“I saw a girl aged around 21 or 22 years. She was walking naked. People were laughing at her. Small children were throwing stones at her. I had to stop,” she recalled.
Abdalla had to call out the people who were laughing, rebuking them in public. But then they made an even more hurtful statement.
“They said, ‘Cheki! Kitu hicho, mama! (Look! That is a beautiful girl, mum!)’. You know? A lady of 21 or 22 years,” Abdalla said.
She asked the laughing bystanders to help her take the naked girl to hospital, maybe she could be treated and be normal.
“They said, ‘No, mama. We cannot do that. This girl is crazy! She will start throwing stones at us. We cannot do that,’” Abdalla said.
She had to offer them money and minutes later, the naked girl was in Abdalla’s car. A lesso was wrapped around her for dignity.
She drove to Port Reitz Hospital for the mentally disturbed, where she was asked to pay a Sh10,000 deposit and a further daily fee of Sh600 until the girl was discharged.
“I agreed, paid the deposit and left the girl there. But I signed as the next of kin. I drove to work and started paying the daily Sh600,” Abdalla said.
In those days, she used to run a tour company.
Six months later, the hospital called her, asking her to pick up the girl who had been discharged.
At the hospital, Abdalla asked the girl if she knew where she stayed. She said she knew.
“I took the girl to where she used to live. There, I saw the dad. But he was blind and very poor. He did not have food. When I told him I had his daughter, he started crying,” she said.
The father said he had been looking for his daughter for a very long time. He did not know her whereabouts but said he would ensure the girl did not leave the house.
“I told him no. The girl is fine now. He started crying like a baby. He told me he could not afford to treat his daughter because he could not even afford a decent meal regularly,” she recalls.
Abdalla found a chemist in the neighbourhood and arranged to ensure the girl got her medication every month.
A few months later, when she visited the girl, she found her selling chapati and beans, using the proceeds to take care of her father.
“That is how my journey started. I tried to help another person the same way and it worked,” Abdalla said.
“I came to realise that 80 per cent of the people with severe mental illnesses roaming the streets come from poor families and cannot afford medication,” she said.
She made a major decision and closed down her tour company to concentrate on taking care of the mentally ill.
This surprised her landlord and she tried to explain why she was closing her successful business.
She sold one of her tour vans to start the journey of helping the mentally ill, mostly from the streets of Mombasa.
“Now it is more than 10 years that I’ve been helping these people,” Abdallah said.
"I used to take them from the street to Port Reitz Hospital but it was very expensive for me. But with the grace of God, I used to go seek help from a friend called Mureithi.”
She used to walk from door to door asking for help from her friends, and they recognised her noble project and helped her out.
That way, her patients never went hungry.
“Now I have a big hospital with a capacity of 120 patients,” she said.
Her husband, Saad, was one of her pillars on the journey.
He said at the onset of Covid-19, Abdalla could not sleep.
“She kept on saying, ‘If everyone is thinking about themselves, who is thinking about the mentally ill people on the streets?’ That is when she started another journey of setting up her own hospital,” Saad said.
He said instead of the mentally ill people living on the streets scavenging from garbage bin to garbage bin looking for food, it was better for them to have a place to call home, at least for a while.
“It was her dream to have them live like normal human beings and not animals. They are not lesser human beings. It was hard for me to cope at first but eventually, I am glad to be one of the people who support her,” Saad said.
Mental illness, Abdalla said, is a disease like any other that can be treated.
“I never imagined that someone who had been mentally ill for years, living off the streets, could come back to their normal self and even find something useful to do with their lives,” Abdalla said.
Her care centre and hospital is in Miritini, Jomvu subcounty, behind the Mombasa SGR Terminus, and has 24 staff taking care of patients.
On January 24, she was awarded the Good Citizen Award at a luncheon hosted by the Rotary Club of Mombasa at the Mombasa Chini Club for her efforts to take care of the mentally ill in Mombasa.
