Abdulkadir Abdirahman Adan was running a free ambulance service in Mogadishu, a handful of vehicles and volunteers, and on the afternoon of the Zobe junction bombing in 2017 his crews were driving the same short stretch of road over and over. At least 587 people were killed. More than three hundred were injured, and for weeks afterwards over five hundred were still unaccounted for. Madina Hospital took most of the wounded. A city hospital system with perhaps a few dozen beds properly equipped for burns received hundreds of patients in a few hours.
People queued outside to give blood before anyone had asked them to, and kept queuing into the night. Many were looking for someone. Some of those they were looking for were never identified.
The burials went on for days afterwards, Marguerite's sort of numbers but one at a time, and families kept their own handwritten lists of the missing long after the official ones closed. Some of those lists are still folded in houses in Mogadishu.
Zobe junction was a market corner, restaurants and bakeries either side of the road, so the crowd that afternoon was people buying bread and people selling it. In the days after, neighbours carried food and water down to the hospital for the queues of people waiting to give blood.