Doctors Hawa Abdi & Deqo Mohamed: Mother & Daughter Doctor-Heroes
They’ve been called the ‘Saints of Somalia’. Doctor Hawa Abdi and her daughter Deqo Mohamed discuss their medical clinic in Somalia, where in the face of civil war and open oppression of women they have built a hospital, a school and a community of peace.
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ABOUT Doctors Hawa Abdi & Deqo Mohamed
“Dr. Hawa Abdi is an Ob/Gyn (and a lawyer) who lives and works in Somalia with her daughters, also doctors, Dr. Amina Mohamed and Dr. Deqo Mohamed.
In 1983, she opened a small clinic in Somalia that became a refuge as Somalia devolved into civil war. Her one-room clinic has grown to encompass a hospital, a school and a refugee camp for some 90,000 women and children, she estimates, who were displaced by war.
In 2010, Glamour Magazine named Dr. Abdi and her daughters ‘Women of the Year’, and called them the ‘Saints of Somalia’. Nicholas Kristoff wrote a stirring tribute to her work titled “Heroic, Female and Muslim.” And she works largely on her own; as Glamour notes: “While Dr. Abdi has gotten some help, many charities refuse to enter Somalia. ‘It’s the most dangerous country,’ says Kati Marton, a board member of Human Rights Watch. ‘Dr. Abdi is just about the only one doing anything.”
The VIDEO
