Rosemary Hennan believes the recession here will be bad news for people in Somalia as Irish people will not be as generous as they were in the past
IT HELPS when times are bad, as they are in this country at present, to have a sense of perspective on things.
Last week, as the sound of civil servants protesting against the pensions levy could be heard outside, aid worker Rosemary Hennan recalled the near biblical series of misfortunes which occurred in her first year in Somalia in 2005.
A nurse who first went to Africa in 1989 and had made the continent her home, she arrived in Gedo, southwestern Somalia to manage a district health programme for Trócaire.
The programme consists of three district hospitals, three TB centres, 52 health posts and four mother and child healthcare and outpatient units for a population of about 400,000 in a desperately poor area near the Kenyan border.
“When I took over we had floods and because we had floods we had a malaria epidemic with the loss of crops and people displaced,” she says.
“We started a flood response, but by the time things were starting to get settled again we had a drought and animals were dying. The population is very much dependent on lifestock and on milk. Because of the drought, communities started to fight over access to water and pasture.”
Compounding the problems, in one of the most lawless and broken countries in the world, was the Ethiopian invasion in 2006 at the behest of the transitional government in the country against Islamists who had seized control of the south of the country.
“You think it can’t possibly get any worse and then something else happens,” she says.
There are many dysfunctional countries in Africa and Hennan seems to have worked in quite a few of them including Liberia and Rwanda.
Sitting in Trócaire’s offices in Cathedral Street in Dublin next door to a social welfare office where civil servants are protesting, Hennan recalls that it was another recession, this time in the 1980s, that caused her to leave Ireland, first to study midwifery in Scotland and then for a short time in Australia.
On her way back she visited a friend in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border and was “hooked”.
With the options for many graduating nurses and doctors likely to be severely circumscribed for the time being, she believes that joining a non-governmental organisation (NGO) could be of benefit for young people looking for a personal and professional challenge.
“I think it is a great opportunity for a young person to broaden their horizons, to understand how the rest of the world works and gain the skills that you might not have gained in other environments,” she says.
“You get bigger challenges. You get an opportunity to use your skills to the best and also a feeling that you are contributing to people’s lives.
“The more expertise you get in emergency health, the more you want to go on and apply it,” she says.
Trócaire runs the local health district in a country where there has been no centralised government authority since 1991.
The average life expectancy is 47. Respiratory problems, malnutrition and malaria are three deadly diseases. Infant mortality is huge as are family sizes.
In Ireland last year a single woman died in childbirth; in Gedo about 400 women die every year in an area with a tenth of the population of this country.
“Getting qualified medical personnel is very difficult. We cannot get Somalian doctors to work here or qualified surgeons to perform Caesarean sections,” Hennan says.
“We get them [pregnant women] arriving with haemoglobins of three [the average for women is 12-14] having been in labour for five days. It’s a huge problem,” she says.
The biggest problem of all for aid workers is the continuing violence which now affects them as well. In the past year it has been open season on aid workers – 32 have been killed and 26 kidnapped with 16 of them still missing.
As a consequence, she and other NGOs have had to leave Somalia and they now co-ordinate aid activities from the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
It is enough to make most people despair, but Hennan says Somalia is an “addictive” country with enormous potential if peace could ever be realised there.
“You see the potential. If they just got a chance, these people would be amazing. I saw the same thing in Liberia [another troubled country which has known decades of conflict]. Liberians were extremely dynamic, clued-in people.”
The can-do spirit has been realised in the absence of NGOs by local people who have stepped into the breach. When Trócaire warned it was too dangerous to run mobile clinics to travel around the district, local people insisted on carrying on.
“They came back and said, ‘this is our programme, these are our people and we are going to do it’,” Hennan recalls.
“Even though we have not got our Kenyan medical staff on the ground right now, the local staff and the local district health boards, some of whom are illiterate community members, will say ‘we need more of this. We need to expand the nutrition programme. In this area there is a lot of malnourished children’.”
Funding for the district health centres comes from various sources including from Trócaire’s own resources, the European Commission and the UK government.
Trócaire has put in an application for funding with the Irish Government to make up for a projected decrease in private donations, but with a €95 million cut in the aid budget, the organisation is less than hopeful.
“For me it was more stark when I came home during the Celtic Tiger.
“I left here when there was a recession and people were cautious about money. Things are a lot quieter now, but people still have food to eat and feed their kids, but the recession is a bit of a wake-up call.
“It is a worry for organisations like Trócaire. People are not going to be as generous as they were in the past,” she says.
Trócaire has chosen a seven-year-old Somalian refugee Khalid Salat Shikh Ali for the front of its collection box this Lent. Khalid and his family are staying at a refugee camp on the Kenyan border which is administered by Hennan’s district health programme. His father is a teacher and the family had to flee their middle-class homes in the capital Mogadishu.
“This is the kind of family that people might be able to identify with.
“They were not poor farmers that are constantly being displaced. These had a reasonably affluent lifestyle. They share a room with 17 other people. They have no idea where their future lies,” Hennan says.
“With the options for many graduating nurses and doctors likely to be severely circumscribed for the time being, joining a non-governmental organisation (NGO) could be of benefit for young people looking for a personal and professional challenge
