On a particularly slow work day a few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. “Sure!,” I respond, not entirely sure what I was getting myself into. Squished between Innocent, my favorite ambulance driver, and Fulgence, one of my favorite nurses and closest friends, I set off for another sector in my district.
On the road, we discuss everything from the status of the road (atrocious, the worst in the district, possibly the country), to the physical appearance of the gorillas in the north (really ugly, but I still want to see them, like every other white person who comes to Rwanda). Conversation flows between Kinyarwanda, French, English, and the language if laughter, which I am becoming very fluent in.
We arrive at the health center and are greeted by its head nurse and director. They tell us about the patients who need immediate transfers. The first patient is a young man who just had a moto accident. His eye is covered with a bandage but blood is pouring out, his arm is also wrapped in bandages tied tightly to his torso.
The second patient is a woman who has been in labor for over twelve hours. I accompanied Fulgence to the health center’s birthing room where she lay on the delivery table, fear and pain in her eyes. She slowly walked herself to the car (over one hundred feet away) and onto the ambulance stretcher. Her husband tried to follow but was turned away for lack of space, he’ll have to walk.
“Has anyone ever given birth in the ambulance?” I ask Innocent. “Oh yes, plenty of times,” he responds.
We head off, but after a minute realize the woman in labor has forgotten her insurance card, so we make twenty point turn on the narrow, pot holed road that drops off into a steep valley, to retrieve it. The woman in labor tries to hold her pain first with deep breaths, then quiet moans, but the road is just awful and the pain too much, and pretty soon she’s screaming bloody murder.
“Ihangane Madame!”, Fulgence says from the front seat, have patience. To me he says, “the pain and stress of the road can induce labor—I’m not trained in deliveries, so you’ll have to help!”.
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| Lake Kivu from Kibuye, Rwanda |
After what seemed like days to me (probably years to the woman), we finally reach the hospital. She is carried to the birthing table and connected to an IV. Reviewing her transfer sheet, the nurses tell me the woman is thirty-two years old and this is her seventh child. “Madame, you have too many children!” they say disapprovingly, but she is barely conscious.
A doctor finally comes to check in. He checks her cervix and discusses with a nurse the correct plan of action. The nurse thinks she needs a c-section, the doctor thinks she’ll deliver soon. An hour later, I help prep the surgery room and put on surgical scrubs. “I am going to look only!” I remind everyone repeatedly.
Two seconds later, another nurse runs into the surgical room “Hurry, it’s coming!”. We run back to the patient and within sixty seconds the most enormous newborn baby I have ever seen (and I’ve seen quite a few at this point) is out! Now I know why they call it the miracle of life.
Over the last few hours I could not stop thinking about the atrocious conditions this woman was being put through—from the excruciating hours of labor at her health center, to the hellish ambulance ride, to the lack of bedside manners of the hospital staff. Once she recovers her senses, this woman is going to raise hell, I thought. Instead, all she did was thank me and the other nurses, praising God for her healthy baby and asking him to protect us and our future children.
And now you might know what to expect if a hospital nurse in Rwanda asks you to go for “a little stroll” on a slow work day.
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