By Esther OLUKA.
I found Berna Awori seated behind her sewing machine making a skirt in front of her house.
She was dressed in a white and purple kitenge. Just beside her, a little boy sat, scooping millet porridge from a blue cup with a spoon.
“This is my four-year-old son, Israel Otim. He is the only offspring I have in this world,” Awori says while standing up to usher me to a seat.
As she resumes to take up her seat, she asks Otim if he has finished eating his porridge, a question he replies in the negative in a timid voice.
The distinctive trait that I notice about Awori is her radiant positive energy. She keeps laughing and flashing a smile from time to time.
And even when she finally opens up to tell me about the six miscarriages that she has suffered in the past before finally having a baby, still, her mood or tone of voice do not change much.
“I am always happy because of my child who has brought too much joy in my life,” Awori says.
She was not always this way. “I was often crying in the past and contemplating on committing suicide because of the miscarriages I was having,” she reveals.
The first and second miscarriages
The first one happened in 2003. “I remember a bloody fluid gushing out of my body as I was having my hair plaited,” she says. It was while at a clinic in town where she later went to seek medical assistance that Awori was told she had suffered a miscarriage of a pregnancy estimated to be six weeks. Malaria was stated as the likely cause.
The second one happened in 2004 when the pregnancy was four and half months old. A dead foetus came out of her as she was easing herself. This was without experiencing any sort of bleeding or pain.
“I cried so much that night and eventually when I calmed down, I called my mother on phone and she consoled me. I then called the father of the child who took me to a health facility.”
At the facility, she was advised that the next time she got pregnant; she should have a cervical stitch in order to hold the baby intact in the womb.
The third miscarriage
A year later in 2005, when she learnt that she was pregnant again for the third time, she was overwhelmed by excitement.
“I was not scared despite of what had happened before. I was just overwhelmed that I was carrying a baby again in my womb.”
A stitch was done shortly before the pregnancy made four months.
“It was a very simple surgery that was done while I was sedated. I was later cautioned to stay away from having sex until the time the stitch was removed,” she says.
When she later notified her partner about this, he was supportive.
“But at around six months, as I was alighting from a taxi one morning, a female passenger who had been seated next to me pointed out that my dress was wet,” Awori says.
She did not really give it much thought until after reaching her work place, Steers and Debonairs Pizza, then located on Kampala Road, where she worked as a cashier. She shared the information with one of her female colleagues. “She suspected that my water had broken and advised me to rush to hospital as soon as possible,” she says.
After requesting for a day off from her boss, she worryingly hurried to Nsambya hospital for a check-up.
“I was told that I was in the early stages of labour and had to be induced. The next 24 hours were agonising as I was going through labour, she says, adding, “And when the baby was born, I did not hear it cry, but felt its mild movements. However, 10 minutes later when it stopped moving, the medical personal confirmed that it had died.” I cried over the loss of my child, Awori says. And to make matters worse, the man responsible chose this awful time to walk out of her life.
“I guess the pain was too much for him to bear and that is why he left me,” she says.
The same man was the one responsible for her first and second pregnancies. Her family on the other hand were very supportive.
“My parents and siblings were my counsellors. They did everything they could to make sure that I was fine and this included checking on me from time to time.”
Comments
About Author
