The Horn of Africa

 

In between patients, Deeq and I talk about anything under the sun. He's enlightened me on the khat economy, fat women, stained teeth, different styles of FGM -- female genital mutilation, social factors around pregnancy, STD infection rates in Somaliland, etc. A few nights ago, we were talking about the social stigma around seeing women. Husbands don't want you to see the face of their wife, even while she's giving birth, but if you leave her veil on you're welcome to examine the baby, etc. So peculiar. This is all contrary to the traditional nomadic Somali woman -- a strong, bossy, decision maker, deciding when to move to a new grazing area, which goats to sell at the market, etc. Edna thinks the current changes are a result of people wandering off into the nearby Arab world an picking up terrible ideas and habits.

 

Anyway, while we were talking about this, Deeq mentioned that he used to work as a doctor in Yemen and that they were far more conservative than anything he's seen here. He related a story about a husband and wife who came in, the woman having a horrendous pain in one of her teeth. The woman sat, hunched over, crying softly but saying nothing. Her husband stood next to her, explaining all of her symptoms, the history, how she was feeling now, etc. He was wearing a dagger on the front of his robes (the sheath is curved, but the daggers themselves are straight), had a pistol strapped to his hip, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, and a grenade on his belt. When Deeq asked the woman to lift her veil so he could look in her mouth, the husband stepped forward and loudly objected. They argued and the man and his wife left, with Dr. Deeq saying that if he wasn't allowed to examine her mouth, he couldn't treat her.

 

An hour and a half later, the man returned to the clinic. He was smiling this time. "I have a solution," he said, and he proceeded to draw his knife and carefully cut a small mouth-hole into his wife's veil for the doctor to peer through.

 

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We have emergency cases come into the hospital now and then -- 8th month, severe bleeding, immediate c-section required to save the baby and the mother. Husbands, who decide if their wives live or die, balk at the prospect of surgery, refusing the sign the consent forms. Edna tells me that twice in the past, with women literally bleeding away on the operating table and husbands steadfastly refusing the c-section, she's gone to the nearby police station and told the commanding officer there that her and herself were going to sign the consent forms, laws be damned, and if the police chief wouldn't sign, the woman's death would be on his hands. "Let them sue us tomorrow! Tonight we're going to save that woman's life!" Both times, the chief has signed, over the protests of the husbands. (I swell with enormous admiration for her when she tells me this but I say nothing.)

 

I'm absolutely incredulous at this. Is it that our head surgeon is male? Is is some part of Islam? It turns out that a big part of the reason husbands do this is because of the language. To describe slicing open a living being, we have the word "surgery." To describe slicing open a living being in the Somali language, there's only one word and it's not precise. "Slaughter." That's right -- the Somali word for "surgery" is the same word used for "and then we're going to the market and we're going to SLAUGHTER a goat." The nurses here have to devise clever, roundabout ways of describing the procedure to fretful husbands. "We're going to... open... your wife... and then we're going to lift the baby out..."

 

There're other reasons for refusing the surgery, but the language problem has gotta be a big one. You're a peasant from a rural area, living life as a nomad, absolutely zero education, almost no exposure to the modern world. Your wife is dying and you're in a huge metropolis, sights and sounds you've never seen, and someone in the hospital asks you to sign a consent form to slaughter your wife. Would you sign? :)

 

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A few days ago, at lunch, Edna described being a nurse here in Somaliland during the war with Ethiopia in 1977. "We were in Jijiga [present day Ethiopia, but ethnically Somali], loading up ambulances and driving back to Hargeisa. We could only drive at night and even then we had to keep the lights off, for fear the Ethiopia fighter planes would bomb us. We had patients loaded on top of patients; some were on the roof of the ambulance. The driver would go very slowly without lights and, when he couldn't see the path, he'd get out and walk ahead with a small flashlight, plotting our path for the next few hundred meters. Blood was leaking down the sides of the ambulance and I could hear hyenas howling in the darkness."

 

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I want to keep all three of my books for my personal library. They're that good. The plan was to give them away here, after I'd read them, gifting them out into the world. I could leave them in Edna's library, donate them to the absurdly expensive library in town, or give them to Diana -- the American NGO worker -- for dissemination into the NGO community. I'll probably do the latter, hoping for wide readership, and just buy more copies when I'm back in the States.

 

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My flight from Hargeisa to Addis on the 9th is on Daallo Airlines. The UN won't let their staff fly on Daallo because it's unsafe and now I keep hearing horror stories from expats. The gist of it seems to be this: Daallo planes are all small and old. Antonovs, I wonder? Some people have told me they're converted cargo puddlejumpers with benches against the walls. Everybody has said they have no seatbelts. This doesn't bother me since a seatbelt isn't much use when you're plummeting out of the sky in a metal tube. Still, the planes fly low and thus are buffeted by thermals. The turbulance can get so bad, I hear, that you can bounce off the benches/seats and slam your head into the ceiling. My flight is early in the morning, when it's still cool, so turbulance should be slightly reduced.

 

If I die in a plane crash in Somalia, I hope someone will gussy it up a bit and make the story more sexy. Not just a plane crash, but a traaaagic plane crash... not just in Africa, but a desolate corner of the Horn of Africa, a war zone maybe, where Westerners fear to tread!... not to be a volunteer doofus while on vacation from cushy San Francisco, but to comfort the weeping children! To "hold the line on AIDS!" A beacon of light in the heart of darkness!

 

That sounds pretty good. :)

 

In the afterlife, Edward Said will strangle me.