by Hawa Abdi
While I was confused by the change in Deqo, I was no less happy to see her. Still, there was little time to celebrate her return to the camp: We had so many people coming to us that we all worked together until nine or ten o’clock every night. After that, if there were an emergency, the duty nurse would come to our gate, sending the guard to knock on our door, saying, “Something happened, Doctor, get up!”
Amina and I adapted to working with another doctor—one who had come of age outside. We’d always known that Deqo was quieter than Amina or me, but now we saw her stubborn streak in a new way: While Amina and I say whatever we want immediately, whether we need help or know the answer, Deqo has to observe, analyze, understand, and only then will she respond. Amina’s impulsiveness meant that she was always calling me if she didn’t understand a case, saying, “Mama, I saw this and this symptom, and the patients said that, that, and that—what to do?” Together we could find solutions. Deqo sometimes preferred to do a job alone, instead of asking her sister or me for advice.
One day there was an explosion in the area—a bomb loaded with bits of iron, nails, and stones was set off in a nearby camp. While I knew that a few of the wounded people had been brought to us, I didn’t know of their conditions until a nurse came to me and said, “Dr. Deqo wants to operate—to open the stomach!”
“Is the anesthetist here?” I asked. “She can’t do this with just a local injection—no!”
I came down to her and said, “Deqo, stop. Put the guy in a bed and we’ll call the anesthetist. You can operate tomorrow.” Oh, how we argue, my eldest daughter and I, until she realizes that it’s no use. As her mother and her supervisor, I say what is best.
When we finally had the right people to assist, Deqo made the incision, taking many nails and stones from the man’s stomach and reconnecting the places that had been cut. I was very proud of the way she worked—especially her ability to remain calm. That man survived, and when another man came to us with a huge stab wound in his stomach, we operated together.
Amina had been right: My beloved son was gone, but at least I had my two daughters together, alive.
My head had first troubled me almost thirty years earlier, when my children were still small. One day I’d felt a sort of knot, about the width of two fingers, right below the skin near my right temple. I’d waited until 1988, and then, I biopsied it myself: I put the piece in a small bottle of formaldehyde and had sent it to a pathologist friend. It turned out to be a meningioma—a benign tumor on the cover of the brain.
I was devastated by the news; at the time, Deqo was almost a teenager, Amina was just eight, and Ahmed still small. Mohamed Ali Nur insisted that I have the operation at a clinic in Freiburg, Germany, where they specialized in such things.
“My only advice is to do whatever you want now,” he joked. “You know surgeons—you may die during the operation.”
My friend’s husband was the Minister of the Interior at the time; he offset the cost of the procedure and a round-trip plane ticket: Mogadishu to Rome, Rome to Frankfurt, and back. After speaking to his cousin, who was also a government minister, Aden was given the same amount of money and his own plane ticket. I sent a telegram to my cousin Asli, who had married a German man and was living in a small town called Lörrach. We greeted one another as long-lost sisters. “You,” Asli said, hugging me, “you look the same! And Aden, hey, you are still with Hawa? How many years are you still together?”
During the 70-kilometer bus ride to Freiburg, I sat next to Aden, fearing that I had somehow brought the health problem to myself, with so much worrying. “You are so serious, Hawa,” Asli had always said back when we were students in Odessa. Maybe she was right.
We arrived at the clinic, where a nurse shaved off all my hair. I cried, refusing to look in the mirror: If I could not see myself, I could not see my own life ahead. If I died, I thought, my body would be brought to Mogadishu, and my children and relatives would want to see my face. Was this what they would remember?
The next morning Aden stood in the elevator with my stretcher as the nurse took us to the operating room. “I wrote you a letter,” he said stiffly. I read it as they wheeled me into the room: Don’t worry about anything. You’re not going to die. I’m sorry that you’re sick, but I’m praying to God that you will be safe. Reading it, I felt calm and happy, as though for a moment my whole life was in order.
I opened my eyes to see only a little white point and a little black point. I fluttered my eyes again and again, until I understood: The white point was the doctor who had performed the operation, and the black point was my husband. I wasn’t in any pain. I felt for my head, still enclosed in gauze, as the doctor explained what had happened: When they’d removed the formation on the right side, they’d removed the skin as well, so they had to move some skin from the left side to compensate.
Aden and I stayed in Germany for close to two months, while I recovered. Asli bought me a wig, but I’d decided I would rather cover my head in a scarf than pretend to be someone I was not. We sat up late into the night with Asli and her husband, discussing Somali politics. “That country is empty,” Asli said. “There is nothing for you there.”
She wanted me to extend our visa and bring the children over. While Aden considered the possibility, I refused immediately, reminding her what I had said when we were students visiting London in the summer of 1969. “I still prefer the smell of Ceelgaab to the beauty of Oxford Street,” I’d told Asli, referencing one of Mogadishu’s low-lying villages. “Your country is beautiful, but mine is the best.”
“You are stubborn, Hawa,” Asli had said, shaking her head.
“I don’t see it that way.” I had the words of Ayeyo, blessing me: You will stay in this place, my child, and no one will bother you here.
By the end of 2006, the two sides struggled inside Mogadishu; innocent people fled the fighting, coming once again down the Afgoye Road, although this time in numbers we could never have imagined. In addition to the violence, it seemed that the Ethiopians brought some kind of poison with them. While I don’t know if it was in the bullets or the shells they used, I suspect it was white phosphorous—so many pregnant women came to us in those days, miscarrying. The weakest ones came to us caked in blood, horrified—we must have seen close to two thousand cases before the fighting stopped. Amina and I were doing D & Cs every night to stop the bleeding, and in the morning, our guards searched the road for the bodies of the women who didn’t make it to us.
On the ICU’s side, their powerful militia, al-Shabab, which means “The Youth,” came into area schools with their cars, saying, “Oh, you young Muslim guys, do you want to go to paradise? Today you have a chance! Come fight the unbelievers—the gallo.”
All the children ran: “I want paradise! I want paradise!” Secondary school children! The men wouldn’t train them, they’d just hand out guns: AK-47, AK-47, AK-47. “Let’s go to fight with gallo!” they said. One group of children was loaded into a car to kill Ethiopian generals, and during the fighting, every single so-called soldier was massacred. No one came back.
News of war brought the journalists to us. They often stayed at hotels in Mogadishu like the Shamo Hotel or the Peace Hotel; they wanted to see something, so the Somali people they hired often brought them to me. A young American journalist named Eliza Griswold visited us several times in those days. One day I gave her and a photographer, Seamus Murphy, a tour of the whole camp. That day, I remember, there were new displaced people coming, carrying sticks, bending them this way and that, in order to make their huts. I told Eliza and Seamus that when they were finished, they would cover the open spaces with plastic sheets, or whatever else they could find—cardboard boxes or empty sacks.
It was difficult for any Western journalist to stay with us for more than an hour or two, as we didn’t want them or the camp to be targeted. As Eliza and I walked back to the hospital, many children ran after us. I told her about the ways we had tried to educate them: The school built by the Ameri
can Marines lasted until 1997; as it was now ten years later, termites and other insects had eaten away at the plywood structure, which was only supposed to be temporary. We’d moved the school somewhere else for a while, but when we were no longer able to provide food for work, all the teachers had left. I left Deqo and Eliza sitting together, discussing plans for the school. Deqo, I knew, believed in the school more than any of us. I knew that she’d do anything to get it back.
After photographing some of the smaller camps in the Afgoye corridor, a Swiss photographer named Matthias Bruggmann came to our place. The heavy rains had finally returned, so when Amina took him on a tour of the camp, they were caught in a downpour and his camera flooded. Soaked, he came back to the hospital meeting room, where we sat and talked about what he had seen, about the impossible political situation, about his work and mine. Like Eliza, Matthias also returned to us several times during his stay in Somalia, and one of his photos from our camp appeared in Time magazine.
A reporter from the Los Angeles Times visited us as we were tending to the sickest children, whom we’d laid out together on a big veranda, each one on a blanket. It was the best we could do, with no beds to give them, and when the rains came, their mothers leaned over them, to protect them somehow. For two days that journalist stayed with me, writing down everything I did. He watched as I examined the abdomen of a child suffering from severe diarrhea. I showed him how I could tell how well hydrated the child was by pressing down on his skin.
“Why do you stay here?” he asked me.
“You see these people? How can I leave?” I told him that my son had been killed, and that I also wanted to die. Still, as these people suffering so much wanted so much to live, I knew I could help them in some way.
He published it all with a big headline, A DOCTOR BOUND BY HUMANITY.
When I first saw it, I felt sorry for myself, thinking of the growth on my head, of all that I had seen and suffered. As I read it, though, my attitude changed. The journalist had asked some of the people, “What do you think of Dr. Hawa?” “She’s a queen,” one woman said. “We don’t have anyone else to protect us here.”
An American man read the article in the Los Angeles Times and found my number somehow. Saying that he appreciated our work and wanted to support us, he sent us a check for $200. We later learned that fifty more people had contacted the journalist, wanting to help. Can you imagine? Fifty people from the other side of the world? That small money was the beginning of the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation, which Deqo had established in Georgia.
Eliza contacted Deqo with wonderful news: She’d raised enough money to begin building two rooms for the school. Other organizations had offered to help us set up makeshift schools in tents, but they had not been willing to build desks and tables, which I believed the children needed. “We have to make it look like schools all over the world,” I’d told them. “Otherwise, how will the students write what they want?”
Finally, we were able to build something that we knew could last: Two rooms made from sticks, some wood to sit on, and some more wood that served as the children’s desks. Two teachers from the area, who had been working privately, accepted some small money to come work for us. I laugh now to think about the opening of the school, which created so much interest that we couldn’t fit every one of our eager students at the desks. In the end the teachers and the students sat outside anyway, studying together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
An Ocean of Need
Amina went into Mogadishu one day to see about opening an Internet connection in the camp. While she was there, in Bakara Market, she was stopped by a group of men who shoved into her hands a heavy, black abaya. “Put it on,” they said, and although she became hotheaded, insulting them, in the end, she had no choice but to wear the cover and return home.
During the warlords’ time, we often saw two groups fighting: One group would fail, and another group would overtake. These so-called religious people coming to power were different, attacking, pressuring, and controlling as I’d never before seen or read. In the name of God, they entered houses without permission—something that’s prohibited by the Holy Qur’an. Then, if they saw a woman uncovered, even if she were just sitting in her room with her children, they would beat her. I can’t understand how anyone could think that clothes can send them to paradise. The Qur’an says that God knows what’s in your heart. Everything is from your heart.
As the religious people became more powerful, everyone and everything suspected as Western or Western-backed was under threat: If the person was military-trained or had government connections, he could be killed. Even schoolteachers risked punishment for teaching something other than to fight in the name of their God. This attitude is nonsense! God creates life—he doesn’t want you to kill people unnecessarily. The religious people claim that faiths outside Islam are different, but every religion has the same commandments—do not kill, do not lie, do not steal. There is nothing written that says breaking these most important rules will send you to paradise.
These men tried to recruit one of our boys, Ismael, whose family had come to us at the height of the most recent cholera outbreak. He was well nourished and strong, and he was also very smart. When we heard the rumors, we offered him a job, which we hoped would keep him occupied inside our place. Ismael loved working as an assistant in the hospital; he came to us every day and boasted about the job to his friends. He was, I admit, difficult to supervise at first. I was the one to train him on infection control: “You,” I said, “wash your hands here, with chlorine. Otherwise don’t go into that room.”
Deqo began working with Ismael and a group of his friends. It was a pleasure for her, as they were very eager, studying more intently than a regular student would. She trained them to administer IVs and to oversee a new room, with nine beds, that she’d designated for emergencies. While they were on duty, they wore white physician’s coats, so they would feel very important.
One day a young girl was brought to us with a severe uterine rupture; when we opened her abdomen, we saw that she had lost too much blood. Our nurse’s assistants heard the news, and they told their friends, who all lined up outside the hospital, wanting to donate their blood. We knew that the boys who had grown up in the camp were healthy; we knew that some had the right match. From those arms alone we received two liters for the girl; when she recovered, her father brought us a goat, which we slaughtered and ate together, with all of the blood donors.
“Drink the soup,” said the man. “You, my children, made me very happy.”
Since we didn’t have proper storage, these boys became our blood bank. You know, they were all like Amina—wanting to help immediately. For example, one of the young men, about twenty-five years old, had A-negative blood, which is very rare. Every time he saw me, he put out his hand: “Dottoressa, I’m ready,” he said.
“I don’t want to kill you, my child,” I said. “You just gave me your blood!”
They were among our leaders, for after fifteen years of civil war, the traditional dynamics of our society had changed completely: The women and the youth ran everything, while most of the grown men had either been killed or were away—out fighting or somewhere abroad, trying to make business deals. For those men left behind, there were very few opportunities. Home, for them, was their only source of control, and the sad result was that some lashed out at their wives and their families, wanting to own, to command. I can’t explain the number of homes that were broken, consumed by this violence; when the brothers or uncles of a battered wife heard the news, they often brought their clan to fight with the husband, causing even more difficulty along the camp’s dusty corridors.
We created a new rule: No man may beat his wife. I instructed the guards to break up domestic disputes and take the perpetrator to our storage room, which we used as a sort of jail. My guards were all young men, just the same as the men they arrested; the difference was that they knew how to treat people. “Why are you doing this?” they wo
uld say to the men they caught. “She’s not a small child, she’s an adult. She knows what’s good and bad, so let her talk.”
One man they caught had lived in our place from the beginning. He had four wives, and the youngest was jealous, often talking back to him. All of their neighbors heard their arguments, and heard how they escalated until he knocked her down, taking a big stick and beating her with it. Someone heard the cries and told me what was happening, so I sent one of my guards to capture him.
“Dottoressa,” he said with angry eyes. “What do you want between me and my wife?”
“I don’t want you to beat her,” I said. “You know that she’s very weak. Are you showing her that you’re strong? We already know you’re stronger than she is.”
The man stayed closed up in the storage room the whole afternoon, and he fought me every moment. “This is our personal affair,” he said. “You shouldn’t be involved.”
“I will be involved,” I said. “As long as you’re here in our place, I’ll be involved in everything happening.”
The guy, God bless him, God forgive him. When he had been hungry, when his children were dying, I’d fed him nutritious porridge. He was, at that time, one of my biggest supporters. He had stood up the day President Bush came, when all of the other people were lying helpless, waiting for food. “Good day, President!” he had said. “We are happy! You’re welcome!”
Now he was struggling against me, saying: “Hawa is like the police. Every time you need Hawa, it will be as if you’re going to the grave.”
After he had spent some time in jail, though, he had time to cool down. Then I appealed to him, as I had to many others: “If you insist on beating your wife,” I said, “go to the rural area, or go back to where you came from. But we cannot support you here.” Violence cannot straighten anyone out, I said, not even children.