photo © The Edna Adan University Hospital
“I am a woman, the mother of the nation, and a nurse.” “I have been fighting for women’s rights forever.” “I was born into this.”
—EDNA ADAN ISMAIL, director/founder, the Edna Adan University Hospital
It is my favorite conference of the year, the Women in the World Summit, where women from around the world gather in New York City each April to break the silence surrounding censorship, patriarchy, and injustice; where women share stories, inspire change, and awaken the next generation of female leaders. Celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2019, the summit attracted such well-known speakers as Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Anna Wintour. Yet, there was one woman who, although not nearly as famous, has done more to improve the lives of women than almost any of the others.
It was by pure luck that I was seated at the same table as Edna Adan Ismail at the summit’s dinner at New York City’s Time Warner Center building. While a variety of conversations flowed among those seated at my table, there was one discussion I overheard that particularly caught my attention. Edna Adan Ismail was sitting just two seats to my right; the executive director of her foundation sat between us. A number of attendees from other tables walked over to Edna over the course of the dinner, introducing themselves while shaking her hand in respect. I did not know who Edna was, although clearly dressed in her native clothing, including a multicolored headscarf that covered all her hair and wrapped tightly around her face, as well as a matching long and loose-fitting dress, I suspected she was from Africa.
“Somaliland,” she replied, after I inquired. “Not Somalia, as our country is sometimes mistaken for. Somaliland,” she emphasized. I then overheard her tell a story to another dinner guest about how she has had to step in to save the lives of women during childbirth by convincing their husbands to sign a form approving life-saving Caesarian sections. “If they did not sign, I then turned the form over and drew a line,” she said, while demonstrating an imaginary line being drawn with her index finger. “So I say to them, ‘Then sign here instead,’ alongside the words where I write, ‘I want my wife to die,” she recounted. “After reading that, the husband signs for his wife’s surgery every single time,” she said, smiling proudly. Upon overhearing this story of daring and courage, I asked her colleague if we could schedule a time for me to interview her. She responded the next day and scheduled an interview before Edna was to fly back to her country one week later.
“I am just doing what needs to be done,” Edna said at the beginning of our interview at New York’s High Line Hotel just a few days later. In the hotel’s lobby, there were many guests sitting around us, talking on their cell phones and typing on their computers, but Edna easily held my attention with her strong and empowering presence. The hotel’s lobby, sporting its original 1895 Gothic design capturing both magnificent height and grace, actually served as an ideal setting to meet Edna, reflecting the grace she similarly embodied. Dressed in a brown-and-white headscarf and matching long dress, similar in fabric and length to her attire when I first met her a few days earlier, her face reflected the strength of her convictions, while exuding radiance and warmth. Her eyes were dark and deep, genial and focused. Her beaming white smile was uncompromising.
Often described as the Muslim Mother Teresa, Edna has held a number of diplomatic roles in her native country of Somaliland, including foreign minister, minister of family welfare and development, and first lady. Yet, despite her powerful political roles, she is perhaps best known for the hospital she built in her name, after selling most of her possessions in 2002.
Unlike the majority of the feminist leaders I’ve interviewed for this book, however, Edna did not initially develop her altruistic qualities of compassion, generosity, and devotion from other women. Rather, she learned them at a very early age from her father, a prominent physician. “When I was a child, the problems of the world came to my father’s door,” Edna recalled with pride. “His patients came before his own needs.” Witnessing his selflessness on a daily basis, she had the unique experience of internalizing these qualities from a male figure who was instrumental in her life. “I was born into this,” she said, “and what I learned from my father, I brought into my diplomatic career.”
One of five siblings (two of whom died during childbirth), Edna was born in 1937, a time when girls were not permitted to be educated in Somaliland. When her father hired a tutor to teach some local boys, however, he also encouraged her to learn to read and write along with them. Later, she attended school in Djibouti where her aunt was a teacher, and this education eventually led Edna to become the first Somaliland girl to study in Britain. “My father always believed that I should not have any educational limits in my life,” Edna recalled. Yet, she still had to undergo numerous battles to reach her full learning potential, since Somaliland’s education system was strictly patriarchal. Even after becoming the first Somaliland woman to earn an education in Britain and return to her homeland as its first qualified nurse, it took almost two years before the state paid her for her work in one of its hospitals. Further, despite learning to drive a car while in Britain, she struggled for years to get her driver’s license in Somaliland. Eventually she became the country’s first woman to do so.
Yet her progressive upbringing did not prevent her from undergoing one of her country’s most long-held and barbaric customs. When Edna was just eight years old, her mother and grandmother arranged for her to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) while her father was away on a business trip. “When my father returned home, he was furious,” Edna recalled. “He didn’t believe in this custom; not at all.” It was due to her determination to prevent other girls from undergoing the same trauma that she went on to train as a nurse and midwife in the United Kingdom at the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University.
“The fight against FGM has been the biggest battle of my life—and every moment of my life has been a battle,” Edna continued. “Girls in my country survived everything from the measles to whooping cough to diarrhea, and then at the age of seven or eight, when they are learning to jump, to run, and to speak for themselves, this is done to them.” While the history of this ritual practice is unclear, it is most prevalent in cultures that are mainly patriarchal—and it’s a dangerous reflection of long-held beliefs supporting gender inequality. Not only can this practice lead to severe pain, excessive bleeding, shock, infections, HIV, and even death, its survivors can also suffer long-term psychological effects such as post-traumatic stress disorder. One of Edna’s goals, therefore, is for fathers to be educated about the dangers of FGM, to hopefully encourage them to protect their daughters. To do so, she is now working on publishing an animated book about its dangers, since so many adults in her country cannot read. “It’s not only cutting, it’s total mutilation!” she asserted.
As the director and founder of the Edna Adan University Hospital in Hargeisa, Edna’s mission is to help improve the health of the local inhabitants and, even more urgently, to decrease Somaliland’s extreme levels of maternal and infant mortality, which are among the highest in the world. This nonprofit teaching hospital, which Edna had built from scratch, is also training student nurses and other health professionals. “Somaliland now has the largest per capita of midwives throughout the world,” she told me proudly.
Officially opened on March 9, 2002, the hospital was built on land donated to her by the local government at a site formerly used as a garbage dump. The region lacked trained midwives and nurses, as most had either fled the country or been killed during the Somali Civil War (1998–1999), which destroyed Somaliland’s entire health infrastructure. Edna recruited more than thirty candidates and began training them while the hospital was still under construction. “Even while training these women, I had to help them build their own character and lead their own lives. Often, at the beginning of training, they appeared so scared and so small—even at the age of eighteen years old,” Edna reflected. “When I would ask them their names, for example, they would respond in a whisper while looking down at their shoes,” Edna lamented. “I would then tell them, ‘Look up at me when you answer. I am more important than your shoes. Don’t be invisible.’” Through ongoing training at Edna’s hospital, many of these women have since become surgeons. “When I see them running through the halls of my hospital during medical emergencies, I proudly say to myself, I trained you so that you can save that woman’s life.”
Today the hospital houses two operating rooms, a laboratory, a library, a computer center, and a university dedicated to training nurses and midwives, as well as other health professionals. As of 2018, it has grown to two hundred staff members and fifteen hundred students. “Due to our training, our country has been able to reduce infant mortality significantly,” Edna said. This facility is also Edna’s home; she first moved in when the hospital was still under construction.
Further, as Somaliland’s first woman minister of social affairs (August 2002–June 2003), and then its foreign minister, she found she was able to more powerfully present the case for supporting Somaliland, not only as a diplomat, but as a woman, to leaders of other countries.
“Because I am a woman,” Edna told me, “I can share emotions I feel by witnessing the pain and injustice my country has suffered.” Today, as the former foreign minister of Somaliland, she hosts numerous delegations at the hospital. “I do this so that I can prove to everyone that if this site is good enough for my patients and also good enough for me to live in, then it is good enough for those who wish to associate with me.” As the only woman in the international delegation of foreign ministers, she often has to remind other dignitaries that she serves as its head. “If I bang on a table or shed a tear, don’t try to appease me, I tell them. When I express anger, don’t tell me to cool down,” she continued. “Don’t try to impose a different emotion from what I am expressing at that moment. I will know when I want to cool down, and I will tell you what I need. If I wish to show my emotions, it is because I have chosen to do so.”
Edna’s accomplishments are enormous, and yet she’s still not nearly finished. “I want to get my country internationally recognized,” she told me. “That is my unfinished book.” She glanced at the floor for a moment before looking back up at me, even more intently. “The world is ignoring the presence of a democratic country in Somaliland. We have managed to demobilize our militia with our own resources; we have a functioning democratically elected government, and we generate all taxes from our own country. While the international community is spending billions of dollars to try to bring peace in Somalia, they are ignoring the peace we have already achieved in Somaliland. We gain from peace and stability. They gain from lawlessness.”
And with that, Edna rose to her feet and gave me an embracing hug as I left our interview. Before I exited the hotel lobby, I looked back one last time, and noticed that her eyes were still fixed on me, displaying all of the compassion and courage it took for her to get here.