She was on her knees, showing a weary mother how to feed her malnourished child with a peanut-based paste that would give him desperately needed calories. Without access to clean drinking water, and already weakened by hunger, the boy had succumbed to a parasitic infection. His bulging eyes blinked slowly and he was close to death, but he still had a fighting chance, thanks to the clinic.

It had been founded two years earlier, after the nurse had approached her clan elders and demanded that something be done to save the tens of thousands of Hawiye who died in Mogadishu each year from the effects of war and famine.

She was summarily dismissed. Unmarried women did not demand things of any man in Somalia, much less the rulers of the clan.

But Farida was undeterred.

She’d pulled a laptop from her shoulder bag and laid out a spreadsheet showing how much the clinic would cost to build, staff, and operate. She identified an abandoned building in the Wardhiigley district that had been damaged in a mortar attack but could easily be repaired, then proceeded to explain how even the most rudimentary care could save thousands of lives, and finished by telling the elders that their inaction would be inexcusable in the eyes of God.

She’d nearly been thrown from the room and beaten.

But the young woman’s preparation and tenacity had impressed the most powerful of the Hawiye clan elders, and Badeed agreed to personally fund the clinic on one condition—that she would join as its director.

—

THE CLINIC WAS technically a stabilization center—meant to prevent at-risk patients from deteriorating past the point of no return—and in a country where 15 percent of the children did not live to celebrate their fifth birthday, the director’s time was in high demand. Farida passed the peanut paste to the boy’s mother and moved to the next area.

The building was long and narrow, like a railroad car, and she entered a room where several adults stricken with tuberculosis were lying prostrate on mats on the floor and wearing surgical masks to protect those around them. One of the men had also lost a foot in an IED attack, and gangrene had infected the stump. The risk of potentially fatal sepsis was high because of his weakened condition and old age.

An old man in Somalia was in his fifties, maybe sixty if Allah was really punishing him.

The director looked at the old man. Sitting on the floor next to him was Badeed. The warlord saw the director approach but continued massaging the old man’s bony foot until he drifted off to sleep.

“Miss Hassan,” Badeed said as he raised himself up with his cane.

“We need more medicines,” she said as they walked to another room. “Our shipment from the Red Crescent was stolen outside the city. The workers were killed and the medicines stolen.”

“I heard,” said the warlord. “It was Masaska.”