Yesterday morning I woke up, got dressed, arrived to work ready for an uneventful day in the office and by 10:30am I was sitting in the maternity ward at the hospital. Long story short, I received a phone call from a friend whose friend (I’ll call her “A”) was about to have a C section and needed someone there, but there was no one else. The hospital is down the street from the YMCA so she called me and asked if I could go. And so there I was sitting in the hallway with my laptop doing work while A waited for the doctor to come.
It took me a good while to find A; navigating the hospital’s maze of indoor and outdoor hallways, asking a whole lot of questions, being told “she’s not here” multiple times, and almost getting yelled at for trying to walk through a door I needed permission to enter. I was spared the yelling when the guard – who wasn’t in uniform so I didn’t know he was a guard – realized that I’m not local.
I finally found myself in the right place and as I sat there I noticed that pretty much all of the women, including those in rooms, were alone. The exception was one man sitting next to me with his wife, causing me to wonder why there weren’t more men with their partners or support people in general. My answer came when a security guard asked the lone man to leave and wait outside of the ward.
I’m not sure how the labour and maternity wards are set up here, but I was sitting in what they call the “Female Ward”, and it seemed the only men allowed were hospital staff. I asked one of the pregnant women next to me if her husband will be able be with her as she gives birth and she said no, not until the baby is here. There seem to be strict rules around support people here. When I went in to see A, I was promptly told not to sit on the bed and to make my conversation with her quick. But on the flip side, I asked Dorothy what her experience was like when she was pregnant and she said the nurses encouraged her husband to be in the room. She was at a private hospital though and said that government run hospitals like the one I was at may have different rules.
In general, I do not like hospitals in developing countries. I find them clinical, depressing and there are no attempts to make them seem less so (I know that they’re not all the same). They also remind me of my own experiences with the hospital in St Kitts, especially being admitted when I was small and how scared I was. Yesterday there was also a particular “hospital smell” that I couldn’t identify, but it made me feel nauseous. It wasn’t all bad though; my urge to get out of there was temporarily suspended and replaced by complete happiness when I saw a nurse walk by with a newborn, or as I like to call them, brand new babies! I actually got teary-eyed at the sight of the little bundle.
In the end I didn’t get to see A’s baby, because like most things in Ghana, nothing happened on time. When I went to check with the nurse about how long it would be, she told me “it will be a while to go and come”. I got news today that the new baby girl was born this morning though; I wish I got to meet her.
I can’t get enough of Ghanaian babies…or babies in general. Vero’s daughter Adom and I.
Collecting Stamps 