100 New Graduates!

Edna Adan, the teaching staff, the volunteers – and, basically, everybody in the whole of Somaliland – is very proud to announce the graduation of 100 newly-trained pharmacists and laboratory technicians. We’ve added a new photo gallery to commemorate the event. New Photo Gallery of...
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Glowing Tribute to Edna from TEDx

Edna will be addressing a TEDx conference. Not TED, precisely. Although, it will be hosted by the head of TED Europe, Bruno Giussani. About TEDx In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are...
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Edna at TEDx

Edna Adan will give a presentation at the upcoming TED conference in Geneva about her work in service to the women of Somaliland. She will discuss how she came home to Hargeisa in 1997 from a career at the World Health Organization to find Somaliland’s health care system in ruins. “The ten year Civil war from 1982 to 1991 caused the death of a quarter million of our people and...
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Half the Sky exhibit opening in L.A.

The book Half the Sky is the theme for a new exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Oct. 27 through March 11, 2012. The book is by our friends and supporters Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who include a chapter about Edna Adan and the Hospital. The Los Angeles exhibit also features Edna prominently. Nicholas Kristof, himself, will speak there on October 25. Buy Tickets...
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Every Woman Every Child Video

See below for a video of the entire Every Woman Every Child conference, a United Nations webcast. Following an address by the U.N. Secretary General and several prime ministers, Edna was featured in the third panel Game Changers. You may skip ahead to 1:34 to hear from Edna. The Every Woman Every Child Plenary event took place on Tuesday September 20, 2011, at the United Nations in New York...
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Female Genital Mutilation

Famous blogger, Andrew Sullivan, nowadays blogging at The Daily Beast, has helped to put a spotlight onto the issue of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Yesterday, he wrote about an Egyptian woman who participated in the uprising in Cairo early this year and who had, herself, suffered FGM: In 2006, when she was 24, Ziada had a long debate with an uncle about her seven-year-old cousin Shaimaa,...
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Every Woman Every Child

Edna Adan was in New York City to make a presentation at a United Nations meeting of Every Woman Every Child. The group was launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Summit in September 2010, Every Woman Every Child aims to save the lives of 16 million women and children by 2015. It is an unprecedented global effort that mobilizes and...
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Letter from Appreciative Volunteer

Edna is deeply grateful for the recent visit by a group of American surgeons. They made use of the Edna Hospital’s surgical facilities for one week to operate on 8-10 patients every day from 7am to around 10pm. Many were helped. As an added bonus, after they had departed, Edna found upon her desk the following hand-written note of appreciation from the daughter of one of the surgeons. (We...
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Vive La France – Water!!

As you may know, access to water has long been a pressing concern for Edna. She has often spoken of this as being her single biggest challenge. Edna is deeply, deeply grateful to France for having funded this months-long effort, which has now met with success. During the past four months, we have been in labour with our water well drilling effort which we started with kind support from France....
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Visiting Medical Student’s Reflection

“Tell them the truth,” she instructed me. Those were the only guidelines Edna gave me when she encouraged me to write a post for her blog. The task sounded simple, but for many weeks after my return from Somaliland, I could not articulate all that I had experienced. Only now am I beginning to understand the reason behind my difficulty. The truth is that The Truth is much more...
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Newly-Graduated Doctors for Somaliland

Edna cried with happiness upon the graduation of these two former Edna Hospital nurses from medical school. They are among Somaliland’s newest (and finest!) doctors. These two young women first graduated from the Edna Hospital school of Midwifery and then were trained by the Hospital as Nurses. The two showed such a lot of promise that the Edna Hospital then sponsored them through Medical...
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Scam Alert !

Yes, Edna’s email was hacked again January 11, 2012. Edna is at home at the hospital. She is not stranded in Spain. They have, again, deleted her recent correspondence and her entire Contacts list, so if you have any ongoing correspondence with Edna, please send her a copy of those recent emails. If you have corresponded with Edna about anything ongoing or upcoming then be aware that Edna...
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Somaliland’s Success Raises Doubts about Foreign Aid

Here is a very interesting news article from London’s Daily Mail. The writer, Ian Birrell, met with Edna and says of her, “no one epitomises the nation’s indomitable spirit more than Edna Adan Ismail, or Dr Edna, as everyone knows her.” Turns out, the remarkable success of Somaliland – in spite of going unrecognized as an independent country – is being cited...
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Somalia’s Mother Theresa Fights Famine

Here is a new report in The Daily Beast about the situation in neighboring Somalia, where Dr. Hawa Abdi has carved out a safe-haven for 100,000 refugees amid the warfare. The women who run the camp now face a grave new threat – famine. Read Full Report at The Daily Beast East Africa has been struck hard by drought and people are dying. Nowhere is the situation worse than in Somalia....
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U.N. Report: Midwives Could Save 3.6 Million Lives

Adequate Midwifery Could Save 3.6 Million Lives, New Report Shows 38 of 58 countries surveyed could miss their MDG5 targets without 112,000 more midwives Up to 3.6 million deaths could be avoided each year in 58 developing countries if midwifery services are upgraded by 2015, according to the United Nations Population Fund. The State of the World’s Midwifery 2011, launched at the Triennial...
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