How one pediatrician is trying to reduce neonatal deaths in Somalia Format For Dr Ubah Farah Ahmed, returning to Somalia was not an easy decision to make, but she knew it was the right thing to do. “I have two children who are now in their mid-twenties still in Rome, but they understand why I had to return,” she says. With an elderly father living in Mogadishu, the 48-year-old pediatrician had always known she would be back one day “to do my part to help.” She left Somalia in 1991 due to the civil war and lived in Italy for the last 29 years, where she also studied medicine.