I gave birth in matatu, thanks to a stubborn nursing team

Tuesday, May 5 seemed like any other day for Grace Waithera.

Everything unfolded as it routinely did on her weekdays; except that today, afraid of the Nairobi traffic jam that had become maddening on many of the routes from her home in Buru Buru Phase II to town, she decided to leave her car home and use a passenger service vehicle.

She boarded a matatu plying the Kariobangi South-CBD route via Buru Buru, sat next to the driver, and, like many other Nairobi commuters nowadays, fished out her phone and buried herself in it.

But as she scrolled through threads of funny text on social media, a few rows of seats behind, another woman, Christine Auma, 26, was holding tightly onto her husband, Patrick Oluoch.

Pregnant and well past her due date, Auma had woken up at 5am that morning to a pesky recurrent pain in her belly. Soon that pesky pain had developed into the niggly lower back pain associated with labour pains.

She had brushed off false labour just a few days earlier, and today she had initially thought that the pain in her belly was just the after-shock tremors of that false alarm.

MATATU OR BICYCLE?

Already a mother of two, she had some experience in childbirth, and so when the pain moved to her back, she knew Baby Number Three was on the way. She was going into labour, she knew.

And then, despite having gone through this twice earlier, she panicked.

From the humble comfort of her house in Kiambiu Slums on the fringes of Eastleigh Section Three, Auma reached for her phone and called her husband, a guard who had spent the night on duty.

“I then lay down and tried to think beautiful, positive thoughts as I waited for him to cycle home,” says Auma.

Thirty long minutes later, her husband arrived home, tired, sweaty and, like his wife, panicked. He did not have time to catch his breath, and so the couple stepped out of their small house and, in the cacophonous morning hustle of Kiambiu, weighed their options.

Auma had to get to hospital fast, and there were two ways to make that happen: the first was for her to climb onto her husband’s bicycle, hold tightly onto him as he cycled like a mad man towards Kenyatta National Hospital across town, and pray that she would be plucky enough not to lose her balance and fall down in the middle of a labour pang. The other was for them to leave her husband’s rickety bicycle home, walk a few hundred metres to the road, and board a matatu to Kenyatta.

Auma settled for the latter. Pumwani Maternity Hospital, just a few kilometres nearby, was a no-no, but we will get to that in a moment.

Once in the bus, Patrick sat quietly next to his wife, who was now grabbing her arm, and prayed that the bus would be fast enough to Nairobi CBD, from where they were to board another bus to Kenyatta.

Stressed and looking for a valve, Patrick started to hum. His wife, now almost crumpling in his arms, told him to please shut up; he was making an already bad situation worse with his monotonous drone. She could stand the labour pains, the cramps in her belly and the rough ride to hospital, but not the irritating whine of her husband. Patrick obliged.

“She was quiet for about 10 minutes,” he says, and then she gripped me so tight I though she would tear off my arm. Then she sat up and made this loud, shrieking noise. Everyone in the bus turned to look at us. Auma was now squatting in the bus, and then she broke the news to me.

SHARP U-TURN

‘I’m going to give birth in the bus!’ she said.”

“What?” Patrick asked. “What?”

“I’m going to give birth in this bus!” Auma repeated.

Patrick had heard her alright, but sometimes these things are hard to imagine, let alone live through. And so the only reaction his tired and stressed self could muster was “what?”.

He looked around and noticed they had just passed Starehe Boy’s Centre on Juja Road. There was no way they were going to make it to town and onwards to Kenyatta, he reasoned, and so he asked the driver to turn back and head towards Pumwani Maternity Hospital.

The driver looked at the couple, stopped for a few seconds, and, without as much as a whimper, made a sharp u-turn towards Pumwani.

In the wrong direction

Waithera, who was still buried in her mobile phone, did not notice that they were going the wrong direction until she briefly peeled her eyes off the screen of the smartphone to behold the horror of driving on the wrong side of the road, and in the opposite direction!

She had just made an appointment in town in 30 minutes’ time, and now she was heading away from that appointment, not towards it.

“What’s happening!” she yelled at the conductor and asked him to give her back her fare change because she was going to alight from his godforsaken matatu.

“Madam, we are trying to sort out something here,” the conductor told her, the young man unable to find the right words to explain the situation to Waithera.

He did not need to find any words, though, because no sooner had he informed Waithera that he was “sorting something” than she heard a loud scream from the back of the matatu.

“The first thing that came to my mind was that we were under a terrorist attack,” says Waithera. “That scream was so piercing and terrifying that I almost jumped out of the moving bus. And then I heard some heavy huffing and puffing and instantly knew someone was in labour.”

Waithera jumped into action. In between pacifying the woman and screaming at other motorists to give way, she forgot that she had an appointment in town in 30 minutes.

BABY'S HEAD

It was too late, though, because, unable to hold the baby any longer, Auma gently lifted her dress and started pushing.

Waithera, now playing the triple roles of traffic marshalling, crowd control and nursing, asked all the males inside the matatu to either alight or move to the back.

All the women in the matatu then surrounded Auma, erecting a temporary leso curtain that divided the rear of the bus and the front.

She then lifted Auma and propped her into a squatting position. Around them, horns blared, ambulances whizzed by, irritated drivers cursed and bleated, a gust of wind blew dust in the skies, children skipped ropes, dukawallahs handed loaves of bread to their customers... Nairobi was on the move.

As she tried to steady Auma, Waithera felt the muscles of the traumatised woman tighten and then, almost immediately, loosen up. Auma looked up to the woman holding her and, faintly, dropped the bombshell.

“The baby is out,” she said.

“What?” Waithera, like Auma’s husband earlier, asked, almost absent-mindedly.

“The baby is out,” Auma repeated.

Waithera looked on the floor but saw no baby. Then she moved her hands up Auma’s squatting frame and felt the baby’s head pressed against its mother’s underwear.

At about the same time, the mini-bus made a screeching halt at the gates of Pumwani Maternity Hospital. The guards studied it and informed the driver that no, they were not going to let a bus full of agitated passengers into the hospital grounds.

The driver informed the guards that a woman was in distress inside the bus, and that she and her baby needed urgent medical attention, so would they please open the gates?

“No way!” one of the guards shouted back at the driver, who then lost his cool and started hooting furiously. The guard, in return, also blew his fuse and shouted at the driver, asking him take his circus elsewhere.

AT PUMWANI GATES

Inside the bus, Waithera toiled to steady Auma, who was now starting to run short of breath and risk both her life and that of her baby.

With the diesel engine of the matatu groaning at the gates of Nairobi’s leading maternity hospital and a woman groaning inside the bus because stubborn guards would not open the gates to let her through, Waithera told Auma not to wait any longer.

“Push, push, and push with all your might,” she urged her.

Auma clenched her arms, bit her lips and let out a mighty mother’s cry. As she slumped back into the supporting arms of Waithera, a three-kilogramme bundle felt, for the first time, the cool breeze of Nairobi mornings.

She had given birth outside Pumwani, and the impatient little boy who could not wait for the guards to come back to their senses and open the gates let out a healthy, sweet wail.

His father, Patrick, had stepped out of the matatu and rushed inside the hospital to call for help as Auma laboured.

“Please help, my wife is in labour outside the gate,” he had shouted at the first team of nurses he saw. To his chagrin, however, they had just dawdled, unperturbed by his cries for help.

“They kept telling me to calm down, I will be attended to,” he says. “I had to yell at them for someone to pay attention to me. As if that was not enough, we were all astonished when the nurse tied only the umbilical cord on the baby and not on the placenta. She had to be called back by the passengers as she was leaving to tie the other end. It was incredulous. Can you imagine what would have happened had there been nobody to tell her to come back?”

Auma had to be taken in for the placenta to be removed. Because she had had a problem-free delivery she was discharged on the same day, and Waithera went looking for her later that evening to see the how the baby was fairing.

TANGO ONE

Other than Waithera, the couple say they were thoroughly impressed by the patience of the matatu crew. “I want to thank them for coming to my aid without a grumble because, as you know, our matatu operators are not the most dependable,” says Auma, who is recovering at home.

Her newborn son is nicknamed ‘Tango One’, in honour of the bus he was born in, and which goes by the same tag.

Waithera, who only has basic first aid training, says the incident left her traumatised by the quality of service in Kenyan hospitals.

She could not understand, she says, why the nurses at Pumwani and the guards at the gate could not see how emergent the situation was, and wonders what would have happened to Auma and her baby had they not received help from fellow passengers.

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The administration of Pumwani Maternity Hospital was not available for comment.

Auma and her newborn were discharged from hospital the same day after being given a clean bill of health. She says she would have wished to make it to Kenyatta National Hospital rather than the nearby Pumwani.

Nurses at the hospital have been on a go-slow, demanding better security and the hiring of more personnel.

They say they are overworked and under-appreciated.

The hospital, meanwhile, is undergoing a major upgrade to, in the words on Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero, “improve service delivery”.

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