A new start for newborn life

Apr 2 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Next month, medical practitioners from around the world will mark International Day of the Midwife. Laura Davis meets a woman who has helped build a maternity hospital in Rwanda

BY THE time the woman reached the maternity hospital, her baby had died inside her.

Her relatives had carried her for six hours through the night when it became obvious her labour was not going smoothly, but the umbilical cord had become squeezed and the oxygen supply cut off.

Cord prolapse is a rare problem, occurring in only about one in 1,000 pregnancies, but in the UK the midwives would have delivered the baby in a matter of minutes, saving its life.

In Rwanda, however, this mother-to-be had already sought help at a health centre, where nobody had the expertise, before making the journey to the nearest hospital.

“All we could do for her was make sure she had a normal delivery because at least it saved her from having a Caesarean section for a dead baby,” says Jane Morgan, head of midwifery at Edge Hill University, in Ormskirk, who was visiting the village of Shyira at the time.

“She was just so grateful and all we could keep thinking was ‘her baby’s just died’.

“It was so upsetting. A lot of their babies die so they cope with it much better than we do because it’s more in their day-to- day life.”

If Jane and her colleagues had not been at the hospital that day in January, the nurses there would have been unable to deliver her baby normally.

Not only would the patient have had to recover from a major operation, but she would also have had a £15 bill to pay – five times the average weekly wage.

Dire as that situation may be, it is better than it used to be before, seven years ago, Jane and her church, St Luke’s in Formby, stepped in to help.

The vicar of St Luke’s organised a link between his parish and a missionary-led church in Shyira and launched a fundraising project.

When Jane first visited the village, she was devastated by the poverty and conditions she witnessed.

“I vowed I would never go back to Rwanda. I was paralysed because it was just so shocking to have a hospital with no running water,” she recalls.

“There were women who were miscarrying in the same ward as women who had malaria and women who had just had their babies.

“They were all mixed in together on broken beds with no linen and hardly any care because there were only five nurses. There was no equipment, nothing was clean. I thought ‘I can never go back’.

“You’d have women who’d had a Caesarean section and had had to pay £30 and would still be paying that off when they became pregnant again so they wouldn’t come to the hospital for delivery. Women are dying because they stay at home too long.”

Although she felt unable to return to Shyira, Jane was determined to do something to help.

She began raising the £24,000 needed to construct a new maternity hospital and, as she sent the money over in stages, the new building began to take shape.

“Once they’d built it, they wanted me to go back and see it, and I’m glad I did because they had this lovely new maternity hospital and they’d set up a local college which had made beautiful wooden beds that were big enough for the women and their babies to sleep together.