Hawa Abdi

It was 1983, in the Afgooye Corridor, south of Mogadishu.

On her family's land, a doctor opened a clinic. A single room. The income from the land kept it running.

Her name was Hawa Abdi.

She was born on May 17, 1947, in Mogadishu. Her father worked at the port.

When she was twelve, her mother died in childbirth. Hawa was the eldest. She raised her four younger sisters, in poverty.

After her mother's death, she decided to become a doctor.

In 1964, she won a scholarship to study medicine in Kyiv, Ukraine. She graduated in 1971.

Back home, she became one of Somalia's first female gynaecologists. She also studied law, at the Somali National University, and earned her degree in 1979. Later, she became an assistant professor of medicine.

Then she opened her small clinic.

In 1991, civil war broke out.

First, Hawa Abdi took in her employees on her land. She housed them, fed them, cared for them. Then came their friends, their relatives.

Then others still: displaced people.

The land became a village. It was called Hope Village.

The small clinic became a 400-bed hospital. There were schools, primary and secondary. There was even a way of settling disputes within the community.

In 2007, her organization took a new name: the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation. It supported the village's farming, sanitation and schools.

During the 2011 drought, about 90,000 people lived there. Mostly women and children.

People called her "Mama Hawa." Her daughters, Deqo and Amina, were doctors too. They worked by her side.

But in 2010, Islamist militants surrounded the village. They wanted to take control of it. They held her for a few days.

She refused to give in. "So they'll shoot me!" she told the elders. Then:

Local people protested. The UN and other groups applied pressure. In less than a week, the militants left. They reportedly even agreed to write her a letter of apology.

The village went on living.

That same year, Glamour magazine honoured Hawa Abdi and her daughters as "Women of the Year." In 2012, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2013, she told her life story in a book, Keeping Hope Alive. In 2017, Harvard University gave her an honorary doctorate.

Her gesture echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing. On her land, there was room for her employees, then for their relatives, then for thousands of strangers.

Hawa Abdi died on August 5, 2020, in Mogadishu. She was 73.

Her daughters carried on her work in the village.

One room, on family land, in 1983. And, around it, decades later, a whole village that bore the name of hope.