Naagta Sannadka (Women of the Year) oo loo aqoonsaday Drs. Xaawo Cabdi iyo Gabdhaheed

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

 

[Che -Guevara]

 

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Paying Tribute to Mother Teresa of Somalia, Late Dr. Hawa Abdi

I know this earthly life is temporary, but I felt great sorrow when I heard the passing of Dr. Hawa Abdi who died at age 73 in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.  Dr. Hawa Abdi helped the helpless, the ill, and the internally displaced women and children, and the weak in war-torn Somalia for decades. She studied medicine in Ukraine and “In 1983, she opened a one-room clinic, on her family’s ancestral property, which over the years grew into a settlement which hosts tens of thousands of people, mainly women and children. The settlement in the Afgooye corridor, less than 15 miles from Mogadishu, includes a hospital, a school and a refugee camp.”

When Hawa Abdi was 11, her mother died due to childbirth complications, and because of the medical reason her mother lost her life, and owing to the fact that childbirth-related death was common (and still is) in sub-Saharan Africa for lack of maternity care, Hawa Abdi decided to become a doctor, especially a female gynecologist. And when the civil war broke out in Somalia in early 1990s, as many Somalis were getting displaced by the war, mainly in and around the capital, Mogadishu, more and more people, especially women and children, moved and took refuge in and around the compound of Dr. Hawa Abdi. She worked tirelessly to save lives and became a lifeline for tens of thousands of Somalis. She was not only helping the needy civilians, but the wounded of the countless warring sides in and around Mogadishu and elsewhere ended up over the years in her clinic and hospital to be treated impartially. Hawa Abdi was a selfless figure who helped her fellow countrymen and countrywomen without discriminating them based on their clan, the main malice that has been destroying Somalia for decades, the biggest factor that plunged the country into an endless civil strife.

At times, Hawa Abdi confronted the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al Shabab to save people in her camp, even when they threatened her. At certain times, some of the people in her camp fled for their lives, but she stayed in her camp no matter how dangerous it was to be fearless. That is how brave she was.

Hawa Abdi not only took risks herself, but she supported her daughters to become doctors so that they can help the needy people in their homeland, Somalia. When you look at the alternative, which is for them to live a peaceful life elsewhere, they prefer to stay in their country and help their people. This can teach the Somali people that these beautiful souls sacrificed so much by saving their fellow Somali citizens.

Hawa Abdi was a role model for millions of Somali girls and women. She braved great adversaries in life. She overcame countless challenges and showed all Somalis, even men, that one person can have a great positive impact on her country and people. She showed her African sisters and brothers, with resolve, mountains can be moved because we live in an inner-connected world where one person, one village, and one city can have a certain influence on the entire world. On the other hand, the world has become a global village, and I believe, compared to when Hawa Abdi started her venture decades ago, now we have more opportunities to do what Hawa Abdi did; the world is more connected than before, and information can be obtained faster and more efficiently. The power of the internet is amazing, and if one can have the access and ways to find and understand the right data, one can do wonderful things to change life for the better.

The news of Hawa Abdi’s death shook the Somali social media world. Many Somali social media users, including me, shared their sadness on the death of this giant woman. Rest in peace!

Xigasho

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

Hawa Abdi, trailblazing physician who built a haven for Somali families, dies at 73

The gunmen arrived soon after sunrise, surrounding Hawa Abdi’s hospital one day in 2010. Marching through the hallways of one of southern Somalia’s few medical centers, they shot anesthesia machines, tore up records, smashed windows and destroyed the country’s only glass incubators. In panic, mothers ripped IV tubes from their babies and rushed into the bush.

The 750 militants, many of them teenagers, were members of Hizbul Islam, a radical Islamist group known for stoning offenders or chopping off hands. They had arrived with automatic rifles and a question for Dr. Abdi, a gynecologist known for turning her family’s farm on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, into a haven for Somalis fleeing famine, poverty and an ongoing civil war.

“Why are you running this hospital?” they demanded, according to a New York Times report. “You are old. And you are a woman!”

Dr. Abdi, then 62, was unfazed. She had been forced to marry an older man at age 12 and went on to become one of her country’s only female physicians, opening a one-room clinic in 1983 to help women giving birth in the East African countryside.

Eight years later she began radically expanding her efforts, spurred by the onset of civil war, to treat anyone who visited her office, whether for malaria or malnutrition.

Thousands soon arrived, and the clinic grew into a 400-bed hospital. The surrounding farm transformed into a makeshift city, Hawa Abdi Village, ultimately home to an estimated 90,000 displaced Somalis living in huts made from sticks and plastic sheets. Under Mama Hawa, as Dr. Abdi was known, they received free medical care, food and education at an 800-student school.

When the militants put her under house arrest, hundreds of women living in the complex protested in a show of support. Somalis across the country condemned the attack. The insurgents retreated after a few days and, at Dr. Abdi’s insistence, wrote an apology note.

“I told the gunmen, ‘I’m not leaving my hospital,’ ” she said in a 2011 interview with the Times. “I told them, ‘If I die, I will die with my people and my dignity.’ I yelled at them, ‘You are young and you are a man, but what have you done for your society?’ ”

Dr. Abdi, who returned to work after replacing the militants’ black flag with a white sheet from her hospital, was 73 when she died Aug. 5 at home in Mogadishu. She had several strokes in recent years, said her daughter Deqo Mohamed, but the precise cause of death was not known.

“She had a really deep faith and sense of hope that things could change in Somalia,” said journalist Sarah J. Robbins, who co-wrote Dr. Abdi’s 2013 memoir, “Keeping Hope Alive.” In a phone interview, Robbins recalled that while touring the United States to promote the book, Dr. Abdi urged young Somali Americans to help rebuild their ancestral home.

“This was a beautiful place,” Dr. Abdi said, telling stories of Somali life after the country became independent in 1960. “This can be a beautiful place again.”

Dr. Abdi was part physician, part human rights activist, with a law degree she earned on the side to protect herself from men who sought to take advantage of a woman running her own nonprofit organization without a husband, brother or son by her side.

“My mom would not talk much. She would just say a couple words and do the work,” Mohamed said by phone from Mogadishu, where she and her younger sister now run the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation with support from aid organizations. “She often repeated a Russian saying: The beauty of a city is the statues or the streets. But the beauty of a human being is his work. If you want to be beautiful, do the work.”

That work was recognized around the world as early as 1993, when President George H.W. Bush visited Mogadishu on New Year’s Day. Dr. Abdi was the first Somali he met; she guided him across her hospital grounds and through the camp of displaced families at a time when it was known as Lafoole, meaning “place of bones.”

“It’s just very, very emotional for me to see it,” Bush told reporters after visiting the compound. “And I’ll tell you,” he added, “I’ve got great respect for what they are doing.”

Dr. Abdi was later hailed as “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo” by Glamour magazine, which named her and her daughters Women of the Year in 2010. Two years later, actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie delivered a testimonial on her behalf at the Women in the World summit in New York City. Dr. Abdi was unable to attend but sent a message to the audience.

“I have given my people my heart and my soul,” she said. “Still I did not lose my hope. One day my people’s lives will change in a better way. I hope my children and the children who grow in camp, and are born in the hospital, will change the lives of Somali people.”

Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe was born in Mogadishu in the spring of 1947. Without knowing her precise birthday, she adopted the May 28 birth date of her daughter Mohamed. Her father worked at the city port, in an era when Mogadishu was controlled by Britain and then Italy; her mother died of childbirth complications when she was 12.

The episode introduced her to the shortcomings of the country’s health-care system and set her on a path to become a doctor. “I wanted to help future generations and children to avoid the pain I felt,” she later told an interviewer. It also led the family to give Dr. Abdi up for marriage, according to Mohamed.

The marriage ended in divorce after the death of her infant daughter, which she attributed to a female genital cutting ritual that she had undergone as a child and that apparently compromised the birth. After the child died, she returned to school and received a scholarship to study gynecology in Kyiv, in what is now Ukraine, as a result of Somalia’s Cold War-era alliance with the Soviet Union.

Dr. Abdi returned to Mogadishu in 1971, at a time when Somalia had about 60 doctors, according to her memoir. She worked at Digfer Hospital, where most of her colleagues were Italian and only one was female, before starting her own clinic at her family farm.

Its location, on the road between Mogadishu and the town of Afgooye, made it a destination for families in need. By 2010, the corridor was home to more than 400,000 displaced people — more than anywhere else in the world, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees — and the camp had grown to about 90,000 people.

Dr. Abdi initially sold a stockpile of gold to feed the women and children who flocked to her doorstep. “Then, as the famine worsened, she had to pay gravediggers in food to bury the more than ten thousand who died,” journalist Eliza Griswold wrote in her 2010 book “The Tenth Parallel.”

In interviews with visiting reporters, Dr. Abdi often said she had not intended to support thousands of displaced families. But “necessity is the mother of invention,” she explained.

To keep the peace, she instituted certain rules. Husbands who beat their wives were sent to a makeshift jail, a storeroom with barred windows. Newcomers who sought to maintain the clan identifications that had torn the country apart were not allowed to stay.

“When they come, we were informing them, if you use the clan division, or you said I am that clan, you cannot stay here,” she told NPR in 2013. “You will be Somali. And you will see, we will welcome you.”

Dr. Abdi married Aden Mohamed, a military technician, in 1973. They later separated, and he died in 2012. Survivors include her two daughters, Deqo and Amina Mohamed, both physicians; two sisters; and three grandchildren. A son, Ahmed, was killed in a 2005 car accident exactly 15 years before Dr. Abdi died, according to Deqo Mohamed.

About three years ago, Dr. Abdi stopped working regularly at her hospital, which has since closed — temporarily, the family hopes — because of safety concerns. “We’re hoping when things clear out, we can regain her legacy,” Deqo Mohamed said. She added that fewer than 10,000 displaced Somalis remain in the camp, where the school has continued holding classes.

Most of the camp’s residents have been women and children. “The men are dead, fighting, or have left Somalia to find work,” Dr. Abdi told Glamour, adding that the country’s women were more than capable of carrying on without them.

“Women can build stability,” she said. “We can make peace.”

Washington Post