A Woman of Firsts - Edna Adan Ismail

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important lesson in nursing care. It was then that I fell in love with medicine. The dirty old nomad was more precious to Adan Doctor than me, his first-born. To this day, if I see something smelly or disgusting or oozing I make a point of diving right in with both hands. It’s my way of training my students that a nurse has to do whatever it takes and treat everyone with the same respect and care.

      My father worked seven days a week, 365 days a year, and he loved every minute. Adan Ismail was my hero. He still is. I will never be as compassionate as he was. I will never be as kind and generous as he was with his time, his emotions, and his affection. My father was a very good man. Every day he was hindered by a chronic lack of funds and supplies, many of which he ended up paying for himself. And yet every day he still put on his uniform and went to work with a smile on his face. My mother used to call him ‘the man with holes in the palms of his hands’ because money slipped through them, usually spent on his hospital or his patients. Every day he’d say, ‘If only I had more medicines’, or ‘I wish I had a better sterilizer.’ He’d have happily bought these things himself but they weren’t easily available in our forgotten part of Africa, so he was forever asking me to wash a pair of scissors or some other instrument because he didn’t have enough or the quality was too poor. ‘Not those ones,’ he’d say, gently. ‘They don’t cut well. Bring me the others.’ I wished I could have bought him a whole tray of sharp scissors, a box of gleaming new scalpels, or a pair of forceps that actually worked.

      Watching him deal with these challenges every day planted a fertile seed inside my head: a quite fantastical thought for any little girl, but especially one growing up in a developing country. I can’t recall the exact moment when I decided that I would one day build him a hospital, but I do know I had a very clear idea of how it would be run. My only image of the outside was that it was large and white, but I never sketched out any drawings or plans. My dream had much more to do with it being the right kind of place – a perfect new medical centre that would do my father proud. In my head it had all the equipment, instruments and trained staff that he’d need. It was a place where he would be delighted to work. And where I would happily work alongside him.

      Back in 1950, my fantasy was little more than a child’s wish to please her beloved father. It was far from realistic in a Muslim country that didn’t even allow schooling for girls. Education for girls was unavailable in case we dared form any opinions or – worse – voice them. Anyway, there was little point when every Somali woman was expected to be a dutiful wife and mother, bound by archaic social traditions as well as often harmful traditional practices. Dad never saw me that way. I was his adored Shukri, his first child and one of three to survive out of five. He called me the ‘apple of his eye’ and encouraged me to read English from an early age. It was he who arranged for me to go to school in French Somaliland, determined that I should have the kind of opportunities he’d been given as a child. Like me, he dreamed that I would one day train as a nurse and help him offer the kind of healthcare he longed to provide for the people he loved. My father wanted me to be the best I could possibly be.

      If I were to fulfil that wish then what better gift could I give him than his own hospital? How I would achieve it, I didn’t know. What money I’d use to make it happen, I had no idea. Neither of us knew that political turmoil and civil war would soon devastate our country. We could never have foreseen the suffering. At twelve years old, I only knew that one day my father’s name would be placed for all to see on a large white hospital built in his honour. I didn’t even tell him of my secret plan. Yet the idea sprang into my young head so clear and bright and certain. It lodged in my subconscious like tumbleweed caught on a thorn, and that’s where it remained for more than fifty years until I finally had the time and resources to do something about it. This is the story of how I made that happen, against insurmountable odds.

       Hargeisa, British Somaliland Protectorate, 1937

      Seven days after I was born at 9 p.m. on 8 September 1937 following a long and difficult delivery, my father gave me the name ‘Shukri’, which means thanks. This was because I was considered something of a miracle after two years of my mother’s infertility.

      The only reason I know the date of my birth is because I was born in a hospital in Hargeisa, unlike the majority of Somalilanders. We didn’t mark birthdays in the same way as people in the West because we didn’t then have a written language, very few people could read, and no one knew what a calendar was. Many my age don’t know when they were born and say simply ‘the time of bad floods’, or ‘the month before the long drought’. Age was counted by the rainy seasons, of which there are two, so a child who has seen two rains would be described as two years old when they were really only one.

      I was a big, healthy baby although I carry two scars on my head from the forceps used by the English obstetrician who delivered me. Perhaps the miracle of my survival in a country where infant mortality is still the fourth highest in the world is the reason I became such a headstrong child and a stubborn adult – to which many will attest. With ninety-four in every 1,000 babies dying at birth in Somaliland (compared with four or five in the UK and the US), it is customary for newborns never to be named until they are a week old for fear their parents become too emotionally attached.

      At my naming ceremony on 15 September, my mother Marian, a Somali who’d been raised a Catholic, called me Edna in honour of a Greek girlfriend who insisted that if I was a girl then I should take her name. It was a moniker Dad never once used. My arrival ended what my mother feared was a curse against her ever since she’d married my father two years earlier. Many of those who liked my father disapproved of his marriage and believed that he should have chosen a Muslim wife. This view only gained currency when Mum hadn’t yet borne him a child, as, in our culture, it is normal for a wife to conceive straight away. If she doesn’t it is usually blamed on ‘the evil eye’ or some other bad spirit and Allah is prayed to, so when Mum finally became pregnant with me the evil eye was considered to have blinked.

      My father was over six feet tall, charismatic, generous, fluent in several languages and the best doctor and communicator I’ve ever met. To him, teaching people about healthcare was not only a duty but also a pleasure, and he threw his heart and soul into educating anyone he came across. One of his favourite expressions was, ‘If you cannot do it with your heart then your hands will never learn to do it.’

      His own father, Ismail Guleed, was something of a legend in Somaliland. A successful, silver-haired merchant from the noble Arap Isaaq clan of nomadic warriors and camel herders, he was known as Ismail Gaado Cadde, which means White Chest. This referred to the white hair on his chest that spilled over his tunic.

      Wealth in my country is measured in camels – a female and her calf can cost £1,000 in today’s terms – and my grandfather exported large herds of them. Independently wealthy, he hired traditional dhow boats to carry goods destined for Ethiopia and service his lucrative contract to supply livestock, firewood and ghee to the British garrison in the Aden Colony, sixty kilometres across the Gulf of Aden – the gateway to the Red Sea.

      Grandfather Ismail naturally expected that his two sons – my uncle Mohamed and my father Adan, born in 1906 – would help run his business. He and his wife Baada had moved to Aden once their sons were of school age specifically so that they could be educated at St Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic Mission School, the only place in the region where they could learn to read and write in English. Little did he know that my uncle Mohamed would jump on a ship bound for the Indian Ocean aged sixteen to become a merchant seaman for the rest of his life, while my father would choose medicine. Sadly, Grandfather died in his early sixties, so I never knew him. After his death my father tried to keep the family business going but it became too difficult to manage on top of his medical duties.

      I sorely wished I’d asked Dad what made him decide to study medicine because it was truly a vocation for him and something he dedicated his whole life to. Perhaps there was an incident that inspired him. As far as I’m aware, he was never ill, but he did have multiple scars on his legs from playing football and hockey so perhaps that was how he encountered the miracle of medicine.

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