Last night John in Ghana and I were messaging back and forth online. He told me about a young woman who came to him for help three days ago. She was Moslem, her mother begged in the streets to stay alive. The girl was having severe pains and was unable to even stand during menstruation. With some other details I won’t go into here.
John gave her the money that should have gone to his own medicine (he is having more bleeding and frankly looks terrible but John is always giving his own money away) and she left to be cared for. I don’t know what happened afterward, I have not yet heard from John today.
But this started me thinking. Since John and I have been working together to help people in Ghana by far the greatest number of people who come to us in emergencies are women with some sort of gynecological problem. Or childbirth, which is, of course, basically the same sort of thing.
The first was John’s own girlfriend at the time, who had simply stopped passing fluid during her period. She wound up in the hospital for that. Later, after they were married, they found in the last stages of her first pregnancy that the baby was breach. The doctors refused to do anything about it unless they were paid first. I paid my rent two weeks late that month, the first time I was ever late, to pay for the baby to be turned in the womb. The child was born safely and is now eight years old, a rambunctious and beautiful little boy. It is one of the things in my wretched, wasted life that I am most proud of.
Two years ago one of John’s sisters-in-law was suffering severe pains and we got her to the doctor only to find that she had ovarian cancer. There was nothing that we could do and she died in agony.
Another young woman from the villages came to John with the same kind of menstrual pains that the girl above is having. She needed an operation and is now well and back in her hometown.
And of course there are the pregnant women who come to John because things aren’t going well. Zenabu, the lady in the photo above, endured months of pain and danger before the baby was finally born. There were several others before her, and the latest is Favour, the seventeen year old Nigerian girl who was just released from the hospital with her little newborn.
John has certainly helped others with other sorts of problems but I honestly think most of the serious problems that he is confronted with are women’s health issues.
It is sad to think how many women in Africa are suffering and dying from these same sorts of problems. And elsewhere too, of course. Women have unique health issues and pregnancy itself is dangerous and life-threatening. That is just a fact.
And then we have our (mostly) male legislators here in the US who are passing laws that basically make healthcare for women impossible. We have relatively good medical services here in the US but, to our shame, fanatics and arrogant, ignorant men who think they know better than women themselves what they should do are taking those services away.
My grandmother’s mother died in childbirth back in 1907. Today she wouldn’t have died. Are we really going back to that? It is appalling to even think of it.
The ladies in Ghana are struggling to obtain even the most basic of health services. We should help them as we can, and not put our own ladies here in America in the same situation.
This is my little rant for the day.
-
I just wanted to add, here, that we have linked GoFundMe sites for Anabel and Favour to our little non-profit webpage. The site also has all of the blogs about the people we have been working with, people projects, recent activities and more photos than I can post here. Check it out, but be kind. Remember it is a work in progress.
www.p9foundation.com/...
As was pointed out to me, not all of the GoFundMe links were working. That problem has mostly been fixed. We have also added the GoFundMe for little Vicky but that one still has a bit of a glitch. We will get that corrected shortly but it does work.
Ah, the joys of an amateur attempting to use the internet!