Story of Compromise

With all the bipartisan arguing going on in congress, as if it ever ends, and the selection of the new super committee almost complete, it night be time for a story of compromise.  There is a massive famine still occurring in Somalia.  Dr. Hawa Abdi, an OBGYN in Somalia says that despite harsh conflict and Al Shabab trying to kill innocent people, he treats anyone who comes through his doors.  Newsweek tells this story:

I ignored their call, so they came to my gate unannounced: six members of the Somali insurgent group Hizbul Islam, with a request to speak with me in person. Their militia had controlled our area for the past year—the latest in an endless line of transitional leaders, warlords, and regimes I’d seen since the collapse of Somalia’s government. I was examining a severely malnourished child, who hadn’t eaten for at least four days, when I heard the news; I was not willing to abandon my patient for a conversation with people whose only clear goals were to rob, to take over, or to kill. 

As hard as it may be to imagine, Somalia was peaceful when I moved here. But now, after more than 20 years of a civil war caused by interclan fighting, the small clinic I started is a 400-bed hospital. The land behind it, once fertile, now utterly parched, offers refuge to more than 90,000 internally displaced people—a fraction of the nearly half--million who now live along that main road, which stretches northwest from our destroyed capital city. (About 1.5 million Somalis have been displaced by the violence.) The need in our area is unimaginable, but my mission as a doctor is the same. I rise long before dawn with a singular focus: to meet my patients’ needs. 

One of my fellow doctors tried to reason bravely with the Hizbul Islam soldiers, jittery, aggressive young men with -henna-dyed beards, wearing red-and-white checkered scarves, their index fingers forever on the triggers of their guns. He told them that in our area, we are known as a refuge; we treat all victims of the conflict equally, no matter what side they’re on. The six men refused to leave, so I assembled my committee of elders and welcomed them to lunch.

If a man who sees continuous conflict and will treat anyone who is an insurgent during war, no matter there side.  Why can't congress work together to fix the economy or agree on a real deficit reduction deal?