Born in the Ruins in Mogadishu

THE JOURNEY OF MY LIFE

Chapter One — The Day I Was Born

I will tell you my name later.

For now, I want to tell you a little about the journey of my life—the things I remember from the time I became old enough to understand, and the memories that have remained with me throughout the years.

This is not a dream. It is not a fantasy. I do not even know exactly how to begin telling it.

But I have a feeling that the day I was born was also the day an entire country lost its future.

It was sometime in 1991. I do not know the exact day. I do not know the month. I do not even know the hour.

I only know that it was one of those mornings when everyone woke up to a frightening new reality.

Soldiers stood outside people's homes.

I do not know whether it was Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. But I was born sometime during the night, close to dawn.

My mother did not go to a midwife. She could not. My family was living through extremely difficult circumstances, so my mother and her sisters had to help each other.

The morning after I was born, my older sister went outside to ask the neighbors for something she could use to make tea or porridge.

As she walked out, soldiers stopped her.

“Go back home. Where are you going?” they asked.

She answered:

“Mother gave birth to a baby boy last night. I am looking for firewood so I can cook tea or porridge for her.”

They let her go.

She returned home carrying what she had found.

That morning became one of the first mornings when people in Somalia saw soldiers standing in the streets in such a way.

It was the beginning of the collapse of the Somali state.

And somehow, in the middle of that darkness, I had just been born.

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Chapter Two — Forty Days That Never Came

I was still a newborn.

My family had not even completed the traditional forty days after my birth when another tragedy came.

There was a major conflict that people remember as Afarta Biloodle.

My family became part of the thousands of people who were forced to flee.

We walked toward Marka, in Lower Shabelle.

My father was not with us.

My mother had been married before. She had separated from two men before my birth. From those marriages, she already had children—an older son, two daughters, and four boys, although one of them had passed away.

And then there was me.

I was the youngest.

In many ways, I was a child born into a family that had already experienced more pain than most families could bear.

We began a long journey toward Marka, where my maternal aunts lived.

We eventually reached the city and stayed there for about seven months.

Life was extremely difficult. There was a severe drought affecting the region, and the entire country was struggling.

Our eldest brother, who remained in Mogadishu, tried to help us. From time to time, he would bring whatever food or assistance he could find and send it to us.

I was too young to understand any of this.

I only know what I have been told and what I later came to understand.

For seven months, Marka was our home.

Then we returned to Mogadishu.

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Chapter Three — The Father Who Refused Me

After seven months in Marka, we returned to Mogadishu, to the Shibis district in Banaadir.

We had been back for only about fifteen days when my mother decided that she had to search for my father.

She wanted him to give me milk—or at least some money to help keep me alive.

At the time, my father had a vehicle known in Mogadishu as a Hajiyo Qamsiin, a vehicle that was well known in the city.

My mother found him in the Xamar Weyne district, near the place where buses gathered.

She was carrying me.

She told him:

“You have a son. He is seven months old and he needs food, milk, and the basic things a child needs to survive.”

His response was something my mother would never forget.

“If he has survived for seven months without me, then he does not need me now. Leave him here. Or take him, but do not come and bother me. I have no milk for him, and I do not want children or headaches.”

My mother answered him angrily:

“He is your blood.”

He stood up.

Then he took me from my mother.

He placed me on the ground, beside the road.

He said:

“Leave him here. Someone will take him—or the dogs will eat him tonight.”

My mother was devastated.

She picked me up.

And she said to him:

“From today onward, you are no longer my son's father. He is my son alone. I will never come to ask you for anything again.”

He laughed and replied:

“Did you give birth to him yourself? How can he have my name if I am not his father?”

My mother walked away.

She carried me back toward our neighborhood, her heart completely broken.

But life does not always give a person time to grieve.

Sometimes you simply have to keep walking.

My mother was not a weak woman.

The life she had lived had taught her how to survive.

She had known hardship, rejection, exhaustion, and suffering.

She had no choice but to continue.

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Chapter Four — Bread From a Stranger

When my mother returned to the neighborhood, something unexpected had happened.

There was bread in the house.

We did not know who had brought it.

My brothers later told us that it had come from a man who worked at a nearby bakery. His name was Isteela.

Every day, after the bread had been sold, there were pieces left over. Instead of throwing them away, he decided to give them to poor families.

For us, that bread was a gift from God.

We were incredibly happy that day.

But soon after, I became seriously ill.

My mother had no money.

There was no doctor we could afford.

There was barely enough food to survive.

Our older brother sometimes brought food once a day because he worked somewhere earning a small amount of money. Sometimes we survived on the bread from the neighborhood bakery.

And sometimes, even that bread did not come.

My mother went to an older woman who lived a little farther away from us.

She hoped the woman might have some medicine—perhaps a tablet or syrup that could help me.

The woman could not give her medicine.

But instead, she gave my mother something else.

Hope.

She told her:

“Fadumo, how long will you continue suffering here? I work at a hospital, and they are looking for someone to work in cleaning. If I take you there, would you be interested? You could earn a good salary every month.”

My mother had never been afraid of work.

She was the kind of woman who could sacrifice her sleep, her comfort, and almost anything else for her children.

The next morning, after the dawn prayer, around five o'clock, she was already standing at that woman's house.

The hospital was called Kaysaney Hospital, located toward the outskirts of Mogadishu.

The woman took her there.

My mother was accepted.

But they told her:

“Your employment officially begins on the first day of next month. Come back then.”

It was still the 26th.

My mother had to return home.

She could not stay away from her children for long.

We had nothing.

Even food was difficult to find.

And the journey between home and the hospital was several kilometers.

There were dangers along the road—thieves, wild animals, and many other things.

But my mother had already learned something very early in life:

Fear does not feed children.

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Chapter Five — The First Door That Opened

My mother's life had begun with hardship almost from the moment she was born.

She had been only three days old when, according to the story she later told us, her own mother refused to breastfeed her.

She had said:

“Take this child away. Her father married me, and I cannot keep her.”

That was the kind of life my mother had known.

So when she found an opportunity to work, she did not hesitate.

Fortunately, that same day we found bread.

My mother was happy.

My siblings were happy.

And for the first time in a long time, there was something that looked like a future.

My mother later told me that those days were among the happiest days she had experienced.

She had been told that she would earn around $70 a month.

To us, that was enormous.

My mother got the job.

Slowly, our lives began to change.

The darkness started to lift.

We entered a period of relative stability.

My mother later met my uncle, and the two of them eventually married.

She became pregnant again and had another child—my younger brother.

My mother's salary increased to around $100 a month, and my uncle also contributed around $50.

For a while, we lived as though hunger had finally forgotten our address.

But there was still something missing in me.

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Chapter Six — The Father I Saw in Other People's Lives

Even though our circumstances had improved, I carried an emptiness that I could not explain.

Whenever I saw a child playing with his father, or sitting on his father's lap, something inside me hurt.

I felt that something in my own life was incomplete.

I would see our neighbor return home in the afternoon.

His children would run toward him.

They would reach for his hands.

He would play with them and lift them up.

I would watch.

Then I would go and sit on my mother's lap, carrying a sadness I did not know how to express.

I did not always tell her what I was feeling.

Sometimes, I did not even understand it myself.

There were moments when my mother would become angry and say things that hurt me deeply.

She would sometimes say:

“Your father does not love you.”

Or:

“Your father rejected you.”

Those words stayed inside me.

But my mother would also comfort me.

She would tell me:

“Your father will come one day. Just wait.”

I grew up between those two realities:

The hope that my father might one day return—

and the pain of knowing that he had once left me beside a road.

Eventually, I was sent to Qur'anic school to learn the Qur'an.

I did not get the opportunity to attend a regular school at that time.

My siblings were sent to an orphanage college.

And then, slowly, another chapter of my life began.

It would become one of the heaviest chapters I had ever known.