Named after the flooded river after birth on dry land

The twins were born after the family fled to a relief camp set up outside IBA in Sukkur.

SUKKUR: The babies lie side by side on a patchwork quilt on the ground, two little tea cakes, the talcum powder dusted around their necks, sugar icing. Their tiny eyes are shut but lashings of kohl make mini Egyptian mummies out of them.

Meet the twins. “I’m going to send them to school,” says their mother, who is a hari on the Banglani estate in Karampur. The twins were born after the family fled to a relief camp set up outside the Institute of Business Administration in Sukkur. They are the sixth and seventh additions to her family and she hasn’t schooled the first five children. People around her snicker. She’s going to send these twins to school because they were born in the IBA camp, they say. The irony is lost on no one.

Across town, two similar bundles of joy were delivered into this world after the flooding. They were named, ever so aptly, Darya or river and Mehran, after the river Indus. “When they are grown up and someone asks, they can say that they were born when the [river broke its banks],” says Agha Mohsin Ali, who has given shelter to the family along with 40 others at his Sukkur house. The babies were born a week or so ago and weren’t named for the first six days, according to tradition. But then Agha Mohsin helped out.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Aga Khan University Hospital’s Professor Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta estimates that we’re looking at 50,000 childbirths in Sindh alone.

Dr Sahibjan Badar’s doctors with the government’s maternal, newborn and child healthcare programme, have already been delivering children in taxis and tents. Her teams are spread over Sindh in mobile units and have been distributing their phone numbers as they go along. One night, one of them received a phone call from one camp, where only one person had a cell phone. “The doctor rushed there to pick up the woman and put her in a taxi,” says Badar. “But it was too late and the baby came out on the seat. The doctor stopped the taxi, ripped her dupatta and wrapped the child in it.”

Their teams have not visited all of Sukkur’s estimated 100 camps, but from those that they have visited, 2,140 pregnant women emerged. “They don’t know anything about their cycle,” says Badar. “They measure it by the last moon.” She and her doctors discovered that these communities have at least one dai or midwife where they live. But with the chaos of the flooding and the displacement, these healthcare helpers are nowhere to be found.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 25^th, 2010.