WUNRN
Displaced
in Somalia: Faduma
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Somalis describe their lives in and around
the capital, Mogadishu, amidst violence between insurgents and government
troops backed by Ethiopian forces. Mother-of-two Faduma, 22, has lived in a
camp for displaced people in central Mogadishu since she fled south from
Baidoa seven years ago.
I actually returned to Baidoa in April this year
when there was heavy fighting here in Mogadishu but I came back recently
because my husband was hit in his face by a stray bullet and so I had to look
after him. We have a lot problems - no food, no
medicine and we can't just walk to go and find these things. We don't feel safe. There are children sick in our houses. When the children get sick we have no
medical facility to go to so we just recite the Koran - or we use a
traditional burning method where you give a small burn on a different part of
the body depending on what sort of sickness the baby has. Or we try herbal
medicine. There are a few hospitals near our camp but
they don't accept us because we don't have money. Rape They only take the most serious cases, like
the wounded or gunshots.
My own child died of
diarrhoea. In the last year though it has been a little better and fewer
children have died from diarrhoea but it will get worse when the rains start.
There is a lot of rape. One woman in our
camp was gang raped. Some men came in from outside, took her baby from her
and gave the baby to the father, and then three men raped her. I even heard of a 70-year-old woman who was
bound and raped by a man with a knife when she was walking to the tailor. It is terrible. We don't know of any
treatment; we can't go anywhere for help. After midnight During the fighting, six months ago, there
was an increase in the number of rapes. But since the transitional federal
government said no-one could walk around at night the number of cases has
decreased.
This is because it is not so
easy anymore to enter our camp after dark. We don't go out because of security. We don't even go to the toilet at night. We
now take bedpans into our shelters because if you walk to the latrines at
night you will surely be raped after midnight. The main problem with the camp though is that
it doesn't have gates and so anyone can just come in and out. Just be kind In our camp none of the husbands have
divorced their wives after being raped because everyone knows it is not the
woman's fault. She will be ok, people don't look badly on
her. There are not those sorts of problems here
because sometimes women are even raped in front of her father, husband,
family and baby and they cannot stop it. The biggest problem is that she doesn't
wake up the next day. She just lies down and doesn't wake up. We live in a small area - roughly a space
of four metres by four metres and in this space there are three to four
families. When a woman is raped everyone is aware
because you can hear the woman screaming. So we go to her afterwards but there is
little we can do. We don't have guns, you can just be kind. |
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