by Hawa Abdi
Now in the early mornings we went side by side to the farm to start the generators and to inspect the fields. We returned through the hospital’s side door, removed our old clothes and sandy shoes, and took showers while the nurses organized the day’s plan. Then we walked into the consultation room together, to start our work.
One night around this time, we received a woman who had been transferred to us from another hospital with heavy bleeding. Her husband was already preparing to bury her; he was amazed when Amina treated her well and she recovered. He was so grateful that he offered us money and food from his farm, but since Amina knew that he had big tractors, she asked to borrow them instead, so we could dig our own farm. “Please,” Amina told him. “It’s the people living here who need the money.”
As she found her way as a doctor, my daughter also tried to address the problems and the needs in the camp, asking help of anyone who would listen. Another woman lent us a bulldozer; we collected money to buy fuel for the water pumps and the irrigation systems and to pay more staff. When the man who lent his tractors brought his wife back for a follow-up visit, he was amazed to see how his happiness had turned into food for hundreds. “You must be very proud,” he told me.
Like me, like all my children, Amina’s heart is open. When she sees something, she reacts immediately, wanting to do everything! When Amina wants to operate, she operates today; once she makes a decision, she will not turn to another thing. But she is warmer than I am, and more active with the patients—taking their hands, welcoming them, talking with them. If we received a wounded child and we had no blood, Amina would say, “Take my blood.” She’d give him her arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ahmed
In the last days of June 2005, Ahmed called me from Moscow and told me that he was preparing to travel. “Hooyo, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how I can see you and Amina this time.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m leaving tomorrow for my father’s place,” he said. “I’m going through Dubai, but I won’t have time to see you.”
“If you are in Dubai, then I will send you a ticket from Dubai to Mogadishu,” I said. “Please don’t go there.” I could not think of him there, among strangers, living with his father’s new wife and his new children. I would not believe it.
“No, no, no, Mama,” he said. “Don’t send me a ticket. I have a ticket already.”
“But there isn’t anything there for you, Ahmed. Amina and I are waiting for you here.”
“I don’t want to come to you. I want to go to my father.”
I hung up, angry that he would defy my wishes. Had his father called to him? What did he want with the boy all of the sudden? When I called Deqo to discuss the matter, she supported Ahmed’s choice. “He has to go to his father,” she said, which made me furious.
“Why?” I asked. “To see someone who lies and cheats?” I slammed my phone on the table. Amina sympathized with me; she was the one who told me that Ahmed had landed, first in Dubai, and then, the next day, in Hargeisa. After that, many days passed when Ahmed didn’t call me. I didn’t call him either.
Amina tried to make peace between us. “Why are you not calling Mama?” she asked Ahmed.
“She told me that if I go to Hargeisa and something happens to me, she will die,” he said. “So I’m not going to tell her that I’m here.”
When she told me that, I closed my eyes, seeing a lifetime of sacrifices. “Beginning today,” I told Amina, “I have no son.”
I couldn’t close him out of my mind or my heart, though, even as he’d hurt me. He finally called one day, around the first of August. “How are you, Mama?”
“Ahmed, how are you?” Though I had taken a strong position, I was relieved to hear his voice, to feel the big, exaggerated love I felt for him. Still, I wouldn’t ask him to come to me, even though I wanted to see him so much. “Where are you now?” I asked.
“I’m in a hotel,” he said. He told me that he had spent some time in Burao, his father’s ancestral home, where two opposing clans lived. “I don’t trust these people,” I told him. “I think they forced your father to go with another woman, and we don’t know this woman’s family.”
“Don’t worry, Mama,” he said, “I’m going with my two friends.” He mentioned one boy who’d lived for a short time in our Nairobi apartment, and another who had grown up in the camp. “I’m driving a car—bringing my father to his office in the morning and home in the evening.”
“My children,” I said. For a moment, I tried not to worry. “I have three children. They’re all doctors, and they’re all drivers.”
“That’s right,” said Ahmed. “Deqo is driving in America, Amina is driving you, and I’m driving my father.” The end of our conversation was relaxed, and he told me that he loved me. He promised, too, that we would talk again soon, and I began to look at a calendar to see when he would return to Russia for school. Maybe he would come to me first. Maybe he would come to me that Sunday.
Three days later I heard a loud cry coming from Amina’s room. When I came in to find out what happened, she was hysterical, clutching her phone. It was Asha’s son, she said, calling from Canada. “Have you talked with Papa Aden?” he’d asked. “The boy died.”
Ahmed. In my mind, so clearly, I can still hear Amina’s cry. Half her life, she raised him in Nairobi. The other half, they were in the camp together. “I called,” she said, “and Father said it was true.”
I preferred to die than to believe what she told me. A car accident. Two broken legs, two broken arms. The two other children in the car—the son and the daughter of Aden—were barely wounded.
When news of a death first spreads, people drop everything they are doing and run to you or call you, to tell you their stories. I didn’t want to talk to anyone—to hear about my extraordinary boy, about the pain that my husband was feeling to lose his son. “Poor Aden,” people would say. He was already nearly sixty years old, and his other son was just four years old. “He won’t have the pleasure of seeing that boy as a man.”
Ahmed had been searching for his father, but his father did not protect him. Now, because Aden had brought our boy to the north, I had no son. My mind raced with suspicion: That clan—perhaps they saw how Aden loved his son, how Ahmed loved his father. Sometimes the two spoke in Russian, so other people wouldn’t understand what they were saying. Maybe this clan saw how Ahmed was clever and worried that he would take Aden back. Every person has an enemy, I knew.
By the time I finally spoke with Aden, the news had spread in the camp, and people were carrying food to us. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I could hear in his voice deep pain. I refused to cry or to console him. I knew that Aden loved his son, but he had chosen to leave us and go there, to a place where such a thing could happen.
“Did you bring him to the hospital?” I asked.
Ahmed had died immediately, Aden said. The man who had first seen him knew that he was dead, but that man hadn’t known my Ahmed, hadn’t known Aden. He was searching all the wrong houses, while my son’s body was still lying in that strange place, either dead or alive.
There was no refrigeration system in Hargeisa; they wanted to bury Ahmed the next morning, Saturday. “Please,” I begged. “Send me his body.”
“No,” Aden said. “I cannot send it to you.”
“What really happened?” I asked. “Who killed my son?”
“Maybe you can come on Sunday,” said Aden.
All that remained for me was deep, deep pain, hot tears soaking my pillowcase every morning. “Don’t go there,” I’d told Ahmed, but he’d refused me. I’d loved him so much, but he’d wanted the people who didn’t love him instead. I continued to search for an explanation. Maybe someone had been hired to drive the other car. Maybe that person had suffocated him first, by pillow, and then put him into a car and crashed another into it.
One of Aden’s coworkers called me. “Oh, Hawa, I am sorry to hear what h
as happened,” she said.
“Don’t tell me that,” I said. “Did you kill my son?” Although I knew in my heart that she had not, nothing was beyond my imagination. I could never have believed that I would live to see a day when a mother could kill her twenty-two-year-old daughter, but I had seen it with my own eyes.
“Hawa, don’t say that,” she said. “All of Hargeisa is crying for you.”
“I raised and educated that handsome boy,” I said, unable to control my anger. “You people eliminated him and now you’re calling to tell me you’re sorry?” I threw down the phone.
I considered going on the Sunday flight from Mogadishu to Hargeisa, but it was canceled somehow. After that, I refused to leave my bed, pulling the blankets tighter, thinking too much: They had told me that Ahmed woke up early that morning, put his brother and sister in a car, borrowed a camera, and went to take photos with them. I had never seen Hargeisa, but I had heard the place was just white sand and stone—no trees. Ahmed wouldn’t have done that—he wouldn’t have wanted photos when his home was filled with big, beautiful trees.
Since we’d both lost our son, I had thought that Aden would act with humanity, that he’d come to us and say that he was sorry. “Father, are you coming to us?” asked Amina.
“Not now,” he said. I knew that Aden had served as the Minister of the Interior for the north of Somalia, and Amina had told me that some people wanted to make him the Minister of Defense. I realized that if he came to the southern part, to his old wife, then maybe they would not give him the position they were preparing for him.
My life stopped. I lay in bed for weeks, then months, unable to sleep; the small rains came in October, but the farm lay fallow. Amina saw my beloved patients, and saw over all the rest, while I thought only of my son. “Don’t be a pilot!” I’d said. Let him stay in the sand as is normal, I’d thought. But death comes from everywhere. I couldn’t stop it.
In the beginning, Amina gave me sedative tablets to calm me. When I’d cry, she’d say, “Mama, I’m here. We need you—we are your children. What, you have only Ahmed? Do not leave us!”
I wanted to leave them, I admit. I preferred to die rather than to feel the pain I was feeling.
Amina began to think like me, and to search for answers. One of Amina’s friends still living in Moscow went to the university office to get Ahmed’s papers, but someone had already taken them. Who would want that file, with all of his preparatory course information, his grades from his first years of school? I did not sleep for seven days, as my mind raced to find other clues, other signs. “Amina, tell me he’s alive,” I begged her late one night when she came back from the hospital to see me.
It was too dark to see her face, but I could hear her weary voice struggling to tell me something untrue, something we both wished to believe: “Ahmed’s alive! Ahmed’s alive!” That night, I slept immediately: The human body, it is very strange.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“A Doctor Bound by Humanity”
Another endless dry season spread across the land—the worst we’d seen in ten years or more. Food and medicine disappeared; water catchments dried up; and children began dying of the diseases that always spread easily with poor sanitation, such as cholera or watery diarrhea. A new generation of starving, suffering people began their long journey to our place. Sometimes we received twenty or thirty families in one day, with little to give them, and little space to share. We had no choice but to make the children comfortable, even when we had no infusions to replace the water they were losing. Some days we lost five children, some days ten.
Although I was still in my bed, I heard Amina’s tired voice every night when she came in to sleep with me. “I need your help, Mama,” she said, growing more and more desperate. Eventually I had no choice but to get up and continue my life, even if I still did not want to live. When so many people are searching for your help, you have to try—to run after them, to see, to do something! Some mornings I entered the hospital at five, without even one cup of coffee or tea. We could not rest anyway, knowing the line of people waiting downstairs.
Amina had met a reporter from the BBC, who was now calling me every day: “How are you? How is the situation?” One evening, he connected me with a head of UNHCR, but the woman there told me that they could not help in our place because the people in the area were killing expatriates.
“If you don’t help us now, it’ll be a repetition of 1992,” I said. I asked her to call on the local organizations that Somali people were forming, which could work with the international organizations and bring food to where the people were most vulnerable.
Thank God, the UN responded quickly; we all worked together—my guards, the guards of the transporters, the guards from the UN’s World Food Programme. The food arrived in big shipments; the local organizations picked them up and brought their trucks to our camp, where they stayed overnight, standing guard, making sure that the food was protected. The next morning, early, they would leave our portion and travel on to other camps. Our volunteers would distribute the maize, beans, oil, and porridge—most were dry rations, although two young women, Nura and Hodan, managed a kitchen to feed eight hundred children who were moderately malnourished. As all the children lined up, Nura and Hodan sang songs to keep the people calm and happy.
I can’t remember the exact words, though I can imagine them there, smiling, even as people pushed and shoved. We have to bless the people who are giving us this food. We are grateful that they came and knocked on our door, brought food to our home, cared for us. We have to understand, to be honest. In the future, there will be peace. Amen, Amen.
Somali people say that when you solve one problem, another problem arises. Though we began to see less watery diarrhea and cholera, violence broke out like another disease, just as deadly. This time the violence was caused by religion, something I believe is private. When religions become political, they wind up disturbing and even killing in the name of God. The United States had declared a war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks, searching for people they believed supported Islamist fundamentalist groups. On their list of most dangerous suspects was a leader of one of Somalia’s Sharia courts, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who had been linked to al-Qaeda. As the world’s suspicion of the courts grew, so did the tension in our country. Still, many Somali people preferred the courts—which promoted Islamic law, not clan warfare—thinking that anything would be better than the warlords who had oppressed us for so long. The other power in Somalia at the time was the ineffective transitional government, which had elected a new president and for security reasons had moved to Baidoa under the protection of Ethiopian troops.
One of the courts’ leaders brought his wife to us for an examination one day. The man seemed uneducated, inexperienced; he alone had five armed guards running after him. While I was visiting another patient, one of the guards came to me. “Our leader wants to see you,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, “I cannot go out to see him, but I can meet with him in my sitting room. Tell me when he is ready.”
“But you cannot wear that!” the guard protested. He wanted me to cover myself as more and more women were covering themselves in those days—head to foot, as Catholic nuns. In areas outside of the camp, the more fundamentalist leaders were insisting that women dress this way, and they were also trying to ban music, movies, sports, and qat, punishing people with harsh fines or violence.
I still made the rules in my place, so I did not change out of my doctor’s coat or cover my neck. The leader came to me anyhow, proudly telling of how his group was running all of the warlords back to their own places. “Injustice,” he said. “We want to fight this injustice.”
“Okay, my child,” I said, “but please, no more fighting. I miss peace.”
In 2006, the Sharia courts in and around Mogadishu came together to form the Islamic Courts Union, or the ICU. By the end of the year, the ICU called for the Ethiopian troops’ withdrawal from Somalia. The Ethiop
ians remained, and the ICU declared war, attacking their troops protecting the government in Baidoa.
Oh, it was a disaster. With aid from the United States, Ethiopian troops backed the Somali government troops to fight many heavy battles, killing hundreds, and advancing north toward Mogadishu. One day, nine big trucks came into our camp, carrying people who were not speaking Somali. “These cars have Ethiopian military inside,” said one of our guards. “Be careful.” They left without bothering us, although as they drove south, they left total destruction.
At night, I lay in the dark, thinking too much, scratching my head. One night as I scratched, I felt something very hard, up against the bone near my right temple. Maybe a tumor? I was not bothered by the idea after spending so much time feeling desperate, crying day and night for my son. In many ways, I still felt as though I were just waiting to die.
I showed Amina the growth and told her that I had decided not to treat myself. I called Deqo, who had moved from North Dakota to Georgia. “Deqo, please come see me,” I said.
“Hooyo, I can’t come,” she said. “I only have a green card.”
“You will come when I pass away to bury me,” I said. “You don’t want to come when I’m still alive?”
So Deqo took her green card, and she came to us. The day she arrived, I remember, it was raining—beautiful weather, cool and calm. I called some of my most senior staff, including Faduma Duale, and told them she was coming. We prepared a big lunch and set the big table in the hospital meeting room, telling everyone else only that we had a special guest coming.
Amina went with our driver to Mogadishu, and when she brought Deqo to me, I didn’t recognize her. The last time we were together, at her graduation ceremony in 2000, she was skinny, wearing shirts and trousers, her beautiful hair open. But now, she was covered totally—from her head to her long sleeves and long skirt—and the way she stood was completely different. She had closed off her entire body. “No, no, don’t touch me,” she said to Ahmed’s friends, who had come to hug her. “It isn’t a Muslim way.”