Good morning everyone! Meet my student Irene Agadi. Irene's husband called this morning just before 5 a.m. to tell me that she had a healthy baby boy. Irene is doing well too which is amazing because about 1 month ago Irene developed a soccer ball sized cyst/tumor in her vagina. Week before last, doctors at a local hospital said she MUST have surgery to remove the tumor so that she would be able to deliver vaginally. The cost of the surgery was around 200,000 UGX (about $80 at the current exchange rate). An impossible amount of money that required her husband to go to every relative they had plus a few others to scrape together a loan package for the surgery.
C-sections are a curse here in Africa because the recovery time is 6 weeks and no woman in Africa has enough family support or time to recover from a C-section. There is water to fetch twice a day, digging in the garden, clothes to be washed, homes to be swept and mopped, harvesting to be done in the garden, cooking to be done, shopping for food to be done. There is literally no end to the list of work that an African woman must do in order for her family to survive.
And the miracle of Irene's new son is that she was able to have the surgery just in the nick of time and two weeks later, she has a brand new son. Her oldest child, a two year old girl named Mercy, has been beside herself with excitement about the coming of the new baby.
This little boy doesn't have a name yet because it is Ugandan custom to wait until the baby is three days old.
Congratulations!
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