It was just another day in Swaziland. Woke up, spent some time with Jesus, went to our care points, and watched an episode of the Office while we ate lunch. Nothing exceptionally exciting was happening. In the middle of the episode Pastor Gift pulls up in White Chocolate (the van). He asked us ladies if we wanted to help deliver a baby. Immediately we (Hannah, Cori, Erin, Tiffany and Kel) all jump up and rush to the car.
On the drive to pick up Gamane, the mother, Pastor Gift was explaining to us that she is a prostitute. She doesn’t know who the father is and is planning on giving the baby away. When we arrived to her home, she was already in a lot of pain. When she waddled out to the car she had tears streaming down her face and I could tell by her facial expression the pain she was feeling.
We laid her on a blanket in the backseat of the van. I sat in the backseat with her and her cousin who came along. We knew her water had broken, we didn’t know how long ago that had happened. She was wearing a pink cloth around her belly that was tightly tied around her lower stomach. We asked her cousin what it was for and she had no idea, neither did Pastor Gift nor Gamane.
To try to keep the amount of pain she was feeling down, we thought it would be a good idea to teach her some breathing exercises. The only breathing exercise we all knew was the one from Full House when Aunt Becky was having the twins. haha. So we had her breathe and asked her questions to help keep her mind of the pain. I was sitting at her feet so I gave her some foot massages as well.
I asked her if she had any children before this one and she said she already had four children, all of which have been adopted. As the contractions continued, we could see the pain was increasing relatively fast and the contractions were becoming closer and closer together. Gemane started screaming something to Pastor Gift and he said she was saying that she wanted to have the baby now.
The girls asked if I could tell if she was dilated at all or if I could see the baby crowning. I glanced and said, “no.” Everything looked relatively normal to me. Then I glanced down again not even two seconds later and all of a sudden I see the baby’s head and its not just crowning the baby’s entire head was coming out within the matter of seconds. I started freaking out because i realized that this baby was coming out and none of us have ever delivered a baby before. I grabbed the blanket she was laying on and Tiffany was helping the cousin push on her stomach and honestly within 30 seconds the baby was born. It’s a girl!
We set her down on the blanket but we’re all still kind of panicked. We didn’t have anything to wrap the baby in, we couldn’t use the blanket because Gemane was laying on it and it was incredibly disgusting at this point. Luckily Hannah was wearing a tank top underneath her T-shirt, so we were able to wrap the baby in Hannah’s shirt. The cousin was getting the fluids out of the baby’s mouth and finally she cried. The baby needed something to suck on so Cori held her finger there for the rest of the ride to the hospital. She was so beautiful. It was so surreal, I couldn’t believe we witnessed the miracle of birth.
We asked Gemane what she was going to name her and she said we could decide. So we decided to name her Hope.
After things settled down, Pastor Gift pulled the car over because we had gotten a flat tire. After he changed the flat tire, he realized the replacement tire was even flatter than the previous tire. So we tried to get help but no one was helping us. We still needed to get to the hospital right away because the baby was still connected to the amniotic sack.
Since we weren’t getting help, Pastor Gift decided we should just drive to the hospital anyway. Oh Africa. Finally we arrived to the hospital. A nurse greeted us and was upset that all we had to wrap the baby in was a T-Shirt, but we weren’t expecting to deliver a baby in the back of a van in Africa, cut us some slack lady! Anyway the nurse cut the umbilical cord and took care of Gemane and the baby. Finally Gemane was settled in her hospital room which she shared with another Mother and a left over dinner on the nightstand covered in ants.
As we said our goodbyes I asked how we can be praying for her and Hope. She told us she has AIDs, so we’re praying that the AIDs won’t get passed to Hope. It is possible for AIDS to not pass during birth.
This was hands down the best day of my life thus far. Its still so surreal, I definitely was not expecting to ever have a day like this on the trip but hey, this is the World Race.
