in order to get to Moscow, I would have to fly through Paris. Since the French Embassy in Djibouti had a photo of a Somali passport with a red line through it, I could not get a visa. Instead I had to return to Nairobi so I could fly through Cairo. “I’m sorry,” I said, leaving a message. “I’ll be a day late.”
Deqo and Amina were there to greet me when I finally arrived, and although they looked thin and tired, they were happy to see me. I was happy, too, seeing my daughters and my second motherland, where I had spent some of the most beautiful days of my life. Many of the tall buildings were gone, replaced by even taller structures without any design or character, and I immediately noticed that people looked at the ground instead of in one another’s eyes. They were especially suspicious of foreigners—no longer welcoming and curious.
I slept in Deqo’s bed as she prepared for her graduation party, cooking beets and eggs for salads, preparing meat, bread, everything. That night they had music and dancing for hours, and we all took turns making speeches. The students applauded when I said that Somalia was waiting for them, but not as loudly as they cheered for Deqo’s speech: “My life is my friends and music, so always, I will be with you,” she said.
For ten days I lived as though I were young again, sitting in beautiful green parks, visiting cafés, taking photos. One night Aden called to speak with Deqo. After she was finished talking with him, she handed the phone to me. “How are you?” he asked.
“I’m enjoying the beauty of Moscow with my daughters,” I said without emotion.
“Congratulations,” he said.
Later that day I told Deqo that I had spoken with my supervisor in Nairobi, and that he had prepared for her a specialization at Kilimanjaro hospital. “No, Mama,” she said. She had begun working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees while in Moscow, and she wanted to continue. “I want to have my specialization here,” she said. “UNHCR will pay all my expenses.”
“I want you to come work with me—to specialize at a university in Nairobi,” I said.
“UNHCR has already accepted me,” she said, “and I’ve told them I will stay.” The words stunned me—while I knew that my daughter had enjoyed her life on the outside, I had assumed that she wanted to return home as soon as she could.
“Deqo,” said Amina, “you will be cursed if you don’t go with Mama.” But Deqo had made up her mind, and if my children say something, they say it. They can’t be convinced otherwise.
When I returned to our apartment in Nairobi, Ahmed was there. He hugged me and then looked over my shoulder. “Where’s Deqo?”
I sighed. “Not now,” I said. I was suddenly very tired. “I need to come inside and rest.”
Aden said that he had enjoyed his trip to the north, and I could tell by his face that he was happy. “I saw many men who asked for my advice,” he said. He thanked me for supporting our daughter, and he told me that he agreed with her decision to remain in Moscow. Together we watched the graduation video: Each child took a diploma, threw his hat in the air, and hugged his parents. Deqo, the only Somali student, tossed her hat and hugged her friends.
“You made a mistake,” I told Aden. “You should have been there.”
I returned to my daily routine: my shift at Kilimanjaro hospital, my home practice, and then long hours on the telephone with Faduma Duale, who was running our hospital at the camp. The UN’s World Food Programme was still working in the region, so people were no longer starving, and some had been able to find work. In those days, the hospital at the camp was able to receive some payment from about 60 percent of our Somali clients.
Two weeks after Aden returned, I came home from
Kilimanjaro hospital to find him in the downstairs sitting room, a large bag at his feet. “I have a job to do in the north, so I’m going to live there,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I die there. And I’ll forgive you if you die.”
I could tell by the way he spoke that something had changed. “Do you have another wife there? Please tell me.” I’d had my suspicions for so many years—the rumors and gossip, the time we spent apart, the strange women answering the telephone in Nairobi or in Saudi Arabia or, I was sure, in Hargeisa.
“Never,” he said, and he said it again when he kissed me good-bye. “I would never have another wife.”
I told my children that their father had left us. When Ahmed called, Aden said, “Your mother is disturbing me—she says I have another wife but I do not, I swear.”
One of Aden’s relatives came to the apartment with his wife, who needed a consultation. I finished the examination and wrote her a prescription, and then he asked her to leave the room while we talked privately. “Hawa, I have to tell you,” he said. “Aden has a wife and a daughter who is five years old.” Now, he said, the wife was five months pregnant.
I wanted to scream so he would stop talking, but from the simple way he spoke, I knew that he was telling me something true. I had refused to believe it for so long, even when I was accusing Aden. He had lied to me and to his children, and he’d continued that lie for seven years. All the time he had been living with us, his relatives and the members of his clan were talking to him, telling him, “You are ours.” They’d insisted that he take a wife that was one of their daughters—not someone like me, from a different clan, from the south.
Like their mother, my children refused to believe. Then one day Ahmed received a call from his father. “You must congratulate me,” his father said, “for today, you have another brother, and I have another son.”
So many women in our society run after men—asking where they went, what relations they had—fearing that they will be abandoned, left with nothing. “Sometimes we are more powerful than men,” said one of my closest friends, a talented midwife named Maimona, who was strong, well educated, and successful, and who still treated her husband like a small god. “We just have to know the right way to approach them.” I could not imagine living as she did, working all day in the hospital but having another top priority: to please her husband, preparing food for him herself, laying out his clothes, running his bath. She treated him as a child in some ways, but even more delicately. If she had a group of friends over, she would say after a while, “Please go. My husband and I have to have time to talk.”
“I’m not his laborer,” I had told Maimona then. “I love him, he loves me. We are equals.” I knew that after the government’s collapse, Aden and I had no time for each other. We struggled together, working and planning as we always had, even as the situation grew more and more difficult. I always had my own targets, my own point of view; it turned out that while my mind had been busy, he had been busy in other ways. Somali men want to be powerful, and Aden was no exception.
We have a saying that comes from the time when we used to walk with camels, balancing two heavy containers on each side. In this world, we say, you never have four containers. It means that although you may make a plan, it’s never fulfilled in the way that you think. Something is missing; that is the fourth container. I think of it now, remembering that Ayeyo never blessed me for a happy marriage.
While Deqo tried to make peace between us, Ahmed refused to talk with his father. “Mama, I am with you—you’ll never have regrets,” said Amina, comforting me. “I’m your daughter, I will give you everything you want.”
As a lawyer, I knew how to end a marriage. Some friends advised me to wait awhile, to try to talk with him, to see if we could make peace. But he had hurt me so, so deeply. I could think only of all the years when I was struggling everywhere to save my family, and he was thinking how to cheat me, how to lie to me.
Other friends thought that he would give me a divorce if I asked him, but I knew that wasn’t true. “I will bury you,” he’d told me, the first time I’d accused him of having another wife. “And you will bury me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Vice Minister of Labor and Sports
Somalia’s newly appointed president, Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, was inaugurated in August 2000, bringing crowds of thousands to Mogadishu and celebrations among the Somali people in the streets of Eastleigh. There, someone rented a bus that drove through Nairobi, filled with people who shouted out the windows, “We’re going back!” Though I was working in Kilimanjaro hospital, I sent some of my nurses to buy cases of Fanta and Sprite, so we could celebrate with our many Somali patients. For so many reasons, I thought Abdiqasim would be a good choice. He had also studied in the Soviet Union, and I remember hearing about him when I was in medical school in Ukraine. Even then, he was known to be kind, well spoken, well liked—an active student and a leader.
One evening, when I was upstairs reading a medical journal and Ahmed was downstairs watching television, my niece Su’ado’s husband came to the apartment, and my son brought him in to see me. “Did you hear the news on the radio?” asked my nephew. “You’re a member of the government today.”
“I didn’t hear,” I said. I hadn’t been among the women and men running after Abdiqasim, asking for a position in the new Transitional National Government. My nephew was surprised that no one had told me, but I continued working as normal. Then, about a week later, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as the minister of labor and sports. I had been named his vice minister, he said. “We will be waiting for you on Friday.” It was already Wednesday.
The other vice minister of labor and sports, he said, was a woman who had moved to Ohio as a refugee and was on her way back to Somalia. Like most members of the new government, she would live in the hotel where the government meetings would be held. The minister suggested I share the room with her, behind the tall walls and layers of armed guards of the hotel, where he knew I’d be safe. I thanked him but insisted on staying in my camp, so I could continue my work.
“Someone may recognize that you are representing this government and hurt you,” said the minister.
“They’ll never hurt me,” I said, and I was right.
I had never wanted to be anything but a doctor. Even while studying law, I was thinking only about defending my rights and securing my family’s own property—not about legislating. But I believed that peace was possible for my country, and I knew that many of the people who formed the new government would not have the interests of the most vulnerable groups in mind.
I quickly made arrangements to return to Mogadishu. Ahmed would remain in Nairobi, where he could finish his last year of secondary school and rent out the downstairs part of our apartment, where my small clinic had been. Ahmed laughed when I told him my position and that someone else from a stronger clan had received the vice minister of health appointment. “Mama,” he said, “I think you should stick to labor—you don’t know anything about sports.”
I took the next flight from Nairobi to Mogadishu and arrived at the camp that evening. Being home, I felt a relief I hadn’t experienced in months; while the hour was late, some of the staff stayed in the hospital to greet me. I gave instructions to my driver, who would bring me the next morning, at eleven o’clock, to a hotel in the center of Mogadishu. The council would meet every day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and he would wait outside to bring me back immediately.
The TNG, as this transitional government was called, used a 4.5 principle—the ministers were divided into four parties, for each of the strong clans, and another party that was half the size represented all the rest. I saw that on my name tag, I was identified by my name, my position, and my clan. When members of the Hawiye clan heard the news about me, they came with their stories, their requests. “You are representing us,” they told me. “You have to protect us.”
“No,” I said, “you are Somali, like the rest o
f the people living in my place. I will defend your equal rights, as I do there.”
“So you like other people more than you like us?”
“I like all of you,” I said.
The beginning of any new project, from a garden to a government, is filled with promise. Inside the hotel was a big hall with many long tables, where the ministers and vice ministers, about ninety people in all, would meet every day. The prime minister didn’t know me, so on the first day I introduced myself: “My name is Dr. Hawa and I live between Afgoye and Mogadishu.” I didn’t mention my clan.
By the second day, it was clear how few of the representatives truly understood what was happening with the people in their country. “The society that welcomed you here is waiting for you,” I said when it was my turn to talk. “Each person here should go back to their region, back to their people, to help them settle, to make peace.”
Many people applauded, including the prime minister. “What she’s saying is right,” he said. “We have to do it and we have to begin now.”
But the idea of returning to the streets of Mogadishu, to the needy people and the primitive villages, was not so popular among the representatives from the diaspora, most of whom preferred to stay inside the safety of the hotel, smoking and talking. I left them there each afternoon, returning to the hospital, where I worked for as long as I could. I went to sleep around nine o’clock and was back to work by five in the morning, going first to the farm to start the generators and see the crops and then to the hospital, where I consulted with my staff.
The TNG had no budget for any new programs, so we representatives had little power. Nevertheless, some of the strongest clans began to argue, each side wanting his clan to have more—more control, more soldiers, more business opportunities. The airport and the seaport were still under the command of warlords, whose militias surrounded the places, refusing people entry. Some people believed this was the right way; others supported businessmen who had opened another, private port that was supposedly earning tens of millions of dollars.