THE DOCTOR: Surgery and sutures under shellfire

This personal testimony is from the Alert Net special coverage page ‘Two Decades, One Somalia’. This multi-media special speaks to Somalis about what life is like in their country.

Mohamed Bidey is a 46-year-old doctor in Mogadishu

The ouster of Siad Barre was fair but we never expected the bloodshed and lawlessness that followed.

I have been a doctor in Mogadishu since 1985 and I am sure few people liked that dictator’s regime. Businesses were restricted, doctors had no right to own their own private hospitals. The parties that drove out that government were right but the problem was they had no plan for forming a better government.

The hope we had turned into violence and evacuation — out of the frying pan into the fire. Most people joined militias. Day and night, we doctors had to treat casualties caught up in gunfire and shelling for no pay, although aid agencies like the World Food Programme and International Committee of the Red Cross gave us food for work.

Sometimes we worked at gunpoint. Gunmen ordered us to leave that patient and attend to this one or else…. Some of my colleagues were threatened with death.

You treated a seriously ill or injured patient but if the patient died in surgery, the doctor faced allegations that they killed the patient. Some doctors were forced to pay a hell of a lot of money and then ran away for their lives.

The situation was hellish. My family fled to Nairobi without my knowledge in 1991. My wife and six children got lost in the chaos.

There was an economic crisis. To call a relative in the diaspora for help, one had to travel as far as the Kenyan or Ethiopian border just to call them: “Please send me money.”

After three years, friends told me my family was safe in Nairobi. They were also told I was alive in Mogadishu. We reunited happily in Mogadishu in 1994.

The country plunged into turmoil that was undreamt of. There were no universities that produced medical workers. Worse, 20 doctors died in shelling during the civil war and more fled abroad so the need for doctors grew bigger.

In the end, we doctors opened Benadir University in Mogadishu in 2002. Benadir University has so far produced 81 doctors including female doctors. They all work in various hospitals in Mogadishu and other regions of the country.

The suicide bomb blast at the graduation ceremony at our university on Dec. 3, 2009 was the worst incident. It is still imprinted in our minds. Glee and grief are mixed in the same memory.

One minute we were talking about the happiness of issuing certificates to the first young doctors we trained, the next minute ambulances carried our dead and wounded — 24 people including professors, doctors and medical graduates died on the spot.

I lost some of my teeth and the shrapnel from the explosion injured my hand and tongue. I was among many who were taken to Saudi Arabia for treatment.

Although our movement is restricted for fear of Al-Shabaab, we hope there will be peace and a central government in the near future.

Here in Mogadishu, all doctors have their own private hospitals and work has been good but patients dictate. Somali patients do not want doctors’ prescription.

Men and women come to you and tell you they have diseases like syphilis, diabetes, high blood pressure and so on. Most of our time is wasted in convincing patients that medicine should not be taken prior to diagnosis or examination.

However, some of them do not trust doctors who find nothing wrong with them. They say, “I know I have such-and-such a disease because I feel nausea and burning in the stomach.” They say, “Write a prescription for my baby. It needs an injection of antibiotics.” We object but they dash to the pharmacies and order the pharmacist to inject their babies anyway.

There has been no effective central government to control the quality of medicine and issues licences for pharmacies to operate. So businessmen import pseudo-medicine — for example, liquids that have the colour of medicine but no quality at all.

Patients keep on taking the medicine but the diseases become resistant, so patients complain and say, “If you are a good doctor, why don’t I recover after taking what you prescribed for me?”

This is the problem treated by the businessmen who import expired and low quality medicine. Patients pay more and yet they are not cured.

As told to Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu. Photo by Omar Faruk