Edna Adan Ismail
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2017
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Edna Adan Ismail is a midwife and campaigner. As a 12 year old growing up in British Somaliland, her dream was to build her own hospital. It took her some 50 years and all her savings to realise her ambition, and the state of the art hospital she built is a testament to her passion and dogged determination.
Nursing and midwifery have been her life since she won a scholarship to study in the UK in the mid-1950s, when she cycled to appointments in her black raincoat to deliver babies all around London. Married at one time to the prime minister of Somalia, she juggled the high profile role of First Lady with shifts at her local hospital. "I was born with this desire to fix things," she says.
As her country's first female foreign minister, she broke deep-rooted taboos by publicly condemning the widespread practice of female genital mutilation - FGM. Her opposition stems from personal experience - she was only eight years old when she endured the invasive procedure herself.
Now 80, she lives on site at her beloved hospital, where more than 22,000 babies have been born since it opened in 2002.
Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Paula McGinley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.4 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, |
| 0:10.4 | the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
| 0:16.4 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
| 0:22.6 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
| 0:30.0 | Music |
| 0:50.0 | My castaway this week is the Midwifeland campaigner Edna Adan Ismailu. |
| 0:56.0 | As a child growing up in what was then British Somali land in the 1940s, |
| 1:01.0 | her dream was to build her own hospital by the mid-50s. |
| 1:04.0 | She'd won a scholarship to study in Britain, but life, as it has a habit of doing, got in the way. |
| 1:10.0 | It took 50 years and all her savings to finally realise her dream. |
| 1:15.0 | In 2002, the Edna Adan maternity and teaching hospital emerged from the rubble of a bloody civil war, |
| 1:22.0 | testament to my castaway's personal mantra. |
| 1:25.0 | If I don't do it, then who will? |
| 1:27.0 | It's a dictum she's lived her entire life by. |
| 1:30.0 | Married at one time to the Prime Minister of Somalia, |
| 1:33.0 | she juggled the high profile role of First Lady with nursing shifts, |
| 1:37.0 | and later, as her country's first ever female foreign minister, |
| 1:41.0 | broke deep-rooted taboos by publicly condemning the widespread practice of female genital mutilation. |
| 1:48.0 | A public health scandal, yes, but a highly personal struggle too, aged just eight. |
| 1:53.0 | She herself was violently disfigured by FGM. |
... |
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