Читать книгу A Woman of Firsts - Edna Adan Ismail - Страница 14

Djibouti City, French Somaliland, 1947

Settling back into my parallel life in a place far from home was all part of the healing process and I embraced my schooling with new fervour. I was there from 1946–1952 and I loved every minute, even though I had the bittersweet knowledge that when I returned to Somaliland my education couldn’t be continued.

My brother Farah, who I hardly knew but who joined me at my Aunt Cecilia’s when he was eight years old, became my daily companion as we held hands each morning waiting for the school bus. He also embraced our new life in French Somaliland and, in time, we became very close.

We still went back home each summer, spending time with my parents and then holidaying with my grandparents in the country. As soon as school broke up, Farah and I would be driven from Djibouti City to wherever Dad was working, a journey of three or four days. He was usually too busy to pick us up himself, so would send a relative who might also collect other children. For us the journey was the greatest excitement of all, as we passed trees festooned with goats nibbling at the branches, as well as camel herds and donkey caravans in every kind of landscape. One trip home took nine days because of heavy rains. A distant aunt had secured us seats in a truck heavily laden with commercial goods that then became stuck in the mud. There were no phones or other cars on the road to ask for help, so everyone had to help dig it out. Our family knew we were en route but when we didn’t show up as expected they were very worried. The only foods we had were onions, salt, tamarind and sweet potatoes, which we roasted. It was on that trip that I learned that peeled bark from an acacia tree could be boiled to make a tea called asal. It was cold at night so we drank it to keep warm. Asal is also good for cleaning wounds and sterilizing vessels – a fact I logged for later use.

My brother and I didn’t mind being stuck in the middle of nowhere because it felt like a free holiday. The truck was carrying so many interesting people from different tribes all riding on the top, which was heavily laden with goods. My aunt paid extra for us to sleep in the cab at night for safety from wild animals, but Farah and I longed to be up on the roof where our fellow passengers hung off ropes on the sides telling poems and singing songs. There were arguments and running battles, there was love and jealousy and friendship. All of life was there.

Desperate to join them, Farah and I would seek out an old woman or a mother and child and offer them our seats. My aunt praised us for our kindness, never quite appreciating that we did it only so that we could swap places and climb up under the stars to inhale the sweat and the tobacco smoke and listen agog to all the stories.

Life as a child in Africa was such a big adventure.

I always loved reconnecting with my father who’d occasionally take time off to bring us home. I remember him driving us back once and letting me hold the steering wheel while sitting on his lap. Mother was screaming from the back seat, ‘Don’t let Edna drive, Adan, she’ll kill us all!’ Dad just laughed and promised to go slowly, letting me steer the car for miles down those bumpy roads and sparking my lifelong love of driving.

Those first summers after my ordeal were when I first started going with him each day to the hospital in Erigavo, the northeastern capital where he was living and working on yet another two-year rotation. I would walk him to the door as I did when I was small but now I’d carry on inside, chattering away and willing to offer my assistance. I was always much happier rolling bandages or washing Dad’s medical instruments than peeling potatoes for Mum and – after several catastrophes in the kitchen – she accepted that it was probably better that I didn’t help her after all. If we had people coming and I asked if she wanted me to do anything, her answer would be, ‘No, no! We have guests today’, which told me something about her opinion of my domestic skills. All her life I think Mum believed that my father had gained a daughter in me but that she never really had one. Whenever she told me crossly, ‘You’re just as bad as your father!’ she had no idea that it was the best compliment anyone could pay me.

When Dad came back from work for his meal, I’d be the first to greet him and would occasionally volunteer to make him something he liked. Goodness alone knows what it tasted like, but he always pretended it was delicious and made a big fuss of me. The one thing he especially liked during Ramadan was labania – custard made from rice. It was my job to make it – a process that took an entire day, as there was no custard powder back then. First I had to soak grains of fat rice until they expanded, then I had to drain them and scatter them onto a tray to dry in the sun. Then I’d have to pound and sieve it repeatedly until it was powdered, before slowly adding water so as not to make it lumpy. While it was cooking, I’d add cardamom, sugar and milk and then pour it onto little saucers and put them on the windowsill to set, as we had no refrigerator. Dad would taste it, grin and say, ‘Hmmm, this is soooo good, Shukri! Only my daughter could have made this. Did you make it? I knew you did!’ He made me feel like I owned a million camels.

***

I was twelve years old during the Year of Red Dust, our country’s worst drought in years, when I became indispensable to my father at the Erigavo hospital. He not only appreciated my help but also came to rely on it, especially when the drought and famine gave him so much extra work.

There are so many more people to deal with in bad times, and not just those dying of hunger and thirst. Animal carcasses litter the roads and attract flies that carry more disease. Starvation compromises the immune system, which gives people a lower resistance to diseases like TB. Dark hair pales through loss of pigmentation, skin wrinkles and ankles swell. The children especially suffer from protein calorie malnutrition, also known as kwashiorkor, or fluid retention in their bellies as their spleens and livers enlarge. The British-organized military response teams and the Somali Army set up huge camps in the desert to hold 30-40,000 destitute people. Dad and the Army nursing officers would travel back and forth to bring the most desperately ill to the hospital for treatment. Mostly they needed water and food – a little at a time or they’d die of diarrhoea. We fed them a kind of gruel or boiled white rice and watered-down milk. If their veins hadn’t collapsed, we could give them saline through a drip. If they had we were to administer subcutaneous injections daily so that their bodies could absorb it.

Every morning Dad would ask me to help him with something else. ‘Come with me today?’ he’d plead. ‘There are too many patients for me to deal with and I need your help with the dressings.’ Or, ‘Have breakfast early tomorrow, I want you to assist with a procedure, so dress up and meet me on the ward.’ He knew he could trust me that if a surgical instrument needed washing I would do it properly, and that it wouldn’t be stolen. We were so short of supplies that the families of patients would be requested to bring in their own sheets, as well as old ones they had no further use for, which I would cut up for dressings. I’d sit in a side room with piles of striped sheets of every colour, ripping and cutting them into every size Dad might need. Every outpatient would also wash their own bandages and bring them back so that we could boil them all up again and issue them with fresh ones. The brand new custom-made bandages from England were kept back for surgery.

My father’s single-storey hospital had a male ward, a female ward, a medical ward, a surgical ward, outpatients and a maternity ward. There was room for forty patients. Babies slept with their mothers in their beds as there were no cots and an incubator was unheard of. The staff was largely illiterate and not very conscientious, but the whitewashed building was clean – if a little tired – as it was still inspected by the British once a year.

Dad was run ragged delivering babies, performing minor operations and rehydrating patients. Often he was hampered by the unwritten custom in our country that any surgery or lifesaving procedure on a woman has first to be agreed to by their closest male relative, or the one who is financially responsible for her. Seeking that consent from nomadic families scattered in remote places was often difficult and sometimes impossible to get. He was also much hindered by a lack of supplies, as whatever the British provided was never enough and in times of crisis the demand trebled. He was constantly sending telegrams pleading for extra saline drips or needles, more paraffin, wicks and lamps. In desperation, he would sometimes put on his best clothes and go in person to see the District Commissioner to ask for what he needed.

I was only permitted to help my father on the outpatient’s ward and never near the delivery room. God forbid a Somali girl is let in on the secrets of the female body. If Dad was away visiting the nomads, I was then allowed onto the other wards to supervise those he was most concerned about, help the auxiliaries, and follow the numerous instructions on his list.

My mother objected vociferously. ‘Why do you have to go to the hospital again, Edna? What do you know about patients? You’ll kill people!’

‘I’m not going to kill anybody. I’m just going to make sure the staff are doing what they should be doing.’

‘How do you know what they should be doing?’

‘I follow what Dad tells me on the piece of paper he left me.’

It never occurred to her to help him, too, or to get some other job. She was a bright, educated woman who’d grown up in a different country, spoke several languages, and could easily have worked as an interpreter or translator. Yet she chose to stay at home to be influenced by her Somali girlfriends about how a wife should be.

***

When my schooling in Djibouti City ended after six years, I returned home proudly to Somaliland with my Certificat d’Études Primaires. I had done very well, but at fourteen years old I couldn’t help but wonder what was in store for me next. Formal education in Djibouti didn’t extend beyond primary school, so there was no reason for me to stay and some pressing reasons for me to go home.

Most Somali girls are married between the ages of fifteen and eighteen and if they are still single much beyond that then they are considered not only unmarriageable, but also unlucky. Marriages are often pre-arranged between families, rather than purely for love. Tribal influences are still important and girls are either wed into their own tribe or into a compatible one to establish new alliances. As a naïve teenager, I had no thoughts about marriage and no idea about sex. Anything relating to my private parts was abhorrent to me after my cutting and I couldn’t countenance the idea of intimacy of any kind. I enjoyed the weddings of my cousins and other family members with their various ceremonies, dances and feasts, but was puzzled by the notion that Somali men can take up to four wives when I had grown up in an unusually monogamous household.

Instead of boys, my focus was on perfecting my languages. Although I was fluent in French by then, my English was poor – especially my pronunciation – so Dad hired a teacher to show me the correct way to say things by having me study diction and read out loud. Armed with this skill, and with my father’s encouragement, I happily jumped at the offer to work for six months as an interpreter for a British doctor named Dr Ashe in the Ruth Fisher Clinic in Hargeisa. This women-only facility had been opened by the Governor’s wife in 1945 with an all-female staff designed to encourage Somali women – banned from seeing a male doctor – to attend hospital whenever they were ill or pregnant.

Dr Ashe was an obstetrician married to a fellow doctor and she was very kind to me. I was conscripted into interpreting for her during the morning outpatients’ clinic for sick women and children. I didn’t know the medical terms for the different medical problems and neither did the patients, but I’d describe their symptoms and the doctor would say, ‘Ah, yes, that sounds like cellulitis to me’, or, ‘I think you may have eczema.’ In every case, if she required surgery, each female patient needed to obtain the permission of the male head of her household, which often delayed and complicated treatments, so I had to help with that too. Very often Dr Ashe would be summoned for a difficult delivery so I would also be called. I was usually kept well back but I still witnessed my first births that way, and there was no time to feel squeamish about it. What struck me most of all was how respectful and professional Dr Ashe was and how she worked very hard to keep the mother and baby alive. It was working alongside her that I first learned that the two main killers of pregnant women in my country are poverty and ignorance. A poor nomadic woman who may have started having babies in the bush as a young teenager and could be on her twentieth child by her late thirties has never had any proper medical supervision or social justice. If she starts to bleed out during yet another pregnancy then the chances are that she will die unless her relatives can get her to a hospital.

I was working with Dr Ashe one day when a woman was brought in who’d got into difficulties giving birth at home, which was the first we knew of her – as is often the case. She’d delivered her baby but was haemorrhaging badly and left a sticky trail of blood right into the waiting room. Dr Ashe stayed calm but announced that we had to get her to the operating theatre in Hargeisa Hospital urgently. In spite of transfusions and other measures, this young mother died. Dr Ashe was very upset but still respectful and thanked me for helping her try to save the mother’s life. She made me feel important in the equation and she whetted my appetite for even more health work.

When the first boarding school for girls opened almost two hundred kilometres away in the town of Burao in February 1953, Dr Ashe surprised me by recommending to my father that I be sent there as a pupil teacher. ‘Edna shouldn’t be wasting her time following me around as an interpreter,’ she told him. ‘She has the making of something better. She can live in the teachers’ accommodation and continue her secondary school education.’ There were two British teachers at the Burao school, neither of whom spoke Somali, and one Somali assistant teacher who spoke only limited English. They needed someone with both languages, so I was selected as one of the two pupil-teachers appointed that year. The arrangement was that the staff would give me tutorials after school hours. It was the only option open to me if I wanted to go any further.

For almost two years I lived and worked in Burao, working as an interpreter in the mornings, sitting in on the classes for the first twenty-seven pupils of the new school. I also earned my first wage, which amounted to thirty East African shillings a month plus food and accommodation. I thought I was rich. Every afternoon I had three or four hours of lessons in higher-grade maths, English and biology – all subjects I’d need to pass if I were to one day become a medical assistant to my father. I had to take these lessons alone as it would have been considered improper for me to sit with the high school boys my teacher also taught.

The British authorities had set up a scholarship scheme in which the best students in the Protectorate could be selected to pursue secondary education and professional training in other countries. Scores of teenage boys had already been sent to Aden, Sudan, Kenya and the UK to study anything from engineering to politics, among them several members of my tribe and one from my neighbourhood, Hassan Kayd, who had gone to the prestigious Sandhurst military academy in Britain. Each year a representative from the British Colonial Office came to Somaliland to examine and interview potential candidates for a scholarship, and in 1953, the teachers in Burao put my name on the list – a first for a girl in Somaliland.

The arrival of the British representative, Miss Udell – I’ll never forget her name – was a big event in our education system. There was even a countdown to when she’d arrive. It was like a royal visit and the teachers prepared us well with mock exams and staged interviews. First she supervised exams at Sheikh Secondary School and interviewed the boys who obtained top grades, and then she came to Burao to examine a small number of the boys for the scholarship exams – and me. At sixteen years old and approximately five feet tall and weighing fifty kilos, I was the only girl. There was one supervisor for the boys and one supervisor just for me, in a separate room. The Colonial Office must have wondered at Miss Udell’s decision to let me sit for the exam and queried whether I would prove a good return to British taxpayers.

To my amazement I passed with flying colours. My father was so proud of me when I told him, but there were problems other than my gender. I was still working towards my secondary school certificate, had a strong French accent, and needed to improve my English. Plus, I was small and skinny for my age, even though I could eat a mountain. Miss Udell considered all these factors and decided that although I’d passed and had good overall grades, I was too young to be sent overseas. ‘See you next year, Edna,’ she told me with an encouraging smile.

By the time she returned to Somaliland the following year, I had filled out a bit and had one more year of learning and teaching under my belt. I passed the exam once more and could hardly believe it when she told me that I’d won a scholarship to study in England. There were multiple forms to fill in, but when it came to the question that asked me to indicate my preferred course of study, I wrote ‘nursing’ without a moment’s hesitation.

There was one additional hurdle to be overcome before I could be sent to London. The authorities needed to find one other girl to accompany me as a fellow student. The most qualified candidate in the region was Jessica Joseph Raymond from a mission boarding school in Aden who also wanted to be a nurse. Her father was half Indian and her mother half Welsh. Jessica was a delightful young woman; a truly cosmopolitan Somalilander and an ideal companion for someone like me, who’d never travelled further than Djibouti.