Jungle Baby the Sequel

Just some follow up to the previous story…

Melissa and I sat talking this evening over dinner. Among the topics of our conversation surfaced the Sunday morning birth we attended, and Melissa shared some other details that she has found out since then. The story shocked me, and saddened me, while at the same making me even more thankful for the guiding hand of God in that precious baby’s delivery.

It seems that Stacy’s mother, who goes to our church, had been in total denial that her daughter was pregnant. She would become very angry any time the health worker, Melissa, or any of the other church members commented about a possible pregnancy. Telling everyone forcefully that Stacy was “just getting fat” and that “her grandmother was fat, and she is just taking after her.” Even the Friday before the delivery she had said that the community was trying to spread rumors about her family that weren’t true.

The morning of the baby’s entrance into the world, Stacy began having contractions early in the morning, and kept going to the outhouse over-and-over again. Finally her mother decided that something must be wrong, and it finally dawned on her that her daughter was in fact pregnant and was in the process of delivery. By that time it was around 5am, and she ran into the village to get the health worker about 1 mile away.

Meanwhile, Stacy was walking up the steps to the house and was becoming so weak from the contractions and labor that she fell onto the stairs and couldn’t get up. Her father asked her what was wrong, and she told him that she was in labor, he told her that she had “made her own bed, and now had to lie in it” and refused to help her. She had to crawl from the steps into her room by herself, where she gave birth to the baby without anyone there to help her. When we arrived Kim, another church member was there, and Melissa and I assumed that she had delivered the baby, but it turns out she arrived about 10 minutes after the baby was born and lying on the floor. We didn’t arrive until about 20 minutes after the delivery, and Stacy and the baby still lay alone on the floor. Stacy’s mother and the health worker arrived right after we did.

I amazes me that a young girl could go through that alone. I can only praise God that there were no complications, because Stacy could have hemorrhaged and been dead before we arrived, with no one to notice. The other miracle was that the baby was still alive, there are multiple reasons that the baby could have died while they both lay there on the floor with Stacy too weak to do anything for her baby. I am thankful for the watchful care of a loving Father who blessed so abundantly as this new life came into the world.