“My baby is alive again!”
From the bottom of a mother’s heart.
Zainab is a little 4 year girl. She is the single child of a poor mother and father. For her parents Zaniab is everything. The whole world and the universe. She is the past, the present and the future ahead. She is the meaning of life for this couple. And they are raising her with a special care, a ultimate passion. With all the love of seeing her growing as the flower of life itself. This flower, this rose, in her innocence, quietness and sweetness is their only source of happiness and joy in their life, with its hardship and toughness. Not enough, Zainab is their source of energy which powers them everyday of their life, whenever they feel helpless and sad.
This year, suddenly, as a heavy storm falling down over the zink plates of their roof, thunder and pain was threatening their sweetest flower. Zainad became very sick. Firstly she felt pains in her stomach. In the beginning her parents thought it was is a normal pain. But the pain got more and more severe.
Her father took her to the nearest health center trying to find remedy and a cure to save her life. But this turned his hopes more deepened into frustration and despair. The health center couldn’t do a thing. They couldn’t save Zainab. Medicine for cholera was no longer available. Behind the falling walls of castles built of hope, both the mother and the father were graveling with despair, helpless and lost.
Tears come back to her mother’s when she says crying:
“ My daughter started to decay in front my very eyes.
It is a very painful feeling to see a part of your heart dying while you can do nothing to avoid it”
Zainab’s parents, poor of means and solutions, had as their only alternative left, to take her to the Al Jumhory Hospital, depositing there all the hope they had left for saving their daughter’s life. And in good time they did it, that day when they set course heading to Al Jumhory. It was behind the doors of Al Jumhory hospital where a spring of hope was waiting. As it was there where the fountain for renewing the poor family’s reservoirs of hope was laying.
Actually, in the start, they didn’t expected what they were about to experience from the first day. In particular because it was not their first visit to this hospital.
From previous times they could remember a carelessness, visible with the whole hospital staff while dealing with any incoming emergency case.
This time everything was different, totally different.
The hospital staff treated Zainab very carefully under supervision of Vision Hope personnel in the DTC. And Vision Hope’s cholera project had equipped and furnished the DTC from A to Z.
Zainab went then through the infection control triage that was in place and she received a comprehensive and free medical care from the hospital.
Zainab and her mother were first asked to wash their hands with chlorine water and then they had their feet sprayed before putting her in a bed.
The mother says “I was very happy when I found that I don’t have to pay to treat my daughter as I have no money to do so. That helped me a lot.”
Zainab was admitted to the DTC along with her mother, staying at her side, for 4 days! But that was not everything.
As the father was allowed to leave and to go back home, after spraying his foot again, he was questioned if there was a similar case in his own neighborhood?
The project’s health promoters followed him back to his village.
There they gave him and his neighbors some awareness on cholera and what the precautions they should take and the instructions to follow to protect themselves from such a deadly disease.
The project’s health promoters also trained the local people on hygiene, including with how to chlorinate the drinking water. They also distributed hygiene kits showing them how to use them.
For Vision Hope International, saving the life of this little girl and other cases is not only saving the life of one person. It is saving the life of three people and maybe the lives of the whole community in the village.
When Zainab and her mother were told that they could leave the hospital, the mother said “My baby is alive again”.
It came from the bottom of a mother’s heart.
The DTC was carrying and providing services at high quality and in great time. That was the result of a lot of professional work and cooperation at policy and funding level interpreted into quality service that can save lives of very poor people in remote villages in Yemen.
All this months after, after Zainad’s story took place, after the start of the cholera outbreak by the end of April 2017, the overall picture of the situation is still quite dark. Over 950,000 of suspected cases have been reported before the end of November 2017. With over 2,100 associated deaths. By the end of 2017 the total of 1 million cases will surely be reached.
The epidemic is not yet controlled and no one dares to forecast its end. Prevention and treatment is all that can be done to avoid more deaths.
By March 2017, the United Nations considered Yemen the “Worst humanitarian crisis in the World” after its foundation, in 1945.
