by Hawa Abdi
For Somali citizens, travel to the United States is very difficult. While we had tried to get visas in the past, the situations were always too complicated. This time, though, we succeeded, and Glamour magazine booked us tickets in business class. Can you imagine? When you sat, your legs went up, and the chair became a bed. The flight attendants, who gave us food every five minutes, were always asking, “What can I get you? What can I give you? Can I help you?” When we landed in John F. Kennedy Airport, we were fresh and happy.
Amina Mohamed is a very common Somali name. Someone who shares my daughter’s name must have made a mistake because when we came through the airport, the immigration officials took Amina away from us and told us to wait. Little Ahmed ran to his mother, but they pushed him away. “No!” she shouted. “He is my son! He will stay with me.”
After about an hour, some lady came to us, holding the Glamour magazine, open to the page where Eliza’s story was written. I saw the beautiful photo that the photographer Martin Schoeller had taken of us in Geneva. “Is this you?” she asked. “This is your daughter?”
“Yes,” I said, “this is my daughter, this is me, this is my other daughter.” We waited and waited, and finally, they released us into the warm hug of Eliza and the women from Glamour.
We were in New York for seven days, staying in a beautiful hotel, the Empire, and meeting many people and many organizations—Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Mission to the UN, Women for Women International. The city was too fast for me: Taxis carried us through Times Square, full of lights; elevators shot us into the sky; and when we stepped out, we looked through boardroom windows to see the huge, modern city in every direction.
Eliza and Matthias came to join us the night of the awards ceremony. Before we could take our seats, though, we walked into a big, white tent the length of the street and onto a red carpet. About thirty journalists took photos, lighting up the whole place! During the ceremony, a television journalist named Katie Couric presented the award to me and my daughters, and we walked up onto the big, bright stage, looking out into the crowd of beautifully dressed people watching us. I made a brief speech, thanking Glamour magazine and the U.S. government for allowing me to have the beautiful night. I thanked Eliza and all the journalists who came to my place, risking their lives.
“We are three women, and we are committed to change Somali women’s lives,” I said. “We can’t do it alone—we need the help of the American people, and those all over the world.”
At the dinner that night, many people came to me, saying, “We will help you.” We met women from an organization called Vital Voices Global Partnership, which would work with Glamour to raise money and send it to us through Association Suisse Hawa Abdi. We met Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia; and so many other powerful women—prime ministers, politicians, actresses, humanitarians. I could not believe that these famous women recognized and respected me. Although I hadn’t done anything for them, they saw that I had done something for poor people. In that beautiful night, and the days surrounding it, I felt half of my depression—the feeling that Italians call tristezza—lift away.
From New York we went to Atlanta. I was proud to see Deqo’s life there, although it was so different than what I knew: By the time I was her age, I was already married with children. Still, I was proud and happy to see how the Somali community in Atlanta respected her, coming to her home with their daughters, saying, “Deqo, advise them. We want them to imitate you.”
I sat with these women in Deqo’s living room, drinking tea. “You are lucky,” they told me. “You are helping people, and your daughter—educated, honest, and hardworking—is helping people, too. God gave you this because of the work that you do.” And that is true.
While we were in Atlanta, Asha called to congratulate me for the work that I’ve done. “It’s wonderful what is happening to you,” she said. “The biggest people are recognizing you, giving you prizes.” I believe that she was telling the truth, and that she wanted to have good relations. Still, it was hard for me to forget the way I had felt for so long, how I had once told her what I had told Aden: “Someday you will search for Hawa, but you will never get her back.”
When the Somali diaspora saw me on television in the United States, they all began to call, sending plane tickets. I visited Minneapolis and Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Boston, and many other cities; wherever we went, we were welcomed by a big crowd of Somali people, many of whom I hadn’t seen since I was young. At one big community event, a friend of mine from medical school, Dr. Osman Ahmed, introduced me. When he walked up to me, I was so happy to see him! I hadn’t seen him since the first days after the government collapse. His face was the same, while I had grown very old, drowning in an ocean of need.
“I want to tell you Hawa’s history,” he told the crowd. “Hawa came to us, and we were only boys. She was young and skinny, so we protected her as if she were a fragile, golden egg. She finished her medical degree, but do not think that she is only a doctor. She is also a lawyer.” Everyone laughed when they heard that, and I laughed, too, able for the first time to reflect on my life and my accomplishments. The experience was so much sweeter because it was shared with someone who had known me from the beginning, and a crowd of people who had seen what I had seen.
Wherever I went, I spoke all that I had in my heart and my mind, asking, “Who will remember with me that time, how it was in Mogadishu, in the afternoon? Who will remember with me?”
The people from the diaspora sometimes cried, feeling homesick, when they heard about the young people passing on the roads, dressing well, the cappuccinos and the ice cream, the sound of the waves. In all my travels I didn’t meet one person, even wealthy businessmen or college professors, who told me that he was so happy, he didn’t want to go back. It doesn’t matter how rich, how successful you are, or how complicated the situation is that you left: The best place, for you, is your home.
“Somalia is waiting for you,” I said. “Let’s die together, fighting to rebuild our country.” The young people cried when they heard that. Although they had finished university and had high hopes to change the world, they were refugees and far from their homes. I knew that for them and for many of their parents—well-respected, economically independent people who were buying and building their own houses, voting for the government—it was still about “my clan, my clan.” That was rubbish, I said.
“The person who protects the clan is cursed,” I said. “Unless you can stand here and count back four generations that are all of one clan, you’re fighting with the people who once loved you.”
I worked out the logic with them, counting, abtirsiinyo: “Can you show on your fingers of one hand your grandfathers and grandmothers, all of one clan? Then why would you want to kill your uncle, your grandparents?” Wasn’t killing your own relatives like cutting off one of your own hands—or removing one of your eyes?
“It is better to have one body,” I said. “Let all of Somalia be one.”
I returned to Nairobi at the end of December, but I would continue to travel back and forth to the United States, speaking before audiences of many kinds—doctors, aid workers, Muslim communities, women leaders. A prominent journalist named Nicholas Kristof had written an article about the attack in the New York Times, and many people sent money through the Glamour –Vital Voices initiative. It helped to keep the maternity ward open, even while we struggled to rebuild the hospital. Although the travel was difficult, we understood that the more we talked, the more people we met would understand our aim and offer their help.
One of our trips was in March 2011, when we returned to New York to attend Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Summit. There, I was honored to talk with some of the world’s most respected people, including President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton told me that she appreciated what I was doing. “You inspire me,” I told her. “You are a very strong w
oman.”
I think she knows that there were Somali people who could understand their friends and their enemies, even though many among us are uneducated or naive. While our situation is so complicated, I believe that, for the United States, freedom means trying to do what one believes is right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Forgiveness
While we were honored all over the world, our phones continued to ring with unsettling news from home. We had still been in New York City in December 2010 when, during a big battle nearby Afgoye, Hizbul Islam merged with al-Shabab, which was growing more and more powerful in the country. Hizbul Islam hadn’t bothered us in the camp for several months; since so many men went from one evil group to another, we hoped we would still be safe.
Our biggest concern, at the time, was the fact that two big rainy seasons never came—the drought stretched on, into May and June 2011; the wells ran dry, and illness spread once more. In May, we received sixty families in one day; they’d walked from Jowhar, 80 kilometers away, to reach us, and we had almost nothing to give them. Our staff did our best to administer to the most serious cases, even as supplies were scarce. Still, the money we had received from donations was reserved to keep our hospital running. Most international organizations would not stay with us or even give to us, fearing that since we were working in an al-Shabab–controlled place, we would be looted and their money would fall into the hands of terrorists.
In July, the United Nations officially declared a famine in our region, and slowly by slowly, many of the international organizations who had been away for so long returned to work, in a high-profile way, in Mogadishu. Still, because of the presence of al-Shabab, they could not reach us. After so many years of relying on these organizations for aid—and in many cases, for good salaries—people in our place understood that their return meant big employment opportunities. When one group held interviews in Mogadishu, our entire hospital staff left us in one day; the other organization offered them good positions at a price that we could not afford to pay.
Deqo knocked on every door, and with the help of our new friends from abroad, we changed our plans to respond to the emergency, calculating how much we could budget to keep a few nurses, cleaners, and guards in the hospital and to buy some small amount of food to help prevent so many people from dying. We returned to North America—to Toronto and New York—to fund-raise, and we were successful: For one month, we were able to set up seven kitchens that fed 4,200 people each day. It was not enough to help all, but our volunteers tried to give the rations to the people who were the most serious. We kept going until, by October, the money was gone.
The rains returned around this time, though, and when they did, Amina cultivated six hectares of maize on our farm. We knew that we had to push people to work with us, so that they could become self-sustaining somehow. Our laborers watched the crops carefully, and when it was time to harvest, they received half the yield. The other half went to the hospital and to the poor people who didn’t have the power to dig—the sick, the old, and the children.
Amina and I remained in Nairobi, where each month we spent several hundred dollars on phone bills alone; she worked at her clinic, sending money every day to the camp by wire transfer, and I began planning for farming and fishing projects that I hoped would sustain our people in the long term. We spoke with the committee every few hours, and we tried to offer advice about serious medical cases and to solve problems as best we could. The panic would be about a lack of fuel, a lack of medicine, or a particular conflict inside; once a person whom we hired to help with the generator and the electricity for the hospital got so angry that he cut our power line.
It sounds like an impossible situation—especially to manage from so far away—and in many, many cases it is. Even when our job goes smoothly, we know that the people around us might see something good and attack. In the rare time I have to think about our situation, I wonder whether the origin of our difficult lives is the divided family. If a husband has two wives—or three or four—the children are born among some hatred or suspicion. A Somali proverb says that you don’t deliver a child, you deliver a society. A child born among a big hatred will grow up to create the same. But the child born into a society that is patriotic, that is doing everything good—that child will go the same way the society is going.
Amina tries her best to make me calm—doing everything I want, sometimes thinking of something that she knows would be good for me, like some special food or even a massage, without my even knowing I wanted it. Still, sometimes, our situation seems too impossible to continue: “Deqo,” I’ll say, “let’s sell the land and buy another place, where it is more calm.”
“No,” says Deqo. “This is the land where I grew up—where you grew up. It is for your descendants. We are not selling it.”
While we were traveling, receiving honors, and telling the world about our work, Aden was in the north, suffering. Around the time that we received the Glamour award, my daughters sent money so that he could have hernia repair surgery; he recovered, but still he was calling Deqo and Amina, telling them that his condition was getting worse. When they learned that he was diagnosed with hepatitis, Amina wanted to transport him to Nairobi. Somehow his family wanted him to travel to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia.
“I will give my father the money and let him go where he prefers,” Amina said when she told me the news.
For two or three months Aden was in that hospital, and they tried their best to treat him. By the first days of 2012, his condition had become very serious. Although Deqo had the information first, Amina was the one to tell me, “My father is now semiconscious—I have to see him.”
“Okay,” I told her, feeling sorry to see her pain and worry. “He will recover, insha’Allah.”
While we brought Amina to the airport, on the other side of the world, Deqo prepared for her long journey, across the whole of the United States and all of the Pacific Ocean. Amina arrived first, and she called me from her hotel. “Mama, I have seen my father,” she said, “but my hope is very little that he will recover from this situation.” I could only reassure her in a small way, telling her that I was praying for his health and waiting to hear from her. Once I hung up the phone in Nairobi, I just sat on the apartment’s balcony, looking out from the fourth floor into our parking lot, watching the children chase one another, shouting and laughing.
Two days later, on Monday, January 9, my phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. Amina. “My father’s heart stopped,” she said, crying, crying.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “Please don’t cry. Everyone is dying. This was the end of his life.”
A few hours after Aden passed away, Deqo arrived in Kuala Lumpur, and my two daughters sat together, their father’s body lying before them. I could not bear to think of them standing there, so helpless in some ways, but also so strong. They arranged to send his body back to Somalia, to the north, as he and his family would have wanted.
My phone rang all day, all night, with thousands of condolence calls from people I hadn’t heard from in years. According to law, I was still Aden’s wife, expected to fulfill the promise that was made in the beginning of our relationship and the decree that he made at the end: “You will bury me.”
What could I do? “Mama Hawa,” said Noor, one of the boys who grew up in the camp and who was now working with our family in Nairobi, “it is indispensable that you go and participate in the burial time.”
I know that there are moments when you have to act, even when every part of you wishes to keep still. Finally I understood that the most important parts of my life were my two daughters, and that I had to support them no matter what the complicated circumstance. Noor kept watch over little Ahmed, and the next day, on Tuesday, I traveled from Nairobi to Hargeisa. When we stopped in Mogadishu, I met a group from the camp—some of the people who loved Aden best—from many different clans. There were thirty-two of us who traveled together, and each one of them was mourning Papa
Aden.
I’d told them not to come. “That is not my place,” I’d said. “I can’t support you there.” They’d insisted, however, and Aden’s brother prepared two homes, side by side, for the Mogadishu family to stay.
Unlike Mogadishu, Hargeisa has little green—mostly sand and hot, hot sun. One of Aden’s sisters met me at the airport. In the 1970s she had lived with us, at our place by the seaside, in Secondo Lido. The last time I saw her was before the civil war, when she was still a young girl; now she was a woman with eleven children, smiling and greeting me. One of Aden’s brothers whom I raised was there, too. “Are you going to the place where Aden lived?” they asked as we drove into the town.
“I’m very tired,” I told her. Deqo and Amina would not arrive for two more days; I did not want to go to the home that my husband had shared with his other wife and his other children. So they brought me to another home, owned by a beautiful young woman with four boys. The people I knew followed me there, surrounding me.
“Ayeyo, someone has come to you, they want to see you,” said my host. She took good care of me, offering the guests tea and sweets in her modern sitting room.
“Thank you for coming to us,” the people said. “We are sorry.”
“Please come live with us here,” said others. “You are the elder of the family.”
I thanked them in a strange voice, although I couldn’t think of it. From the moment I landed, when the car had driven from the airport to the house where I stayed, until now, as I sat in the house greeting people, I thought only of my son.
Ahmed. In the Holy Qur’an is written a story about Joseph, Jacob’s son, whose brothers left him in a well. They put blood on their shirts. “Father, we are sorry!” they said. “Joseph was eaten by some wild animals.” Though Jacob became blind with grief, still he said, “He’s alive—I know he is alive.” They told him he was mad, but in the end, he found his son. Since those most terrible days of 2005, I had searched, too, wishing we had the money for private detectives, and even following the false hope of someone who had suggested she’d seen Ahmed passing by in Mogadishu.