Name of health worker: Nanyonga Lucy
Occupation: Nurse Midwife
Masaka Regional Referral Hospital
A health worker’s selfless act in helping to get a home for a baby who lost his mother from the hospital and had no relatives.
My experience has been of managing a sickly woman with a 5-months old baby who had no care caretaker. She died and left me with a verbal WILL. This happened in 2018 when I was deployed to the Medical Female Ward at Masaka Regional Referral Hospital. It all started when; one day a woman, suffering from Tuberculosis and AIDS was admitted with a five-month-old baby boy. She was very sick with nothing to use and no one to attend to her from her family. The baby kept disturbing her while in bed, yet she was so weak. I had a baby of my own so I couldn’t help her take care of hers. Since she had tuberculosis, we feared that the baby might contract the disease as well. While in my care, this lady called me and made a WILL stating that,
“Please nurse, I am going to die but take care of my son.”
She told me that she was Rwandese by the origin and got pregnant while in Kampala. She bore her child but were abandoned by the father of this child and he had never taken her to visit his parents. So this little boy had no other relations apart from his mother. She died and was buried in Masaka hospital burial ground. Afterwards, the challenge I faced was getting clothes for the baby but being an advocate for such impoverished people, I rallied my friends who had babies then to give me cloths for this baby. There was the hustle of going to the police to find a place for him. I had to look for someone who was willing to take care of this baby boy. I found a woman, who is now taking care of this boy. He is now 12 years old.
I took a step further to look out for sponsors from Europe who helped and still paying the school fees for this boy and buying food for him and his guardian. Though the persisting challenge is that this boy knows no one from his background; not from his mother’s or father’s side of the family. If I had taken a photo of his mother at the time, he would have a start at searching for her family. He would look at the photo and probably say, “This was my mother.”
My recommendation would be to take photos of incidents such as these to keep records for future references.