LITMIR.BIZ

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that I learned that peeled bark from an acacia tree could be boiled to make a tea called asal. It was cold at night so we drank it to keep warm. Asal is also good for cleaning wounds and sterilizing vessels – a fact I logged for later use.

      My brother and I didn’t mind being stuck in the middle of nowhere because it felt like a free holiday. The truck was carrying so many interesting people from different tribes all riding on the top, which was heavily laden with goods. My aunt paid extra for us to sleep in the cab at night for safety from wild animals, but Farah and I longed to be up on the roof where our fellow passengers hung off ropes on the sides telling poems and singing songs. There were arguments and running battles, there was love and jealousy and friendship. All of life was there.

      Desperate to join them, Farah and I would seek out an old woman or a mother and child and offer them our seats. My aunt praised us for our kindness, never quite appreciating that we did it only so that we could swap places and climb up under the stars to inhale the sweat and the tobacco smoke and listen agog to all the stories.

      Life as a child in Africa was such a big adventure.

      I always loved reconnecting with my father who’d occasionally take time off to bring us home. I remember him driving us back once and letting me hold the steering wheel while sitting on his lap. Mother was screaming from the back seat, ‘Don’t let Edna drive, Adan, she’ll kill us all!’ Dad just laughed and promised to go slowly, letting me steer the car for miles down those bumpy roads and sparking my lifelong love of driving.

      Those first summers after my ordeal were when I first started going with him each day to the hospital in Erigavo, the northeastern capital where he was living and working on yet another two-year rotation. I would walk him to the door as I did when I was small but now I’d carry on inside, chattering away and willing to offer my assistance. I was always much happier rolling bandages or washing Dad’s medical instruments than peeling potatoes for Mum and – after several catastrophes in the kitchen – she accepted that it was probably better that I didn’t help her after all. If we had people coming and I asked if she wanted me to do anything, her answer would be, ‘No, no! We have guests today’, which told me something about her opinion of my domestic skills. All her life I think Mum believed that my father had gained a daughter in me but that she never really had one. Whenever she told me crossly, ‘You’re just as bad as your father!’ she had no idea that it was the best compliment anyone could pay me.

      When Dad came back from work for his meal, I’d be the first to greet him and would occasionally volunteer to make him something he liked. Goodness alone knows what it tasted like, but he always pretended it was delicious and made a big fuss of me. The one thing he especially liked during Ramadan was labania – custard made from rice. It was my job to make it – a process that took an entire day, as there was no custard powder back then. First I had to soak grains of fat rice until they expanded, then I had to drain them and scatter them onto a tray to dry in the sun. Then I’d have to pound and sieve it repeatedly until it was powdered, before slowly adding water so as not to make it lumpy. While it was cooking, I’d add cardamom, sugar and milk and then pour it onto little saucers and put them on the windowsill to set, as we had no refrigerator. Dad would taste it, grin and say, ‘Hmmm, this is soooo good, Shukri! Only my daughter could have made this. Did you make it? I knew you did!’ He made me feel like I owned a million camels.

       ***

      I was twelve years old during the Year of Red Dust, our country’s worst drought in years, when I became indispensable to my father at the Erigavo hospital. He not only appreciated my help but also came to rely on it, especially when the drought and famine gave him so much extra work.

      There are so many more people to deal with in bad times, and not just those dying of hunger and thirst. Animal carcasses litter the roads and attract flies that carry more disease. Starvation compromises the immune system, which gives people a lower resistance to diseases like TB. Dark hair pales through loss of pigmentation, skin wrinkles and ankles swell. The children especially suffer from protein calorie malnutrition, also known as kwashiorkor, or fluid retention in their bellies as their spleens and livers enlarge. The British-organized military response teams and the Somali Army set up huge camps in the desert to hold 30-40,000 destitute people. Dad and the Army nursing officers would travel back and forth to bring the most desperately ill to the hospital for treatment. Mostly they needed water and food – a little at a time or they’d die of diarrhoea. We fed them a kind of gruel or boiled white rice and watered-down milk. If their veins hadn’t collapsed, we could give them saline through a drip. If they had we were to administer subcutaneous injections daily so that their bodies could absorb it.

      Every morning Dad would ask me to help him with something else. ‘Come with me today?’ he’d plead. ‘There are too many patients for me to deal with and I need your help with the dressings.’ Or, ‘Have breakfast early tomorrow, I want you to assist with a procedure, so dress up and meet me on the ward.’ He knew he could trust me that if a surgical instrument needed washing I would do it properly, and that it wouldn’t be stolen. We were so short of supplies that the families of patients would be requested to bring in their own sheets, as well as old ones they had no further use for, which I would cut up for dressings. I’d sit in a side room with piles of striped sheets of every colour, ripping and cutting them into every size Dad might need. Every outpatient would also wash their own bandages and bring them back so that we could boil them all up again and issue them with fresh ones. The brand new custom-made bandages from England were kept back for surgery.

      My father’s single-storey hospital had a male ward, a female ward, a medical ward, a surgical ward, outpatients and a maternity ward. There was room for forty patients. Babies slept with their mothers in their beds as there were no cots and an incubator was unheard of. The staff was largely illiterate and not very conscientious, but the whitewashed building was clean – if a little tired – as it was still inspected by the British once a year.

      Dad was run ragged delivering babies, performing minor operations and rehydrating patients. Often he was hampered by the unwritten custom in our country that any surgery or lifesaving procedure on a woman has first to be agreed to by their closest male relative, or the one who is financially responsible for her. Seeking that consent from nomadic families scattered in remote places was often difficult and sometimes impossible to get. He was also much hindered by a lack of supplies, as whatever the British provided was never enough and in times of crisis the demand trebled. He was constantly sending telegrams pleading for extra saline drips or needles, more paraffin, wicks and lamps. In desperation, he would sometimes put on his best clothes and go in person to see the District Commissioner to ask for what he needed.

      I was only permitted to help my father on the outpatient’s ward and never near the delivery room. God forbid a Somali girl is let in on the secrets of the female body. If Dad was away visiting the nomads, I was then allowed onto the other wards to supervise those he was most concerned about, help the auxiliaries, and follow the numerous instructions on his list.

      My mother objected vociferously. ‘Why do you have to go to the hospital again, Edna? What do you know about patients? You’ll kill people!’

      ‘I’m not going to kill anybody. I’m just going to make sure the staff are doing what they should be doing.’

      ‘How do you know what they should be doing?’

      ‘I follow what Dad tells me on the piece of paper he left me.’

      It never occurred to her to help him, too, or to get some other job. She was a bright, educated woman who’d grown up in a different country, spoke several languages, and could easily have worked as an interpreter or translator. Yet she chose to stay at home to be influenced by her Somali girlfriends about how a wife should be.

       ***

      When my schooling in Djibouti City ended after six years, I returned home proudly to Somaliland with my Certificat d’Études Primaires. I had done very well, but at fourteen years old I couldn’t help but wonder what was in store for me next. Formal education in Djibouti didn’t extend beyond primary school, so there was no reason for me to stay and some pressing reasons for me

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