by Hawa Abdi
Over the years, we have seen many types of conflicts, many arguments that seemed to have no solution. Still, if you use reason and explain in a way that people can understand, they will, over time, begin to accept.
The fighting between the Islamic Courts Union and the Ethiopian-backed Somali government continued, with frequent suicide bombings and other attacks. By May 2007, at least 365,000 people had fled the latest fighting in Mogadishu; the number of people on our 1,300 acres alone had reached at least 50,000 people—a number that we could never have imagined. There were so many people with me that the United Nations named the surrounding area the Hawa Abdi area, which also included the other camps in the area.
What had once shocked us in the early 1990s, when we lived with 460 families, seemed relatively calm now as we sometimes received 90 families per day, all fleeing the fighting. They occupied every inch of land, even where we buried our dead. “We have to live,” said one man, who agreed to build his hut there. And it was true, really. Still, overwhelmed by need and by other people’s suffering, people became agitated, restless; when they felt the committee had made a wrong decision, they staged protests outside my bedroom.
The elders and I decided to divide the land into seven areas, according to water distribution; we expanded our committee into seven groups, each group reflecting the makeup of the area, with at least one woman, one elderly person, and one boy or girl under the age of eighteen. That way the camp’s residents could know and relate to their leaders, and each person could bring to the committee an important point of view. The young people, for example, were the most committed—when they believed in something, they would defend it! The women’s sense of justice was often sharper than that of the men, who were more interested in taking sides than in settling a problem. I found, too, that the women on the committee tended to be more honest and hardworking than some of the men. They weren’t chewing qat, for example, or trying to cheat me by telling me something untrue.
One day, a young man named Faysal came to visit; he was a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, in Switzerland. He returned with a truck full of plastic sheets, enough to cover the children lying outside in our intensive care unit, and he was able to find us some cases of hydrating solution to give those suffering from watery diarrhea as well. In time he brought to us the head of health care for MSF Switzerland, to assess our situation. They were looking for a place to work in Afgoye, said Faysal, but it was clear just how much help we needed.
A group of them opened an outpatient clinic in one of our existing rooms. We didn’t have much to offer for their help, but we could give them a secure, clean place to sleep, clean water, and as much food as we had. I prepared for them two apartments, each with beds, a small refrigerator, and a table to write. Amina hired a cook to prepare whatever they wanted: lobster, fish, eggs, beefsteaks, pasta, rice.
It was a beautiful partnership. MSF gave a salary to both Deqo and Amina; they employed our hospital staff, some of our guards, and about twenty-five young people who worked as community health workers. The difference was remarkable: Suddenly, people in our area were living well, having money for food, clothes, and even to pay for health care.
The job of these community health care workers was to get into four cars and to drive through our camp and the camps in the surrounding areas, looking for children who were the most malnourished. Since some of the other camps’ owners were resistant to this, we advised our group to be kind, to talk nicely, to say, “Oh, my uncle, we want to see here, we want to help.”
Still, the owners sometimes said no: “If this organization wants to help the camp, they will come here.” In those cases, our team had to pay the leader of the camp in order to make the rounds and to find the most serious cases.
With the help of MSF, we were able to meet the huge need. They built an administrative office in one of my first rooms—a beautiful place, with a garden and many flowers outside. They also made two consultation rooms, and one pharmacy. We opened another porridge kitchen to fight moderate malnutrition, for the children who were able to still eat something, but the number of severely malnourished children was too great.
So along with a big cholera treatment center, with more than a hundred beds, MSF opened a separate internal therapeutic feeding center to help suffering, starving children. I remember that we lost the first two patients immediately. They were a boy and a girl, each about three years old and each weighing under five pounds—less than a healthy, newborn infant. We tried to feed slowly, through small, small gastric tubes, but there was only so much we could do.
That December, Deqo and I were invited to Geneva, to participate in an event that focused on international aid after the September 11, 2001, attacks. We had just arrived and were checking in at the Hotel Cristal when we saw our photographer friend Matthias coming to us, bringing Swiss chocolate! He had stopped by MSF’s office coincidentally, and they had told him we were coming. I hugged him, happy to see him in his own country; the next day, he took us to a very nice restaurant in the center of Geneva.
After so many years inside Somalia, I was overwhelmed to walk through a big, clean city. The cars had changed so much, and I didn’t understand the streetlights. “You people—you came from the U.S., Deqo, and you are Swiss, Matthias, but I was in the bush for twenty years,” I said. “I have never seen this!” They laughed at me and took me by the hands, trying to explain the colors.
The meeting involved many people from many different countries, all discussing and debating how to go and help in places like Somalia, where people were killing one another. “What is your strategy?” one person asked. “These people are killing the expatriates who are coming to work.”
“First, I have to negotiate with the society,” I told them. “These bandits aren’t coming from other countries, you know. Solve the problem within the society, get those people to respect and trust you, and they’ll never bother you.”
When we were all out to dinner that night, Deqo and I discussed our travel plans. I’d decided that I wanted to go to Dubai, where I knew a doctor who could examine the growth on my head. One of the men sitting with us, an Ethiopian doctor who worked with MSF, overheard part of our conversation and asked if he could help.
“A visa to the Emirates is very difficult with a Somali passport,” I told him.
“Why are you going there?” he asked.
“I had brain surgery many years ago,” I said, “and I feel another formation in my head.”
By the next day that kind doctor had made all the arrangements for me to have a CT scan; a Swiss doctor he knew, who had worked in Somalia, identified a tumor. I was upset to see the scan, and Deqo cried. Our new friends were very straightforward. In order to determine whether or not the growth was cancerous, they needed to operate, and since the best surgeon would not be available for another six weeks, I would have to come back.
The news was unsettling; on our way back to the hotel, I questioned whether I’d made the right decision by agreeing to an examination in the first place. “For me, to die is simple,” I told Deqo. Although years had passed, part of me still did not want to live without my son.
But Deqo could not hear such talk—she protested, as my daughters often do. Soon after we learned that MSF had made a generous offer: Since I was a humanitarian, the operation would be free. God is great, I thought. The answer has come in time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A New Generation
News of my condition had spread by the time Deqo and I returned to the camp in December 2007. People had begun to talk. “If Hawa dies,” one man told Amina, “this camp will belong to her male relatives.”
Amina, by this time, was starting her own family. She and Faysal had married; we found out, when I was in Geneva, that she was expecting a child of her own. “Mama, how can they say these things?” Amina asked. “What is this religion? How is it fair?” She was, you see, raised by a strong mother and educated outside t
he country. She had no idea about the harsh Sharia property laws that had almost destroyed my own family.
I called my lawyer, and together we wrote my will—something I had been thinking about for years. Deqo was my witness; she cried as I wrote my name and looked up to a camera, which was recording the moment. “All of this land,” I said, “and all of this property, belongs to my daughters.”
The next month I returned to Geneva for the procedure, Deqo by my side, while Amina stayed on the ground with MSF, overseeing the camp’s security. I drifted off in the hospital to the sound of Deqo reading the Qur’an. When I awoke, the tumor was gone.
“Hooyo, I’m okay,” I told Amina later as Deqo held the phone to my mouth. “I’m not feeling any pain.” I could hear her tired voice, saying that in the camp that afternoon, hundreds of people came together, in a big clearing, to pray for me. I was relieved to think of my daughter there, with her growing belly and her eyes full of tears, bringing the people sweets and milk, thanking them.
But not everyone was praying for me. There was a man that we knew, who had begun to write MSF’s main office in Geneva, saying, “Do not support Hawa Abdi.” His clan had adapted to doing business with the international aid organizations; he wanted MSF’s money for himself, so he accused me of cheating the organization and using the money for myself. I was still recovering from surgery when representatives from MSF came to ask me about the letters. “It’s a lie,” I said. “The people who are saying this want to be employed.” The man who wrote this letter had once come to me, looking for a job, I said; since I knew he was neither educated nor honest, I’d refused to hire him.
I sent a message back through the committee: “If you can’t find a way to stop these letters within 24 hours, I will never come back, and you will all lose your jobs.” When the committee went to the man, threatening him, he immediately wrote another letter to me and to MSF: “Mama Hawa, we know you are the mother of Somalia; we know that you sold your gold during a difficult time. MSF and Doctor Hawa are doing a good job.”
The people in MSF’s office were surprised. “Dr. Hawa, one phone call, and you change everything!” one man laughed. “The people who said you were taking the poor people’s things are now calling you Mama Hawa.”
The results of my tests came back, and the pathologist called a meeting with my surgeon and an oncologist. Although the tumor was not cancerous, it was an aggressive meningioma with atypical cells. They suggested that I undergo an experimental dose of radiation—10 percent more than the recommended amount—to help ensure that it would not return. They would send a piece of my tumor on to a lab, to study it in more detail, and monitor my progress after the radiation.
Lying in the hotel room that night, I turned toward Deqo. I had suffered so much, and this proposition meant three months away from my home, my work, and my pregnant daughter. There was also my own health to think of: Although the doctors had promised me from the beginning that my mental capacity would remain intact after the surgery, there could be complications from the treatment—especially an experimental treatment. I was in agony, trying to reason it out in my head, but this time, I was not alone: “Deqo, if I leave here and go home now, I’ll still be alive, helping the people in need,” I said. “But if they experiment on me and find a new way to treat a disease, I’ll be helping far more people into the future.”
Deqo sighed. “It’s a difficult decision,” she said, so I returned to the debate in my own head, thinking of my own work over the years. I had given my land and my time to other people—my whole life. It made sense now that I would give my body as well.
The next day I signed the documents, and MSF booked a room near the oncoradiology center where Deqo and I would stay. For the next three months, Deqo and I walked from that hotel to the center for my dose of radiation. Although the treatment itself was not painful, my face became very swollen; sometimes you couldn’t see my eyes. Matthias came to us, to visit and to help, and so did many, many members of the Somali diaspora, who told me that they were praying for me. While I was weak, I was still happy to see them; to talk about our country’s beautiful past and my goals gave me strength, even if I woke up in the morning with a pillow full of hair.
My sister Khadija called our room one day, saying, “Sister, I’m so worried about you!”
“Khadija,” I said, “I’ve done my job—I raised you and raised your children. I wanted your respect and your help, and I didn’t get it. You care for yourself, not for me.”
Khadija cried when she heard that, saying, “Forgive me, sister, forgive me.” I knew that someday we would continue the conversation, and I was happy that she called. But from my bed at that moment, I didn’t have any answer.
Around this time I was invited to receive an award at a Somali community event in Geneva; since the group had a particular clan affiliation, I declined to attend. The organizer cried when she heard that, but I was firm. “Fighting by clan is low class,” I said. “These beautiful buildings—these clean roads and lights—are not yours. Someone else owns them. They have built them for their country, not for their clan. You have to do the same, for your country.”
Deqo and Matthias went without me to the reception, where they delivered a presentation about our work. There they saw a Swiss woman named Claire-Lise Dreifuss whom I’d met a few days earlier; she and her friends had come to our hotel, wanting to meet me, because they’d seen a documentary filmed in our place. I’d liked Claire-Lise immediately—she was a strong, committed woman, a bit older than I am, and very involved with the refugee committee in Geneva. That night she invited Deqo and me to join her for a visit to the Camarada center, which supports and educates women refugees—including many Somali women—living there.
When we walked through the door at Camarada, I felt a new energy in my blood. It was a perfect place! In many different rooms, they had different teachers working with the women on language, computer skills, and sewing. In another part of the center, there was a kitchen where women from different countries each brought their own national dishes. Three people—including one Somali woman—worked entirely on issues of integration, and regardless of their job or their focus, all their children played together and went to school together. I loved being there, seeing how, when you have good friends, you don’t miss your home so much—I felt that way once, when I was a student. I had begun to feel that way again.
“Claire-Lise,” I said, “we have to do this in our camp.”
“We will try,” she said.
Deqo did not want to tell me that Amina had been suffering under the strain of work, the dust, and the sickness in the air, so I learned about her condition while talking by phone with another man in the camp. “Do you know how your daughter is?” he said. “She’s seriously sick!”
“Give me my daughter,” I told him. When she came to the phone, I could hear her labored breathing.
“I don’t know, Mama,” she said. “They think it may be pneumonia.” MSF made arrangements to fly Amina to a French hospital in Djibouti; when she landed there and I spoke with the doctor, we learned that she had the same strain of pneumonia that was plaguing the camp. The doctor also feared that she was at risk for a pulmonary embolism, which was very serious. And she was pregnant. I squirmed through my treatment session that day, wanting to jump off the table and run. She had been healthy when I left, and now, she could barely breathe without a big pain in her chest. I was shocked, thinking of the mistakes that I had made. I was still mourning my son, and now, my daughter’s life was in danger. Without Amina, how would I live?
“I’m leaving,” I told my doctor in Geneva. “My daughter is pregnant, and her doctor says she may have a pulmonary embolism.”
“You are the more serious one,” he said. “If they’ve already diagnosed the pulmonary embolism, she will recover. You must stay.”
I argued with him, insisting that it was better for me to risk dying—I’d already had a long life. He convinced me to remain, and for another two weeks
I sat and worried. Then, when I had just two treatments left, I learned about a flight from Geneva through Nairobi to Djibouti.
“Can I get two radiation treatments in one day, in the morning and the afternoon?” I asked my doctor. “Please allow me that?” He agreed, so I booked a flight leaving for Djibouti the day after.
That radiation burned my skin until it was red, red, red; it made my entire body smell bad. The hair on that side of my head never returned, and now, when I’m in the hot sun for too long, I feel weak and dizzy—I’ve even fallen unconscious, I think, because of the extra exposure to radiation caused by the sun. At the time, though, I didn’t think of the risks or even the outcome. I just wanted to see my daughter.
The sight of her beautiful, full face at the airport filled me with joy, for what I had imagined and what was true were very different. We stayed for a while together in the hot, hot city, and finally, on July 12, she delivered a strong, healthy, baby boy. We call him Ahmed, to remember.
“How many hours, how many months have I been waiting for you?” I asked, looking down at my Ahmed. “You’re late, but thank God you’ve come to me now.”
I cared for Amina as I had cared for my own sister Amina, feeding her soup from the head of a goat and giving her, each day, a small cup of olive oil to drink. After carrying Ahmed for nine months, she needed to relax and to feel her own strength return. Unfortunately, she couldn’t rest long. Two weeks before Amina had delivered, we’d learned that Deqo had been called to sit for her U.S. citizenship test. She couldn’t miss the opportunity, so she’d immediately flown back from the camp to Atlanta. Since our agreement with MSF was that at least one member of our family had to be in the camp, Amina and I boarded a flight from Djibouti to Mogadishu when Ahmed was just fourteen days old.
I worried so much as that plane took off, thinking about the air pressure and the tiny new life in my hands. Still, we made it through. The short rains had returned to Mogadishu by that time, so we touched down to very cool, very nice weather. We went immediately to the third floor of the hospital, where we had a small guest room. All the people ran when they heard we had arrived, and a young woman named Fayeri was the first to scoop up the child.