Current Bıography®

Current Bıography® Hawa Abdi Born: 1947 Occupation: Activist and physician In November 2010, when Hawa Abdi and her two daughters were named the “women of the year” by Glamour magazine, Eliza Griswold, a freelance journalist for Glamour who had worked closely with the Somali obstetrician-gynecologist, called Abdi “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.” Abdi had founded a small clinic outside of Moga- dishu in 1983, and that humble enterprise eventu- ally mushroomed into an entire compound, pro- viding housing, medical facilities, and a school to some ninety thousand people who had been dis- placed by Somalia’s sectarian violence. While that mission earned her comparison to the late Mother Teresa, a nun who ministered to the poor and ill in India, it was Abdi’s steadfast defi ance of Somalia’s various militias that led to her comparison with the Astrid Stawiarz/WireImage tough action fi lm hero Rambo. She has repeatedly refused to turn over Hawa Abdi Village, as the was our bath and our Laundromat.” Growing up, compound is known, to marauding militias, even she spent a great deal of time with her mater- after being kidnapped and held hostage. nal grandmother, whom she called Ayeyo, at the Despite the adversity she continually faces, Abdi older woman’s farm outside of the capital in the has remained stalwart in her mission to house, heal, rural region of Lafole, enjoying the fresh milk and educate Somalia’s most vulnerable citizens, and meat there. and she has enlisted her two daughters to help When Abdi was twelve years old, her mother, keep the village running. “As I speak for millions Dahabo, died in the midst of a painful and com- of Somali women who have no voice,” she wrote plicated pregnancy. Abdi was at her side when in her 2013 memoir, Keeping Hope Alive: One she delivered a premature baby, no bigger than Woman—90,000 Lives Changed, “I also share their a woman’s palm, and later when she died of re- struggles in this complicated world we will forever lated complications. After watching her mother insist on calling home.” suffer, Abdi, who was left to raise her three younger sisters, became determined to become a EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION doctor. In 1963, one of her friends told her about Hawa Abdi Diblawe was born in 1947 in the So- a Russian cultural school that was giving schol- mali capital of Mogadishu. Her father, Abdi Di- arships to Somali students, where Abdi enrolled blawe, worked in the city’s ports, and while the and became a serious and dedicated student. At family was not wealthy, they owned a fenced-in, the time, the Soviets maintained a strong pres- two-room home. As Abdi recalled in her mem- ence in Somalia, and thanks to the recommenda- oir, “In those days, we had no running water; the tion of one of her Russian-born teachers, Abdi— well fi lled our jugs, and the entire Indian Ocean an avid student who completed three years of 1 2 Hawa Abdi academic work in one year—won a scholarship of the Red Cross in 1993, provided some of the from the Soviet Women’s Commission in Mos- only clean drinking water for miles around. cow to study medicine. In 1964, at the age of In 1993, due to her law background, she was seventeen, she received her father’s blessing called by the United Nations Operation in Soma- and left Mogadishu for the Soviet Union. From lia to help draft a new constitution for Somalia. Moscow, she transferred to Kiev for a yearlong In the early 2000s, she was asked to serve as a preparatory course. Although many of her fel- vice minister of labor and sports in the newly low African classmates began adopting a social- established Transitional National Government. ist ideology while studying in the Soviet Union, She was later appointed as a vice minister of Abdi felt herself to be apolitical. “Of course I health and tasked with reopening the Banadir wanted our country to be built well, whether that hospital in Mogadishu, although she was forced was through democracy or socialism,” she wrote to resign from that post after receiving multiple in her memoir. “What I most wanted to take with death threats. me from the Soviet Union was the work ethic and the respect for science.” EXPANDING HER EFFORTS Abdi earned her medical degree in 1971 and By 2012, as drought and famine caused wide- returned to Somalia as one of the nation’s fi rst spread suffering and violent clashes continued, female obstetrician-gynecologists. She quickly an estimated ninety thousand refugees had ar- found a post at a six-hundred-bed hospital in rived at Hawa Abdi Village, which by then in- Mogadishu called Digfer, where she was placed cluded a four-hundred-bed hospital, a school, on the pediatric rotation despite her experience and thousands of makeshift shelters. All who ar- and desire to work in the surgery department. Af- rived were welcome to stay, Abdi has explained, ter three months in the pediatric ward, Abdi was provided they followed just a few simple rules. assigned to a rotation in the obstetrics and gyne- cology department. To further her education, she For example, she has forbidden wife-beating and began attending the Somali National University established a rudimentary holding cell for men in the evenings in 1972 and earned a law degree accused of striking their spouses. Even more im- in 1979. She later taught as an assistant professor portant in a time of sectarian violence, she ruled of medicine at the same university. that no one could speak of their clan kinships in the village. “We created a rule with no excep- A LIFE OF SERVICE tions,” she explained in her memoir. “In our place, we are all Somali. If you want to identify In 1983, Abdi relocated from Mogadishu to by your clan, you can’t stay.” The ban was meant Lafole, where she opened a one-room medical clinic with twenty-three beds. Two months af- to limit fi ghting between members of opposing ter its opening, the clinic was drawing about one clans in the village and to ensure that Abdi could hundred patients per day from the surrounding not be accused of favoring any particular faction. area. She later expanded the clinic to include a In addition to housing, health care, and school- surgical ward. ing for the children, Abdi instituted a series of Within a few years of the clinic’s opening, classes for the village’s adults, aiming to teach civil war had broken out in Somalia, and in 1991 them about various health and child care topics. the country’s president, Siad Barre, was over- “We couldn’t survive without her,” said Hamdi thrown in a coup. As clan-based guerilla groups Nur Mire, one of the residents of Hawa Abdi battled for supremacy, Somalia descended into Village, in an interview with Edmund Sanders chaos. As injured people began arriving at the for the Los Angeles Times (1 Aug. 2007). “She clinic from Mogadishu, Abdi and her employees is doing what the government should be doing.” began to perform emergency medical interven- Abdi’s other major goal is to make the vil- tions as needed. Soon, word had spread that lage—and Somalis as a whole—as self-suffi cient there was a safe haven not far from Mogadishu, as possible, and to that end she has established a and refugees from across Somalia began fl ock- variety of fi shing and agricultural projects. “The ing to her. Although she had to sell many of her long-term solution in preventing another famine family’s assets, including her late mother’s gold, in Somalia is to promote self-reliance,” she told Abdi turned no one away. A few months after Laila Ali for the Guardian (23 Aug. 2011). “Soma- the coup, some four thousand people were living lia has enough land and a big coast but, because on Abdi’s property. Her well, which was drilled there hasn’t been an effective government for over with fi nancing from the International Committee twenty years, we need to educate people on how to Hawa Abdi 3 use the land sustainably. Our policy is sustainment internal refugees from the protracted confl ict in her and development.” country.” (The honor ultimately went to the Euro- pean Union rather than to an individual.) MEETING ADVERSITY The Hawa Abdi Village has proven to be a tempt- PERSONAL LIFE ing target for militias, whose fundamentalist mem- Abdi married her fi rst husband, Mohamed Hus- bers often disapprove of a woman heading a major sein, at the age of twelve in an arranged marriage; organization and are eager to commandeer Abdi’s their marriage ended in divorce. She married her assets for their own use. In May 2010, more than second husband, Aden Mohamed, an engineer fi ve hundred armed members of the militant Party and former offi cer in the Somali Marines, in 1973. of Islam (also known as Hizbul Islam) entered the They separated in the early 2000s, and Aden died village and demanded that Abdi relinquish control in 2011. Together, they had three children. of the hospital and refugee camp on her property. Abdi had one son, Ahmed, who died in a car ac- Holding her at gunpoint, the group, comprised cident in 2005. Her daughters, Deqo and Amina, mainly of teenage boys, ransacked the building, are both physicians, and both now work with the destroying X-ray machines, shredding records, Doctor Hawa Abdi Foundation.

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