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Keeping Hope Alive (2013) by Hawa Abdi: a doctor's memoir of the war years
Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman, 90,000 Lives Changed is a 2013 memoir by the Somali doctor Hawa Abdi, written with the journalist Sarah J. Robbins and published by Grand Central Publishing in New York. It tells how she trained as a doctor, opened a clinic on her family's land outside Mogadishu in 1983, and kept it running through the civil war as it grew into a hospital and a camp for tens of thousands of displaced people.
Keeping Hope Alive
- Author
- Hawa Abdi with Sarah J. Robbins
- Year
- 2013
- Publisher
- Grand Central Publishing
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 9781455503766
- Sources
- 5 sources
The book
Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman, 90,000 Lives Changed was published by Grand Central Publishing in New York on 2 April 2013 (Kirkus Reviews). It is the memoir of Hawa Abdi (1947 to 2020), a Somali physician and lawyer, written with the American journalist Sarah J. Robbins.
About the author
Hawa Abdi was born in Mogadishu in 1947. In 1964 she won a scholarship to study medicine in the Soviet Union, and graduated from the Kiev Medical Institute in 1971. Back in Somalia she also studied law at the Somali National University, finishing in 1979 while practising medicine in the mornings. In 1983 she opened a one-room clinic for women on her family's land in Lower Shabelle, which later grew into a hospital of about 400 beds. She died at her home in Mogadishu in 2020 (Wikipedia).
What it covers
- Childhood and training. The book begins with her childhood around independence in 1960, when she was 13, and follows her scholarship abroad. She returned as one of about 60 doctors in the country (Kirkus Reviews).
- The clinic and the camp. It describes the clinic for mothers and children on the family farm outside Mogadishu, and how the farm became a source of food and a refuge for people displaced by the war after 1991. During the 2011 drought, the camp on about 1,300 acres held some 90,000 people (Wikipedia). Displacement in Somalia is covered on Internal displacement.
- The 2010 attack. In 2010 armed insurgents overran the compound and tried to force it to close. She refused, and they left within a week under pressure from local people, the UN and advocacy groups (Wikipedia; Kirkus Reviews).
- Her daughters. Her daughters Deqo and Amina, both doctors, worked with her and later ran the foundation that carries her name (Wikipedia).
How it was received
- Kirkus Reviews called it "a poignant account of personal bravery, love, and loss and a chronicle of the tragedy of our times" (Kirkus Reviews).
- BookPage gave it a starred review (BookPage).
- The book appeared a year after Hawa Abdi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. In 2010 Glamour had named her and her two daughters Women of the Year (Wikipedia).
Where to read it
- Lending copy: Internet Archive
- In a library: WorldCat
Related pages
Sources
- Kirkus Reviews · kirkusreviews.com
- Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- BookPage · bookpage.com
- Internet Archive · archive.org
- WorldCat · search.worldcat.org
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Where this matters
- Muqdisho (Mogadishu) and BanaadirMogadishu (Muqdisho) is Somalia's capital and makes up the Banadir region, with about 2.97 million people in 20 districts.
- Marka (Merca) and Lower ShabelleLower Shabelle is Somalia's biggest farming region, along the Shabelle river south-west of Mogadishu, with Marka (Merca) as its capital and about 835,000 to…
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