What were things like at the hospital during the fighting?

The hospital is not too close to the frontline, so the immediate surroundings were calm. The problem is that the hospital was overwhelmed by the influx of casualties, most of them civilians, including women and children.

Access to the hospital was sometimes difficult for both patients and hospital staff, especially at night when shelling took place in the city and roads were blocked by the fighting. No transport was available and people had to wait until the next morning to come to the hospital. Imagine injured patients waiting 12 hours to reach help!

How did people get to the hospital?

There are no ambulance services in Mogadishu and people came by any means. Sometimes their relatives carried them; sometimes they came in wheelbarrows or on donkey carts, in taxis and minibuses, anything available. So it was very, very difficult.

Even in daytime it was difficult because not much transport was available. Many roads were blocked and there they had to pass lots of checkpoints. Sometimes even our staff were unable to reach the hospital, or else they had to walk long distances to get there because there was no transport.

And the hospital was overflowing with patients….

The normal capacity is 65 beds, whereas at the worst point we had 200 in-patients in the hospital. We squeezed beds together, we had to make room for more beds, we had to put beds in the corridors, we put up tents in the garden.

At the hospital, did you feel safe?

The community has great respect for the hospital, because it is neutral: everybody who reaches it gets the medical care they need. That is our policy, we tell everybody we are neutral and we treat everyone the same. So, that helps us to keep safe and to keep working.