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About a month ago, in a shelter made from tarpaulin and sticks in the middle of a crowded refugee camp in South Sudan, a woman named Ajoba silently gave birth to a little girl in the dim light of dawn. The baby girl, named Dahiya, was premature – only 28 weeks gestation. When Ajoba’s mother saw how small Dahiya was, she believed she wouldn’t make it. However, Ajoba, full of determination and love for her baby, knew she could seek medical help only 25 minutes away. So she soon climbed onto the back of her husband’s donkey and rode with the baby to the nearby health facility of Medair, an international relief organisation.
Weighing just 700 grams – less than a bag of sugar – Dahiya had the slimmest chance of survival in a harsh environment like Batil refugee camp. Batil camp is home to over 40,000 Sudanese refugees who fled their homes, along with 100,000 others, to escape fighting in Blue Nile state, Sudan, in 2011. After a long and harrowing journey chased by dehydration, hunger, and exhaustion, they settled into the camp. Not long after they arrived, fighting broke out in Juba, the capital city of South Sudan. Caught up in the ongoing conflict in South Sudan and Sudan, they have nowhere else to go.
The camp – a maze of homes made from UN tarpaulins, sticks, mud, and grass – stretches as far as the eye can see. It is extremely hot and also prone to flooding when the rains pour down. There is limited food in the camp and little opportunity and space to grow food. Disease and hunger are never far away. And yet, in this extreme and hostile environment, like everywhere else in the world, new life enters every day.
When Ajoba arrived in the Medair facility, Dahiya was hypothermic and weak, as she was unable to feed properly due to being extremely premature. Her mother refused to be referred to the larger hospital as she was fearful of leaving the camp. She wanted to stay in the Medair facility, or take Dahiya home – if she had taken her home, Dahiya most certainly would have died. So, in a low-resource environment, improvisation and determination were the keys to Dahiya’s survival. An ‘incubator’ was fashioned for her made from a plastic see-through bucket and an oxygen concentrator machine with a lead from the machine through a hole into the bucket. Inside the bucket was a bed of cotton wool, an emergency blanket, and some pink fabric as a little cocoon to keep Dahiya warm.
The day they arrived, Ajoba saw how sick her baby girl was, and believed she would die. However, with the dedication of the midwives over the next few weeks, and the strong will of a mother who didn’t want to lose another child, Dahiya began to put on weight and get stronger. After a week in the ‘incubator’, Ajoba began to do ‘kangaroo care’ – placing Dahiya directly on her warm chest, skin to skin, nestled there for many hours of the day.
I popped into maternity the other day to see how Dahiya was doing. Together with Ajoba and Leila, the midwife, we marveled at how well she was doing and how, even though she is still tiny, she is getting stronger by the day thanks to her mother’s dedication and a simple plastic contraption.
South Sudan as a country remains extremely tense and fragile. It is amidst all the difficult times and insecurity that small stories and miracles like Dahiya remind us that beautiful life still goes on. That amidst all the darkness in the world, the forces of good are so much stronger.
South Sudan has an astonishingly high maternal mortality rate. In fact, in the world’s youngest country, an adolescent girl in South Sudan is three times more likely to die in childbirth than complete primary school. Poor infrastructure, distance from health facilities, and inadequate transport services give women little hope of accessing adequate delivery services. Medair works day and night amidst these challenges to support mothers like Ajoba during the vulnerable time of pregnancy and delivery.
