ICRC

Short film on Mogadishu's Keysaney Hospital, where a new operating facility was inaugurated earlier this year.

Two decades of armed conflict have had a heavy toll on Somalis in and outside of Mogadishu.

Fighting has destroyed essential infrastructure, including hospitals, all over the country. Access to proper health care is precarious, at best.

Twenty years ago, the ICRC rehabilitated an old prison in north-eastern Mogasdishu. Since, Keysaney Hospital - now run by the Somali Red Crescent - has managed to treat over 200,000 people, including over 30,000 weapon-related injuries.

Here is a chance to hear the stories of a few patients and to meet the doctors who treat them.

Valerie Simon, a retired attorney, Northern California resident and Kenya Red Cross Life Member volunteered for two weeks at Dadaab last year. There, she worked with the ICRC and the Kenya Red Cross to restore family links for Somalis who live in the world's largest refugee camp, near the Kenyan-Somali border.

Dispatch from Dadaab, Kenya, by Ms. Simon.

Imagine a boy’s quick grin when he hears his father’s voice on the line; a woman’s sigh when her husband says hello; sagging shoulders and a quick turning away when there is no answer, or the tears of an old man who can’t find his children. These are Somali refugees telephoning relatives from the Dadaab Refugee Complex in Kenya.  The cell phone calls are a high-tech approach to traditional Red Cross Messages being used by the ICRC and Kenya Red Cross Society to restore family links at Dadaab.  These are calls to say, “I made it alive.”