Greetings From Hargeisa

Well, I’ve made it!  I am safely settled into the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital is Hargeisa, Somaliland.  It was a long, long journey, including four flights and layovers in four countries.  Halfway through my journey I was unexpectedly required to spend the night in Djibouti, where I shared my air-conditioned hotel room with a gecko named Alfonse and his lady-friend Victoire.  We had an uneasy truce: I wouldn’t throw my sneakers at them and try to turn them into gecko paste, and they would stay on the wall’s northern hemisphere and generally try not to be too creepy. 

The next day I resumed my journey for the final flight, into Hargeisa.  The Djibouti-Hargeisa flight on Juba Airlines is…interesting.  The plane isn’t too small, in fact, some of the “puddle-jumper” flights in the US use similar-sized planes, but this plane is old, so old it is, in fact, a propeller plane.  The seats are tiny and lean so far back that I can’t imagine the agony if someone is in the seat in front of you—luckily my flight was more than half empty.  On top of that the plane rattles, and has a rather strong odor.  The flip side, though, is that it was the single smoothest takeoff I’ve ever experienced; I barely noticed when we left the ground.  Only about 40 minutes later we landed in Hargeisa!

                                           My First View of Ethiopia

                                          Alfonse being "not too creepy"

                                          The view from one of my windows.

                                          A view through the grille.

Another view through the grille.

I have to say, right off the bat, that the weather in Hargeisa was a huge relief.  Djibouti is like a muggy furnace blasting at you straight from the surface of the sun, but Hargeisa, with its higher elevation, is warm without being oppressive and there is always a breeze.  In fact, it’s the windy season right now, so sometimes there is a little more than a breeze.  Edna herself picked me up from the airport, and after we arrived at the hospital I was shown up to my room.  I really like my room, which has some very nice views of the city.  I met some of the staff that day, including the other volunteers and paid non-Somaliland staffers who live in the residence wing with me.  Everyone has been very helpful as I settle in to my new life here.

I don’t think life here will ever be entirely comfortable.  I am too foreign, too much of an oddity to ever be one with the city.  Almost everywhere I go, especially when I leave the hospital compound, I am looked at, stared at, by people who know that Hargeisa isn’t exactly what one could call “cosmopolitan,” and who wonder what a white woman is doing here.  I am also working to adapt to the rhythm of this place, including 4 am prayer calls blasting from the 8 mosques which dot the area around the hospital.  Prayer calls happen several times a day, sometimes followed by a sermon, also delivered over the loudspeaker.  It makes Hargeisa a noisy place.  Without them it would be rather quiet—mostly the sounds of conversations and the bleating of the goats which roam the unnamed, unnumbered streets and sometimes seem to outnumber the people.

Right now the sound which is blotting out all other sounds is the sound of rain.  We are in the middle of a massive thunder storm, and rain is beating down on the roof of the Hospital with incredible force.  There is no drought here, nor is there a drought in neighboring Ethiopia, where it was raining during my layover.  In fact, people here will tell you there have been multiple reports of rain down in Somalia, which only helps confirm the idea that the famine there is politically motivated.  Here there is no drought, and while there is certainly incredible poverty, the infrastructure of the country means that there is certainly no wide-scale famine like that to the south.

I will share more with you soon, including my first impressions of the Hospital and the people of Somaliland.  I would also like to tell you about two interesting people I met in the Djibouti Airport…

If you would like to support my work here at the Edna Adan Hospital, please consider making a tax-deductable donation to help me cover the cost of my room and board, as well as a return ticket.  Any amount is appreciated, and checks made out to the East Sandwich Friends Meeting, and marked in the memo line for the Brown Fund, can be mailed to PO Box 198, East Sandwich MA, 02537.  Please include a request for a receipt if you would like one.  Thanks to everyone who has supported me so far! 

More to come…