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| Where a child is born: Esther Gwena, 69, who acts as a midwife but has no training, lays down sheets in her rundown apartment -- a makeshift maternity unit (AFP Photo/Jekesai NJIKIZANA) |
Harare (AFP) - The floor is dusty, the walls filthy and the furniture decrepit, but for two weeks last month a tiny flat in a Harare township was transformed into a maternity clinic where scores of babies were born.
Its owner,
69-year-old Esther Gwena, says she helped to deliver 250 infants as Zimbabwe's
health sector tottered -- a feat that earned comparisons to Florence
Nightingale, the pioneer of modern nursing.
Hundreds of
junior medics at state hospitals began a strike three months ago because their
salaries -- less than $200 a month -- are not enough to live on in a country
gripped by 500 percent inflation.
Nurses are
only working two days a week.
Those who
can't afford private care -- the majority of the 14 million people reeling
under an economic crisis compounded by acute food shortages -- suffer at home
or seek help from people like Gwena.
Senior
doctors, in a letter last week, said state hospitals had become a "death
trap" and warned of a "slow genocide".
Gwena, a
widow and member of the local Apostolic Faith sect, is a self-taught midwife.
When the
health services strike peaked last month, she came to the rescue.
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In need:
Monica Bepu, 33, heavily pregnant with her second
child, sits on a bench in the
passage outside Esther Gwena's
two-room flat in Harare (AFP Photo/Jekesai
NJIKIZANA)
|
'I had to
do something'
"A man
came to me and said there were two women in advanced labour at (a nearby
clinic) but the place was closed because the nurses were on strike," she
told AFP in her two-room flat in Mbare township.
She rushed
there and found that one of the women had a baby which had died.
"I
took the other one to my place, where I helped her. The baby survived. From
that time, I knew I had to do something," she said.
Word that
she was helping deliver babies for free spread quickly.
The
state-owned television ZBC described her as "a modern Zimbabwean version
of Florence Nightingale" and First Lady Auxillia Mnangagwa visited Gwena
and donated food, detergents and blankets.
A funeral
services company chipped in with a mobile water tank and pitched a tent outside
to serve as a waiting room for women before they went into advanced labour.
"I
helped to deliver 250 babies ... (they) are alive and kicking and at home with
their mothers," Gwena said.
Two weeks
later, the government asked her to stop after a nearby maternity clinic
reopened.
Winnie
Denhere, 35, cradled her two-day-old baby boy outside the clinic, where she had
taken him for an immunisation injection.
"Everything
went very well, she didn't ask us for money," she said, speaking of Gwena,
who brought her child into the world.
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A moment
for prayer: Gwena belongs to an Apostolic religious sect where she
says she got
her calling to take up midwifery. She says she has delivered as
many as 250
children (AFP Photo/Jekesai NJIKIZANA)
|
'People
dying'
But while
some laud Gwena as a selfless do-gooder, doctors worry that she exposed
herself, the mothers, the babies to infection.
"We
need to do something about our facilities so no one goes to her," Harare's
director of medical services Prosper Chonzi, said.
Medicines
have been in short supply and broken machines go unrepaired.
The
government has fired 448 junior doctors for striking.
Senior
doctors last week also stopped work in protest over the sacking of junior
colleagues. Dozens marched in Harare on Monday.
"People
dying has become the order of the day in our hospitals," said the
vice-president of the Senior Hospital Doctors Association Raphael Magota.
He told AFP
machines were breaking down and that intensive care units were only able to
treat two or three people "due to lack of equipment".
A senior
doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the situation has become untenable.
 |
Gwena
collects water in a bucket as she prepares for a long day (AFP Photo/
Jekesai
NJIKIZANA)
|
"There
is no public health in Zimbabwe at the moment; everything has come to a
standstill," he said.
Even the
scarce equipment is often not right.
"One
needs gloves that fit just right when performing delicate operations, but we
get old gloves that are too big," said another doctor.
A UN
special rapporteur on food security, Hilal Elver, last week spoke of
"disturbing information" that public hospitals had exhausted food
stocks, forcing them to seek humanitarian aid and that medical equipment in
some cases was "no longer operational".
In the
second largest city of Bulawayo, Zimbabweans living abroad are helping in a
small way by crowdfunding and sending money back home to offer health care for
the vulnerable.
One such
initiative is Citizwean Clinic, which opened its doors last month and attended
to hundreds of patients in the first five days -- providing free consultation
and drugs.
"We go
to the hospital these days it's bad, there are no doctors. We heard that there
were doctors here," said hypertensive patient Elina Dzingire, 63.
"We've
really been helped here," she told AFP from the clinic in the city's
Cowdray Park township.
Health
Minister Obadiah Moyo admitted the situation in hospitals is constrained but
says the government will soon advertise the posts left vacant by the sacked
doctors.
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