How baby survived dog attack after mother left her in the bush
What you need to know:
- When she arrived at the hospital, she was only a day old, but her face had been badly mutilated
She was denied parental love and thrown to the dogs, practically.
But like the proverbial cat with nine lives, Baby Malaika — as she has come to be known in her popular ward — has refused to die from the massive trauma that she suffered in her first days of life.
When she arrived at the Coast General Hospital, she was only a day old but her face had been badly mutilated by what seemed to be dog bites.
Half her right arm had been bitten off just above the elbow.
“She was brought to the hospital by a Good Samaritan from Rabai and we quickly started to work to stabilise her,” nurse Cecilia Muthami says.
The surgeon who conducted corrective surgery on the girl Dr Mark Solomon said she was recovering better than had been expected.
“She had sustained severe injury to her right upper limb and facial structures. We had to amputate her right upper forearm and repair the facial injuries.”
Medical Services Minister Anyang’ Nyong’o was among those who visited the baby on Wednesday. She is too young to be fed by the bottle and is being fed by tubes through the nose.
The scars on her face and amputated arm will forever tell of the vicious attack in the wild that welcomed her to the world.
Mr Tsuma Mwandalo, the herdsman who found the child while gathering grass for cattle on Saturday morning, recounted the incident terming her rescue as sheer fluke.
“I was answering a call of nature when I heard a baby crying and stumbled upon her in a hole a few metres away,’’ he said.
Mr Renson Chumbe, the medic at Bwagamoyo medical clinic who gave her first aid, said the child was brought in bad shape. It took the local administration two days to comb Bwagamoyo Village and trace the baby’s mother.
“We searched the nearby homesteads and found four women who had recently given birth, interrogated them and took one them to the clinic for examinations,” said Ms Florence Chokwe, a village elder.
When the medic confirmed that the woman had recently given birth and that her breasts remained heavy with unsuckled milk, she was taken to Rabai police booth before being transferred to Kaloleni.
And on Monday when she appeared at the Kaloleni Law Courts, Ms Grace Mwadziwe Mwinga, pleaded not guilty to the charge of child neglect.
Ms Mwingi told senior resident magistrate Sylvia Wewa that it was the estranged father of the child who dumped her in the forest.
The case will be mentioned on March 27 and heard on April 5.
