.Reopening the San Martino hospital in the Somali capital Mogadishu has been a largely thankless task for Dr Aisha Omar Ahmed. Instead of earning a tidy living as a consultant obstetrician in Europe, the hospital director has been working mostly unpaid and in appalling conditions
Since quitting her medical career in Rome to return home to a city and country at war, the 44-year-old has been threatened, beaten and shot at. So far she has chosen to stay.
"I was watching Somalia for 20 years in the headlines. I saw the [wounded] children brought to Italy for treatment. I was always thinking about this country," she says.
While admitting she has thought of giving up, Dr Ahmed insists that San Martino must become a hospital again. "I am a Mogadishu person. I was born here. My mother was born in this hospital. This is our place."
Her family wonders whether she has lost her mind. She is the daughter of a wealthy Somali family – Dr Ahmed's father was minister of finance under the socialist dictator Siad Barre, the last time Somalia had a functioning central government before war broke out in 1991. He died during the civil war that followed. Today, most of her relatives live in London and think she is crazy to risk her life in a notoriously dangerous city.
When the Somali medical student put her studies on hold to return to her home city for the first time in 2006 the trip was traumatic. The port and airport were closed due to heavy fighting, which meant landing 100km outside the city. At the time Mogadishu was under the control of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist alliance which drove out the warlords who had fought over the Somali capital since the early 1990s. Dr Ahmed chose to live and work at the foreign-funded SOS hospital in the city and was on hand to witness the death of an Italian nun, which prompted the evacuation of all foreign aid workers. The suffering she witnessed stayed with her after her return to Italy and when she finished her PhD in Rome she decided to go back.
Her reward comes in the form of a dozen young women sitting in a makeshift classroom near her office. Known as "traditional birth attendants" the ladies often act as midwives and FGM cutters in their home communities. They are now the first graduates of a scheme that the director hopes can help to change conditions for women. They have been schooled in basic hygiene, given a stern lecture on the ills of FGM and dispatched with some sterile gloves and the offer of $10 per referral to the capital – paid for by a local mobile phone operator.
The overawed women sit in silence as she tells them they are expected to "go back to make a difference in their village". The San Martino's director is a tough woman to argue with.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 35739.html
