Keeping Hope Alive by Hawa Abdi

Author:Hawa Abdi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Social Science / Regional Studies, Biography & Autobiography / Women
ISBN: 9781455599295
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

God is great—the medicine, the vitamins, and the diet worked, and I became healthy, able again to stand to meet the demands of the camp and the hospital. As Deqo worked and Ahmed played with his cousins and the other children in the camp, Amina was my shadow, following me as I made my rounds and visited patients, or else sitting on an empty examining table in the outpatient clinic, watching people come and go. She was sitting there one day when we received a man who had been injured in a car accident. He was bleeding from the head and holding his gun. Faduma Duale met him at the door, along with another nurse. “Please, this is a hospital,” said Faduma Duale calmly. “Please give the gun to your friend to hold.”

The man, clearly in shock, kept the gun and waved it at them. “Will you treat me or not?” he asked. “I’m bleeding to death.”

Amina stared at Faduma Duale, who said, “Okay, okay, we will treat you.” The two nurses tried to be calm, to convince the man to sit, so they could examine his wound, but his mind was not normal. He started shooting off the gun in the hospital, blowing holes through the ceiling and sending everyone—patients, staff, and my daughter—running. Only one lady remained. Though she was able to walk, she was too scared to move! She just lay on the bed, pumping her arms up and down like she was running in place. “God help me,” she repeated, “God help me.”

By the time I came out, the guy had already left for the bush. We all walked back into the room to see the woman still pumping, still crying out. Finally, one of our nurses had to stand over her and shout: “Maria, you’re okay, everyone is okay. Now shut up!”

Amina remembers that day as one of the funniest days in the hospital, and you know, I can see why. These are the types of stories that we usually tell one another during darker times, to make each other laugh. They are stories of our lives, for while Somali poetry may be as lyrical as a flute, our humor is dark, blunt. We lived to see another day, so for Maria to cry and thrash, says Amina, is something silly indeed.

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