Artikel adalah dalam Bahasa Inggeris.....
When Nine Months Of Hope Dies In One Second GRAPHIC CONTENT
Last week, after saying goodbye to some visitors, I headed to the Hospital to check in with everyone for a few minutes. Unfortunately, it was about to be the hardest “few minutes” of the last couple of months.
I walked into the waiting area, just outside the nurses exam rooms, to see a nurse holding a medical pan. He saw me, and beckoned me closer. In the pan, I saw a towel wrapped around something that I presumed was a brand new baby. As he started explaining, I found I was right, but as he pulled off the towel, it was as if the entire reality of Africa came crashing down upon my shoulders.
The baby had no mouth, no nose, and one severely deformed eye with two pupils. The nurse continued to pull away the towel, and at first, I was relieved. The torso, arms, and little hands seemed completely normal. But the nurse continued, and then pointed to the genital area of the baby, where I saw the child had both sets of genitalia and, according to the nurse, no anus.
It lay there, still, and as I was about to finish processing what I had just seen, it moved. It was alive! I have no idea how that was possible, but it twitched its arms and kicked its legs. The nurse shrugged his shoulders at that, and stood there, waiting for the little one to lie lifeless, as there was nothing he could do.
I asked the nurse about the mother, he said that she was fine, and that she lived in the bush, many kilometers away from the hospital. By the size of the baby, I guessed it was fully developed and had been born after a full nine months. The nurse confirmed my theory, and then it hit me like a sledgehammer.
The mother, carried and expected and hoped, for this child for nine months. Nine months. American’s can't wait nine months for anything. We can’t even wait a few months to see the baby when it’s still in the womb. We criticize Africans for having no sense of delayed gratification, but we are absolutely the biggest hypocrites when we do that. Yet, our desire to see the baby isn’t all that selfish. If the equipment, such as an sonogram, had been available in the hospital, it is likely that the child’s deformities would have been seen early on, and that the mother never would have had to carry it to term. Her and her family would have been spared the tremendous emotional shock, disappointment, and shame.
While I’m not a fan of simply giving things to Africa, it makes me sick to think that we can digitally map the face of our American babies and ensure their health, while mothers in Africa only hope, for nine months, that their child will be as beautiful and healthy as they dream.
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