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A Nepalese nurse tells how she trekked across leech-infested hills and delivered babies in a quake
After two massive earthquakes hit Nepal earlier this year, nurse Kabita Balami trekked up to 10 hours across landslide-prone, leech-infested hills to provide healthcare to women and girls in the disaster zone.
The 7.8-magnitude quake on April 25, and 7.3-magnitude quake on May 12, killed more than 8,600 people, injured 100,000 and severely affected 5.6 million people.
The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that of those affected, 1.4 million were women of reproductive age, and of them, 93,000 were pregnant.
The U.N. estimated the quake destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 health facilities.
Balami, 22, was deployed to assist women and girls at a dozen mobile reproductive health camps set up by UNFPA, district health offices and NGOs including Care, Adventist Development and Relief Agency, and Family Planing Association of Nepal.
Balami spent the better part of three months, from June to August, working at reproductive health camps reached only after a five-hour drive north of Kathmandu, followed by six- to 10-hour hikes.
Earlier this month, in her first ever trip outside of Nepal, Balami told an audience of humanitarian workers and journalists in a plush hotel in Bangkok of the challenges and pitfalls of working in the quake-hit mountains.
"On the 11th of August, we started to walk, leaving the main road, and about one and half hours from main road, we saw a landslide," Balami told me, speaking haltingly in broken English.
"We had to cross that landslide. We had to step very carefully," she said, describing how her legs suddenly plunged into the mud.
Each time she moved, she sank deeper. It took several minutes for her colleagues to dislodge her.
She encountered "so many leeches" along the way, and worked through food shortages, eating only packets of noodles between seeing patients.
She worked in villages where all the houses were destroyed, and places that still lacked electricity.
"I live in Kathmandu valley. I thought everywhere had electricity, but in Yarsa, there is no electricity," she said. "They have to walk two to three hours, or four to five hours, just to charge a phone."
There was a lack of equipment for complicated deliveries, and blankets for women and babies.
She was struck by the extent of child marriage, with some girls already married at 15, and at least two pregnant teenagers who came to the mobile camp for their deliveries.
The most harrowing experience was working through aftershocks, both in the camps and back at her hospital in Kathmandu.
"In the hospital, when there was an earthquake, I couldn't run from the hospital. Patients with injuries were flowing into the hospital, so we had to take care of them," she said, adding that she and her colleagues could not even think about whether or not their own homes were destroyed.
"While we were suturing, it was shaking. We had to manage anyhow - how to conduct delivery?"
Somehow, she did it, and she beamed as she showed off a picture of the baby boy she delivered. The mother, Balami added, was 18.
UNFPA, the local health offices and NGOs have conducted about 130 mobile reproductive health camps in the 14 districts most affected by the quakes, focusing on remote areas with little access to health facilities.
The first one was held on May 1, five days after the earthquake, and the most recent was completed on Dec. 14 in Sindhuli district, southeast of Kathmandu.
The camps are staffed by nurses, health assistants, gynaecologists, counsellors, lab assistants and female community health volunteers.
In addition to trauma, psychosocial and general health care, services offered include family planning, ante- and post-natal care, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, screening and treatment of uterine prolapse, delivery and counselling for birth spacing and contraceptives.
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