Pre-war nurse gets award

[naijababe]

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A 78-year-old nurse and midwife is among seven given awards this year for helping take healthcare to millions of Nigerians in some of the remotest parts of the country.

Sister Therese-Jane Ogu's work began when she was a 20-year old training for Grade 2 midwifery at St Luke's Hospital, Anua in present-day Akwa Ibom and spans periods before and after the Nigerian civil war.

The native of Ahiazu, Mbaise, Imo ran antenatal and child welfare clinics in remote locations, and also "created time in her busy schedule to also do outreach in several villages where she educated mothers on how to care for their children," organisers of the award cited her.

The award came from Nigeria's health ministry and its developing partners—USAID, UKAID, PATHS II, CDC and others—who recognised Sr Ogu for running mobile antenatal clinics for many who did not have the means to travel long distances to hospital.

A nun of Medical Missionaries of Mary, She was cited as sometimes being "in the nick of time to take a difficult delivery and save the life of mother and baby."

Moved by a standing ovation that greeted her tottery but resolute appearance on stage at a workshop deliberating on human resources in health, Sr Ogu said she "didn't know this was going to happen" as she took the award presented by Dr David Okello, the WHO country representative for Nigeria.

She said it was her dream to ease "the suffering caused by so many unqualified midwives" who made life unbearable for women with vesico vaginal fistula, which formed a latter part of her health career in southern Nigeria.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkTZtzpjnaA

Urgent needs in single room

At 30, she started a single-room health centre at Ikot Ene, a rural area in the then southeastern state, where she and two others sisters of the order held clinics for antenatal care and child welfare.

Shortly after attaining grade 1 midwifery in 1966 at Sacred Heart Hospital, Obudu, she took up an assignment at a catholic hospital in Ogoja, handling the maternity at a time when doctors were scarce.

When the Civil War broke out, she was placed under house arrest for 11 months but continued to work.

Even in the heat of war, she answered call for services at St Vincent Hospital, Ndubia, present-day Ebonyi and spent the next ten years there, working in difficult circumstances, sometimes with the aid of just a bush lantern and the assistance of a village girl.

With a diploma in public health, Sr Ogu completed general nursing course in 1978 and took up work in Zungeru Community Health Centre, Niger.

She supervised the building of a health centre in Gussoro, some 45km away—nearly an hour and 15 minutes from the capital Minna. From there she administered to the health needs of 14 villages that could only reached by canoe and 10 miles on a bicycle.

Babies and prizes

It wasn't always easy doing outreach work in places far from home, where language was a problem. But she says she dealt with the problem by arranging for a native who understood English to record her message in the local language on tape, which was then played to the community.

It is a method she used even when she would later work in the northern part of the country.

When she noticed her listeners not paying attention, she said, she quizzed them on things as ordinary as how to keep babies from getting cold. She presented winners with prizes of soap for dressing their babies well to keep warm.

"The next time they came, many of them dressed their babies well, and are ready to answer questions," she said in an interview.

"I also did demonstrations for them—not to give their babies water without first boiling it, and to give breast milk."

It was a message she took from one village to another, and the demonstrations were useful for practice even in Abakiliki, where she encountered guinea worm.

Infestation by the worm "was so bad at the time," she remembers, gingerly seated before microphones and cameras for her 15 minutes of fame. "I started instructing them about digging wells, boiling and filtering water to drink. Before I left there, there was not much guinea worm."

She even scared some by showing pictures of the worm bilharzia to push her point home and stop the local population from unnecessarily wading in rivers. She managed to eliminate some worm infestations that way, coupled with deworming.

Outcasts and hope

After 15 years in Niger, she has returned to Akwa Ibom to work at a newly opened pioneer clinic for vesico vaginal fistula—the brainchild of fellow MMM gynaecologist Sr Dr Ann Ward's 50 years of health work in Nigeria.

The clinic handled women "who were mostly outcasts in their villages because of the repulsive nature of the VVF condition," said organisers of the award, adding the success in work with VVF patients lay in the care she gave them before and after surgery.

Organisers also called Sr Ogu the "silent background gentle power behind those women's recovery and rehabilitation back into society."

Teaching and being taught

Looking back to her first time in Gussoro, she remembers her first sight—a shocking confrontation with a severely malnourished four-year-old child still nursing.

After demonstrations to teach local women simple hygiene, "within a month, the child's health developed," she recalls fondly. Now the child is through secondary school.

"When I saw that, I thanked God and the mother foundress [of MMM], who started this and came to Nigeria to help them in teaching. I thank my God for bring me there to help."

The help also included training traditional birth attendants to help women through delivery—all, she says, are simple health tips that save lives.

Today, she says, there aren't many midwives selfless giving themselves to their work. To her thinking, many are just ward orderlies pairing up with doctors.

"The midwives won't even do their part to drive these people out, stay in hospital and do the work, and not let orderlies do the delivery for them."

"Do your work and you get your reward. Of course, when a child is delivered, mother healthy and child healthy, the joy that two lives are saved, is a great joy that you can get."

Attribution: Compass, DailyTrust, Guardian, NationalMirror, NewsWatch, SaharaReporters, Sensor and Vanguard.