ON MAY 5, just after sunrise, 750 militants surrounded Dr. Hawa Abdi’s hospital. Mama Hawa, as she is known, heard gunshots, looked out the window and saw she was vastly outnumbered.
“Why are you running this hospital?” the gunmen demanded. “You are old. And you are a woman!” They did not seem to care that Mama Hawa, 63, was one of the only trained doctors for kilometers around, and that the clinic, school and feeding program she built on her land supported nearly 100,000 people, most of them desperate refugees.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOHAMMED IBRAHIM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW RIGHT, CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dr. Hawa Abdi, below right with her daughter, runs a compound near Mogadishu that includes a school and a hospital.
For hours, militia commanders held Dr. Abdi at gunpoint while their underlings - mostly 15- to 16-year-old boys ? ransacked the hospital, shooting anesthesia machines, smashing windows and tearing up records.
“I told the gunmen, ‘I’m not leaving my hospital,’ ” Dr. Abdi said. “I told them, ‘If I die, I will die with my people and my dignity.’ ”
The gunmen, who belonged to one of Somalia’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups, put Dr. Abdi under house arrest for the next five days and shut down the hospital, causing two dozen malnourished children to die in the bush after their families fled. Then something extraordinary happened. Hundreds of women from the refugee camp on Dr. Abdi’s property protested, adding to a flood of condemnation from Somalis abroad that forced the militants to back down. Somalia has been at war with itself for 20 years. The health care system, like much of the country, has been demolished. But for decades Dr. Abdi has persevered. With her daughters, who are also doctors, she is essentially running a small city . And on patches of land she owns, she is organizing families to run farms and has bought fishing boats to help feed the camp.
Eliza Griswold, who wrote about the compound in her book “The Tenth Parallel,” said, “ Dr. Hawa and her daughters have built a city of healing within the war’s brutal chaos.”
Dr. Abdi has earned recognition worldwide. She and her daughters, Amina and Deqa, were included by Glamour, an American magazine, in its Women of the Year 2010 awards. The magazine described Dr. Abdi as “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.”
Dr. Abdi recently had a benign tumor removed from her brain. She is better, she said, but tired. Still the work continues, and Dr. Abdi plans to return in a few months. “I can’t run away to save myself,” she said.
Dr. Abdi comes from a different generation of Somalis, one with opportunity. At 17, she won a scholarship to study gynecological medicine in Kiev,in what is now Ukraine. She was the only woman among 91 Somali students.
Her dream to become a doctor began when she was 12, watching her mother die in childbirth.
“I used to think and dream that one day I, myself, could save lives so no other mother would die helpless,” she said.
On returning to Somalia, she worked for government hospitals. She married and had three children, two daughters and a boy, though her son was killed in a car accident in 2005.
In 1983, she opened a one-room women’s clinic on family land and began delivering nomadic women’s babies. Dr. Abdi said Somalia’s president at the time, Mohammed Siad Barre , personally gave her the permission.
That one-room clinic has steadily grown. Today, Hawa Abdi Hospital has 400 beds, three operating theaters , 6 doctors, 43 nurses, an 800-student school and an adulteducation center .
Dr. Abdi has long performed surgical procedures herself, everything from Caesarean sections to tweezing out bullet fragments, though operations have been on hold because of the damage from the assault. Measles, malaria, diarrhea, epilepsy, tuberculosis and especially lifethreatening malnutrition are what she confronts daily , with far from enough equipment or medicine.
Around the two-story hospital, a veritable city has sprung up over the years, 90,000 refugees living in bubble-shaped huts made out of plastic sheeting and sticks. It is considered one of the few safe places in southern Somalia. The medical treatment is free, supported by donations.
The haven comes with some security guards and a few important rules. Among them: no man may beat his wife. The property even has a storeroom that doubles as a jail.
Hakima Mohamoud, a 50-year-old mother who had just given birth, recently arrived with a tiny, malnourished baby, who was immediately put on a feeding tube.
Mrs. Hakima marveled that her daughter’s life could be saved - for free. “I’ve never, in my life, seen a freeof- charge hospital serving free medicines,” she said. “I don’t know how I will pay Hawa Abdi Hospital back.”
At Dr. Hawa Abdi’s compound in Somalia, a women’s education
center dispenses lessons in health, cooking and other domestic skills.
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
