Assalamu aleykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu sisters!
My dear readers, today I shall tell you about one the life moments that are intrinsically linked with the purpose of women on Earth and that plays a extremely important and meaningful role in a woman’s life – giving birth to a child.
When I first arrived in the refugee camp in Syria I was astonished to notice that there were also pregnant Muslim Sisters, and that they were forced to give birth under such harsh conditions. It was simply one of the trials that women had to endure inside the camp.
Usually, women inside the camp gave birth in their tents, on the floor. There was no medicine, there were no doctors, there were not even the most basic hygiene conditions. Each time one the Sisters was about to give birth, we all had to run all through the camp and search for another Sister that had at least some basic knowledge about being a midwife. Sometimes, we could not find them in their tents, so we had to continue our search while the expecting mother was in active labour.
Giving birth was a difficult trial for women inside the camp, more difficult than most things there. When a woman felt that her due time is near, she would usually try her best to reach the gates, in order to request aid and asks that she would be sent to the hospital. However, soldiers would no listen to our pleas, and they would simply scorn us and respond: “No. Stay in your camp and die there. You will not be going anywhere”. The soon to be mother would then be forced to go back to her tent, while having contractions and generally being in great pain.
As I mentioned earlier, inside the camp we had not proper conditions to give birth and then to take care (medically speaking) of a newborn baby. We only had a mattress on the floor of our tents, a tablecloth, a kitchen knife to cut the umbilical cord, an emptied-out pen to clear the airways of the newborn baby and, if we were lucky, some diapers. Even antiseptics or antibiotics were not always available, or and option on hand for a young mother and her newborn child. I imagine you can easily see and understand, my dear reads, that these conditions were completely unsanitary.
But this was just the beginning of the young mother’s trials inside de camp.
Many of the new mothers, because of the stress, exhaustion, lack of proper nutrition and other factors, could not lactate and breastfeed their newborn babies. Thus, if one wanted her newborn child to live, it was imperative to find and buy formula. However, the types of formula that you could acquire inside the camp were not always the appropriate ones for a newborn.
Something like this happened to a Muslim Sister I knew and befriended inside the camp. Like many other Sisters there, she also had an extremely difficult birth and could not lactate afterwards. She began searching for formula for her infant, and she tried out several types of formula, but none of them seemed to agree with her newborn. She tried every type of formula she could get her hands on inside the camp, but with no use. Her baby not only did not gain weight, but I began to rapidly lose weight. The baby had already been born underweight and continued to lose even more weight rapidly, would constantly throw up and cry of hunger. At some point, the baby stopped crying at all and it seemed as if it were just a matter of days until his final demise. Fortunately, just at this point, the mother managed to find a new type of formula and she bought it. Even though the Sister was exhausted, depressed and completely without hope o saving her little baby, she prayed to Allah, and He, the Allmerciful, listened to her prayers. This new kind of formula agreed with the baby. Slowly, the baby began to recover, started eating properly and gained some weight.
You can imagine, my dear readers, that moments such as the one I described earlier were extremely difficult for a moment, especially since sometimes there was no solution at hand and no happy ending for everyone, as it was the fortunate case with the Sister I mentioned.
As I have explained in one of my previous posts, in the camp there was a major problem with having access to medical care. Because of the lack of necessary medication and without the supervision of a proper medical professions, there were times when the Sisters died during labor. After they arrived inside the camp, many Muslim Sisters were wounded and / or exhausted from the long road. Every time when, while in labor, the Sisters were carried in blankets to the gates to receive medical assistance because they were so exhausted they did not have the strength anymore to stand up and walk on their own, the soldiers would answer, without even looking or caring, „go back to the camp. For us, it would be much better if all of you just died”.
To this day, many of these problems still persist inside the refugee camps in Syria, and simply being in that place is a constant and daily battle for survival. I hope Allah will free all hostages, keep them safe and give them the best life conditions possible.
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