DON’T ROB ME OF MY CHILDHOOD

Soila* is fifteen years old. Typically, her days should be spent in school, her young mind soaking up new knowledge, her blossoming young body exploring sports and games in the great outdoors and the only dilemma she should be dealing with is when she will get home to listen to the latest crunk music.

But today, Soila is lying in the intensive care unit, with tubes running out of every orifice, an inch away from death. And all this, as a result of teenage motherhood.

Soila has grown up in a culture that, to date treats women and girls as part of one’s property. One day, while she was happily skipping in the plains with her friends, walking to the local school, her father was busy having a man to man conversation with a 57 year old local area village elder on her suitability to be a fourth wife.

Unbeknown to Soila, the ceremony had been arranged and for the second time in her life, Soila was to suffer untold trauma. You see, just a year ago, Soila had undergone the traditional female genital cut. Squatting with her peers, gripped in terror and wearing an ashen face, she had her innocence taken away by a rusty blade and a thundering applause.

She was lucky to have survived the physical injury of the female genital cut without infection and attendant complications. But, like most children do when faced with trauma that they don’t know how to deal with, she buried the memory in the deep recesses of her mind and tried to live a normal life.

As a few bony cows changed hands, Soila left everything she knew and became a wife to a man old enough to be her grandfather and 14 months later, she went into labor. She had attended only one ante-natal clinic in the nine months of pregnancy. When labor set in, the traditional birth attendant, who was no less menacing than the woman who had cut her several months earlier, was in attendance.

To say Soila went through torture would be a gross understatement. She presented to us in coma, all swollen up with eyes sealed shut and lips caked with dry blood. She was still carrying her unborn baby, who was now no more.

She underwent a caesarean section to deliver the baby, long dead and already starting to decompose. She was battling sepsis, her blood pressure was hitting the roof, her kidneys had shut down and she was making not a drop of urine.

It was a wonder she survived this far. She labored with the midwife for over 26 hours. Due to absence of monitoring, her elevated blood pressure was not picked up and she was only taken to a nearby health centre when she started convulsing uncontrollably. The midwife who received her shelved her horror, sprang into action, started emergency care and initiated the referral process to the tertiary centre where we were. She literally kept her alive, long enough for her to reach help.

Soila needed intensive care straight off the operating table. The intensivists battled to correct her physiologic derangements, brought about by the high blood pressure, organ failure and sepsis. She would require dialysis for several weeks as her battered kidneys attempted to recover. A brain scan showed her coma was as a result of brain swelling. She was terribly lucky to escape a stroke.

Medicine alone was not going to do it for her. We all prayed and rooted for this little girl to make it. To some of my colleagues, she was young enough to be a daughter. She looked so frail under the sheets, she could break. It took five days for us to see a ray of hope.

Soila progressed from fluttering her eyelids, to breathing on her own and eventually was able to be discharged from the intensive care unit amid cheers from the team. She was however terrified. She had no comprehension of what she had just been through. All she knew was that she was in a strange place, surrounded by strange people and was no longer pregnant. She asked about her baby and we all squirmed. We had no courage to break the news to her.

Along with the grief of mourning her baby, Soila had to deal with a new problem. She had developed a vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF), an abnormal connection between her bladder and her vagina, that led to constant leakage of urine; a condition that would immediately cast her as a social pariah. Her physical recovery was progressing well but her emotional and psychological health was in the doldrums.

How did we get to this? How did a fifteen-year old child come to carry such an overwhelming burden? Child brides are right here in our midst. While the rest of us “civilised” Kenyans go about our lives without a care, some of our harmful cultural practices continue to claim the lives of our children.

We have fought hard to prevent neonatal and child health for those under five, significantly bringing down these statistics through immunisation, improved nutrition, improved hygiene and sanitation and treatment of childhood illnesses. However, we are not yet paying enough attention to the six to eighteen year old age set. The disadvantaged adolescent girl from a poor socio-economic background in the city slums, the orphaned rural girl who lost her parents to HIV and the girl child in the rural community who is still subjected to harmful cultural practises have all happened under our watch.

Soila is a good example of why girls under the age of eighteen should not be getting pregnant. Young age is a well-recognized risk factor many life-threatening pregnancy complications. We didn’t work so hard to keep her alive as a child, to callously toss her aside in teenage.

Interventions needed to prevent teen pregnancy must be employed, whether at a personal level we like them or not. Law enforcement must step up its campaign in prosecuting those marrying off children. Sexuality education among the children must happen. If providing contraception for sexually precocious teens is what it takes, let’s do it. A pious outrage will mean nothing when she is dead!