NEWS
December 26, 1992 | KENNETH FREED, TIMES STAFF WRITER
If there is a hell on earth, it would have to include the Dikfeer Hospital. Nothing from Dickens or even Dante prepares one to enter Mogadishu's only operating medical facility. It is nothing short of an abomination, an offense against humanity. Yet it is what Somalis have. Its staff tries to ignore the stench, filth and lack of what other hospitals would consider necessities. Some people even emerge alive.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 17, 1996 | HILARY E. MacGREGOR
These elite, specially trained construction workers built hospitals in Somalia and mess halls in the Middle East, but on Monday, Navy Seabees used their prowess to scale the San Buenaventura Mission's towering pine trees and hang hundreds of feet of Christmas lights. The two century-old pine trees, standing in front of the mission, are about 130 feet tall.
NEWS
January 10, 1993 | KATHLEEN KELLEHER, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Somalia is not for the faint of heart. "One relief worker told me that his enduring image of Somalia is a 12-year-old kid carrying an AK-47, chewing qat and popping Valium," said Neil Frame, procurement director of the Los Angeles-based Operation U.S.A. Frame, who left for Somalia last week, has worked for the relief agency for 13 years. "He said it's just like (the road-warrior movie) 'Mad Max.' One of the side effects of qat (a plant chewed for its stimulant effect) . . . is paranoia.
MAGAZINE
April 4, 1993 | SCOTT KRAFT, Scott Kraft, the Times' Johannesburg bureau chief, won this year's Sigma Delta Chi award for foreign correspondence for a story on AIDS in Africa, which appeared in this magazine
THE WHITE-ROBED SURGEON, AWEYS ABDI OMAR, hands covered in blood, was cutting into the abdomen of a Somali man in Mogadishu's Digfer Hospital when half a dozen armed men burst into the operating room, carrying a moaning figure in their arms. "Doctor, you have to leave that one," they said, pointing to the anesthetized patient on the table. "Our brother has been shot." "But this patient may die if I leave," Omar protested. "Your brother is not hurt badly. He will have to wait."