A salve amid Darfur woes: better midwives

In a classroom full of young women in white veils, Fatima Alameen demonstrates the techniques of a safe birth with a plastic dummy on a table. With rubber gloves and surgical mask, she "catches" a newborn baby – a handsewn cloth doll with an umbilical cord – wraps the baby in a towel and applies a clamp to the umbilical cord.

Married at age 10; difficult birth

All the students has come here because they have suffered complicated births themselves.

Some, like Aziza Jiddu Suleiman, were married off at an early age, a tradition that persists among the Fur and Arab tribes of the Darfur region, and have lived lives that would make Charles Dickens shudder.

Married at age 10, she became pregnant almost immediately.

The birth was complicated; Ms. Suleiman, still a child, lost her baby and suffered an injury that left her unable to control her urine.

Her husband divorced her soon afterward, citing unpleasant side-effects of her injury, and her inability to bear further children. She was just 11 years old.

For the next nine years, she sought shelter, work as a cleaner, and eventual treatment for her condition (called fistula) at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in Al Fasher, also funded by UNFPA.

Now 20, Suleiman has decided to turn her tragic life into a source of strength for others. She wants to become a midwife.

"I feel two feelings about my life," says Suleiman, smiling and cracking her knuckles. "First I felt weak because, although I was not assaulted, I was ignored by others because of my problem. But I also feel strong, because I'm going to help others to avoid this same problem in the future."

General MacArthur of midwifery

If Suleiman and her classmates are the hope of a new generation of mothers, then Zainab Juma Nimeir is their Gen. Douglas MacArthur, tough, reliable, and unwilling to just fade away.

Trained as a midwife in 1952, after her father died, leaving her in charge of her younger brothers and sisters, she became one of the first midwives in Darfur.

"I convinced myself that I could help all my Sudanese sisters, I was doing something humanitarian," says the septuagenarian, who performed her duties until retiring two years ago.

War has brought the biggest changes to the region, she says, and the same insecurity that forces families to come to relief camps – where they can at least receive some modicum of healthcare – also keeps more remote families from even venturing out of their houses at night.

"Since the war, people are afraid; even if they call you to their houses, you are afraid to go unless they come pick you up," she says.

But that doesn't keep them from showing their appreciation for her. When Mrs. Nimeir goes out into the countryside, she says, "People come up to me and say, 'You are my mother.' When I go to the village, people give me a sheep or a goat as a gift."

And this gives her an influence in villages that usually only village chiefs and tribal elders can expect. "We build on a relationship of sisterhood with our patients," says Nimeir. "They listen to us. It's a matter of trust."

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