Women We Love: Dr Hawa Abdi

There are many reasons to be thankful you don’t live in Somalia, which is located in the Horn of Africa.

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One is the ubiquitous practice of female genital mutilation. Another is this: becoming pregnant there is one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, thanks to an appalling lack of healthcare.

Dr Hawa Abdi’s mother was one of those victims, dying from the complications of childbirth when Dr Abdi was young. It’s why she decided to become a doctor.

Thirty years ago this August, she founded her own one-room clinic to save other mothers. Bloody civil war broke out in the capital, Mogadishu, soon after and the doctor found herself sheltering terrified locals. The clinic turned into a massive refugee camp and by 2000, some 90,000 women and children had arrived. There’s now a hospital and school as well as the camp.

Operating largely alone – many charities are too fearful to enter the war-torn country – Dr Abdi has, more than once, had to face down men with machine guns on her doorstep. Her method? “I tried to stay calm and talk with them as though they were my own sons and I was their mother,” she told Glamour magazine recently. “Besides, I felt it would be better to die first than to witness the destruction of my hospital.”

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She has now written a memoir, Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman, 90,000 Lives Changed (out in early April). Any woman who can manage to do that – keep hope alive – in such circumstances - well, she certainly gets our vote.