by Hawa Abdi
I arranged a private meeting with President Abdiqasim to discuss the gridlock. “Hawa,” he said, “we don’t want to create problems among the strong clans.” He believed in dialogue, he said, reconciliation. “We don’t want to kill anyone during our stay here, and we don’t want to call in outside forces. We will talk only.”
As much as he tried to reason with the warlords, they never accepted. Part of our job was to try to negotiate from our own positions. One man that I spoke with offered a piece of advice. “You know,” he said, “if you want peace, Abdiqasim has to come to me and step down.”
Frustrated, I stopped going to meetings, preferring to focus on my responsibilities in the hospital and on the farm. No one said anything about it until one day Abdiqasim called me to his office. My position had been transferred, he said; I was now vice minister of health.
“Why?” I asked.
“We want you to reopen Banadir hospital,” he said.
“But that’s as big a job as opening the airport!” Banadir, like so many other hospitals and institutions in Mogadishu, was itself a casualty of civil war—its once-rich resources all in the hands of thieves and bandits, its windows stolen or shattered. As far as I knew, people were squatting in the patients’ rooms and the staff offices.
“Try,” he said.
People laughed when they heard the idea, knowing that the government could give me no money to build and no guards for protection. “You will die there,” they said. “The people are wild—killing everyone.”
Still, how could people argue with opening a hospital? I made an appointment to meet Osman Ali Atto, the warlord who had control of Banadir, whose office was in front of the hospital. Since my driver was a relative of Atto’s, he made the introduction. “How are you?” asked Osman Atto. “You are welcome.”
“I’m here because I want to open Banadir hospital,” I said.
“Oh, I have no problem, I’m ready,” he said. “We can’t control all these militiamen, you know, but we will do everything within possibility.”
So as Abdiqasim had asked, we began to try. The next day, on my way to Banadir with my driver and three of my own guards, I thought about how I used to enjoy working there, next to the friends who had helped me in my clinic’s earliest days, or with fifteen or twenty students by my side, showing them how to deliver, how to operate. But when I walked through the door and saw the unsanitary conditions, I returned to the present day. My friends and colleagues had either fled or died, and any instrument or fixture of value in the hospital had been stripped away long before. Families squatted in the patient rooms; we saw one in which the tile floor was shattered by someone pounding maize directly onto it. I saw remnants of fires in the surgery departments and of weddings and dances in the big wards.
People began to approach me, asking questions, and as I walked through the halls, I realized that the hospital, lacking in every possible way, was still full of staff—nurses, assistants, cleaners—who had been coming in the early morning, every day, just as they used to. Even though they were getting nothing, not even five cents, they’d remained there, waiting, someday, for their beautiful Somalia to return.
When I called a meeting, they all came, wanting to protect their positions. “We’re going to open this hospital,” I told them. We would ask of each patient about 15,000 Somali shillings, I said, which was the equivalent of a half-dollar.
“Oh, we bless you, Dr. Hawa,” said one of the nurses. “Don’t leave.”
We had few supplies in the beginning, and at first I was the only doctor, but we adapted as best we could, relying on some donated instruments and some medicine that I brought from my own hospital. The local media covered the story on the radio, and we began seeing on average about thirty patients a day—more if there had been an accident or an explosion.
The small amount of money that the needy patients could offer was barely enough to pay for the staff’s transportation home, but it was a start. A few other doctors joined us, and it seemed that, each day, the faces of the staff became more and more alive.
Then a man working under Atto came to me one day. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m examining patients,” I said, “and I’m giving these hardworking nurses their transportation home.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “From now on, the staff will collect the money, and then they’ll give it to me. I’ll distribute it.”
“How will you distribute it?”
“Every Thursday,” he said.
I was helpless to argue—the place was as much his as it was mine—but I called after him: “That is not government money, that is not your money. I work for that money and I want them to have it!”
The next day, when my driver entered Banadir’s front gate, a boy with an AK-47 began to fire in the air. Our car stopped suddenly, and everyone in front of the hospital ran! “Do you want this lady to die here?” said that boy to my driver. “Don’t bring us this lady. Go back.”
Without our lives, we’d be useless to the people we were trying to help. We told Abdiqasim what had happened, and he called a meeting of all the doctors to address the situation. We were all responsible for the health of our country and for Banadir hospital, said Abdiqasim.
One man stood up to offer a suggestion, “Okay, Mr. President. Hawa is vice minister, but if you want to send her to Banadir, let’s change the positions. Have her stay in the hospital, and make me vice minister.”
“We request that every hospital in Mogadishu return to its original aim,” said another doctor. Since Banadir was once a women’s and children’s hospital, he preferred to work somewhere else.
I returned to Banadir a few days later, and my staff and I tried our best to speak nicely to everyone we encountered. While we were able to make a bit of progress, it wasn’t long before the same young, armed boy met us at the hospital gate. “Go,” he said, clutching his gun. “Go, go.” Some of the hospital staff saw what was happening, and one young assistant begged me not to leave.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but I had to get back in the car. I spoke with Abdiqasim that afternoon. “If you can convince your children not to kill or terrorize anyone, then I can work as your minister,” I said. “Otherwise I will not.”
There is an old story from this time about a father who bought a gun so his boy could go to work. With no government, however, their definition of work was to earn money by killing someone or robbing someone. On the boy’s first day of work, he was successful; he brought back all the money to his father. The next day, the boy tried to rob someone, but the man had a gun and killed him first. “Oh,” said the father when he saw his son. “Yesterday he was worth a million and today he is a dead body.”
This violence was still the true law of our land, so I decided to end my time in the government. The best thing for me, I learned, was to stay and work in my own place, my clinic. When Somalia once again tried to form another new government at the end of 2004, I turned down the invitation to attend the meeting. People who are fighting will never be able to build.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We Can Remember
When Ahmed flew from Nairobi to Moscow to enroll in university in August 2001, all of my children were together again, in one place, for the first time in many years. I was relieved that they were far away from the inhuman people in their own country, but Moscow was full of a different type of suspicion and intolerance. One night a group of young neo-Nazis beat a group of Somali students waiting for a bus; Deqo and Amina were with them, and one Somali boy was injured. I moaned when Amina told me the news on the phone, unable to accept that a place that had once welcomed me so generously had become so closed—that my children could face such danger simply by walking down the street. “Do not argue with anyone who threatens you,” I told her. “Keep quiet and give these evil people whatever they want.”
Another time a group of ten or fifteen neo-Nazis came to an apartment owned by an old Somali woman, where many of the Somali students cam
e to get their dinner. When these evil men entered to fight, the Somali students stood to defend themselves with knives and forks, and the men ran away.
“Before I was shocked,” Ahmed told me over the phone one day. “Now I’m adjusting.”
In 2002, we learned that Deqo had been granted refugee status by the United States. She had worked so hard through UNHCR on behalf of other Somali refugees, sending away her friends and even her cousins; now her new home would be Grand Forks, North Dakota. I had never heard of such a place, and while I kept quiet, I worried about her travel and the people she would meet when she arrived. Ahmed reassured me. He promised that he would take her shopping in Moscow and see her to the airport, and he called me after her flight took off. Once she had arrived in North Dakota, he called me again with her phone number there. “Mama,” he said, “she is so happy.”
When I finally heard her voice, I knew he was right. “I have good people here,” said Deqo. “They prepared a house for me, and they’re looking for a secondhand car.” When I imagined her there, I saw her as I had been as a young student, among a sea of white faces. Remembering that part of my past gave me confidence, however: She would work as a teacher and a translator, and she would find her way.
Ahmed finished his preparatory course and decided that he would go on to medical school after all. I was proud to hear the news, thinking that he would become a surgeon, but still I worried, hearing his tired voice from so far away. The cold weather had affected his asthma and gave him chronic bronchitis; I knew that his depression affected his health as well. “Mama, when I was in Nairobi, I was powerful,” he said. “People were running after me, respecting me. I had friends. But you sent me to a place where they call me monkey.”
Ahmed’s health still hadn’t improved by the time he came home with Amina for a short vacation in February 2003. When I saw him, I decided that he would stay with me until he recovered. The political situation at the time was relatively calm: Abdiqasim’s government was still in power, but they controlled just a small corner in Mogadishu. Our area was controlled by a group of Sharia courts, and while I knew that their schools had extreme teachings, they were also generous, offering goats, pasta, rice, and dates to people in need. They did not disturb us, and the surrounding area was peaceful.
That season, our mangos and papayas were plentiful, and Ahmed was able to relax, get well, and grow into a leader. Among the boys—now young men—who’d grown up in the camp, he organized a soccer team, planning matches with some of the neighboring camps and even finding a coach who could run with the team in the mornings. We believe, as you know, that a boy is your protection—he guards your property, your life, your daughter’s life. While I’d been raised by only women, and we’d all found our way somehow, I felt happy and relieved just watching Ahmed sleep. I admired my grown son so much that I began to question the importance of education: Why should Ahmed be so far away from me, if life for him there was so difficult? Maybe he was like me, needing a simple life, close to home.
I remembered a time when Ahmed was just fourteen years old. We’d walked together through the camp one day, stopping for a minute to see how one of the newest families had built their home.
“It’s very difficult for them,” I had told Ahmed then. “You must be grateful for all you have in your life.”
“But they are happy,” Ahmed had told me. “As long as there’s happiness, then maybe to live under the trees is the best.”
Now that my son was becoming an adult, I wanted him to stay close. One day I showed him a magazine article about a successful American farmer who owned 3,000 acres of land. “That could be you,” I said, and as he flipped the pages, I thought proudly of the land that spread out around us, below the homes of so many. We would not always have the difficult life we have now, I thought. Maybe it was Ahmed’s destiny, I thought, to marry, to have children, to take over the farm. When a family came to me to offer their daughter’s hand to Ahmed, I asked him to consider it.
“Mama,” he said, “that girl is not well educated. I didn’t select her.”
“But son, I want a grandchild,” I said. “If you want, you can go to study, and I’ll take the grandchild.” He was surprised by what I said, laughing and shaking his head, but I was serious. Why couldn’t I have the happiness that other people enjoyed, with big, strong families and many children?
Ahmed insisted that I would have all of it, but he first had his own ideas about his future. He and his friends organized a youth group called the United Somali Patriotic Party, which organized events and looked out for one another. They wrote slogans and encouraged one another to volunteer. Likewise, when some of the people in their group ran out of food, they told the Party, and Ahmed told me; together we worked to find something extra.
Deqo heard the way I was talking and grew concerned: “Do you want my brother to be an uneducated man from the bush?” she asked. While I protested, I knew that she was right. Ahmed would return to Moscow in August, but until then, he would enjoy his time at home in the camp. His soccer team was busy preparing for the final game of an all-Afgoye tournament in our place, on a field that the Americans had cleared with a bulldozer in 1993. They arranged for more than a hundred chairs for the spectators and bought a trophy that I would present to the winner. The day of the match, a huge crowd of people came to our place, picnicking on the lawn and cheering for their favorite players. I think I may have cheered the loudest: When our team won, I handed back the trophy to my son, hugging him.
Amina returned to us for her summer vacation in June, and we celebrated together. We had a big cake for Ahmed’s twentieth birthday, and then, about a month later, Amina and Ahmed organized a twentieth anniversary party for the clinic. They asked a group of young boys to distribute invitations across town: Our friends, my colleagues, the prime minister, and many other members of the government were all invited—about two hundred people, not counting all of the people who lived with us in the camp. The day before the party, my children and their friends swept up the area under the mango trees and set it up like a beautiful open-air restaurant, with different carpets serving as different sitting rooms. A well-known Mogadishu cook came to us to prepare a big cow and several goats, working all night by the light of the fire and a big, generator-powered lamp.
The first guests arrived at eight o’clock the next morning to find many, many carpets scattered with beautiful red flowers and green leaves. As people walked around, amazed, they found old friends and sat down with them, remembering the old days in Mogadishu. The young men, wearing white shirts and black suspenders, came out to serve the food, which the cook had divided into individual dishes, three for each person—meat, rice, and fruit. Ahmed and a few members of the soccer team had collected some drums in the camp to form a band: As people ate and drank, they played on and on, singing popular songs as well as an original song they wrote about the hospital. When they stopped to rest, there was a performance by a troupe of African dancers that Amina had hired.
We’d arranged just a few speeches. The prime minister stood up, calling our work courageous. “I didn’t know that inside Somalia, something like this was going on,” he said. I shook his hand, but when it was my turn to talk, I didn’t feel right about thanking everyone. Our successes were before our eyes now, but I also saw all the difficult times. I decided to remember the women we’d lost and those we had protected somehow. I mentioned one woman whose husband and children had been tied up and killed in front of her. She had survived that unimaginable pain, and she still came to me, to talk about her children and mine. “How many people have we buried here because of hunger and gunshots?” I asked the crowd. “Can you remember with me? We cannot count, but we can remember.”
When I asked people to help us continue our work, Amina stood up to join me, saying that she would follow in my footsteps. Many of the older people were confused, wondering if that meant I would retire. “Oh, Mama, do you hear them talk?” said Amina. “Don’t say that I will take your pl
ace—don’t say that.”
“I will work beside her,” I told the crowd. “To have my children beside me is the ultimate happiness.” It was true, really, even in the shadow of so much suffering. We would rebuild our society, I thought, watching Amina and Ahmed dance with the rest of the camp’s grown children. They would lead, and I would have my golden time, sitting with the people of my generation, offering advice, and enjoying what I had built.
A few days later, we arranged for a minibus to bring a group of Ahmed’s friends to the airport, to see him off to Moscow. When his flight was called, the team made a huddle, and Amina and I joined in. Our shoulders fit under the arms of the big boys. “My brothers, my friends, I want you to care for Mama,” Ahmed said. “You’re still a unit.”
I was well known by the airline, so they let me go with my son aboard the plane, before it took off. “Don’t worry,” Ahmed said as we walked to the bus that would take us there. I was surprised to see at the foot of the stairs a Russian pilot that I recognized. We’d just started to talk when the line began to move and Ahmed walked up the stairs and into the plane. I’d wanted to hug my son, to kiss him one last time, but I didn’t get the chance.
After so much activity, the next several months were lonely for me, but Amina kept her promise: In 2004, she brought her diploma directly to Mogadishu, as I had done in my time. And from that moment on, she did not sleep. A new doctor goes through a rigorous training regardless of where she specializes; while Amina’s first job in our hospital was in some ways very difficult, she was, in other ways, very fortunate: She had her own hospital to learn in, and her own mother as a teacher. “Oh, how you are lucky,” I told her, pushing her to trust her instincts. After a few months of Cesarean sections, she grew comfortable with surgery, and she worked well with the rest of the staff—some who had known her since she was a child.