What
Would Happen If The Virgin Mary Came To Bethlehem Today?
By Johann Hari
24 December 2006
The
Independent
In
two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains
of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another
mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down
town is trying not to howl.
Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed
27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the
Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured,"
she says.
Fadia clutches a set of keys
tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged
sentences what happened. "It was 5pm when I started to feel the
contractions coming on," she says. She was already nervous about
the birth - her first, and twins - so she told her husband to grab her
hospital bag and get her straight into the car.
They stopped to collect her
sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away.
But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was
allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't
wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat.
One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake
up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't
understand."
Her family begged the soldiers
to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back
seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia
delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I
don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,"
she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud
had died, and doctors said they could "certainly" have saved
his life by getting him to an incubator.
"Now Mariam is at an
age when she asks me where her brother is," Fadia says. "She
wants to know what happened to him. But how do I explain it?" She
looks down. "Sometimes at night I scream and scream." In the
years since, she has been pregnant four times, but she keeps miscarrying.
"I couldn't bear to make another baby. I was convinced the same
thing would happen to me again," she explains. "When I see
the [Israeli] soldiers I keep thinking - what did my baby do to Israel?"
Since Fadia's delivery, in
2002, the United Nations confirms that a total of 36 babies have died
because their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli checkpoints.
All across Bethlehem - all across the West Bank - there are women whose
pregnancies are being disturbed, or worse, by the military occupation
of their land.
In Salfit, on the other side
of the West Bank, Jamilla Alahad Naim, 29, is waiting for the first
medical check-up of her five-month pregnancy. "I am frightened
all the time," she says. "I am frightened for my baby because
I have had very little medical treatment and I cannot afford good food
... I know I will give birth at home with no help, like I did with Mohammed
[her last child]. I am too frightened to go to hospital because there
are two checkpoints between our home [and there] and I know if you are
detained by the soldiers, the mother or the baby can die out there in
the cold. But giving birth at home is very dangerous too."
Hindia Abu Nabah - a steely
31-year-old staff nurse at Al Zawya Clinic, in Salfit district - says
it is "a nightmare" to be pregnant in the West Bank today.
"Recently, two of our pregnant patients here were tear-gassed in
their homes ... The women couldn't breathe and went into premature labour.
By the time we got there, the babies had been delivered stillborn."
Many of the medical problems
afflicting pregnant women here are more mundane than Jamilla's darkest
fears: 30 per cent of pregnant Palestinians suffer from anaemia, a lack
of red blood cells. The extreme poverty caused by the siege and now
the international boycott seems to be a key factor. The doctors here
warn grimly that as ordinary Palestinians' income evaporates, they eat
more staples and fewer proteins - a recipe for anaemia. There is some
evidence, they add, that women are giving the best food to their husbands
and children, and subsisting on gristle and scraps. The anaemia leaves
women at increased risk of bleeding heavily and contracting an infection
during childbirth.
Earlier this year, conditions
for pregnant women on the West Bank - already poor - fell off a cliff.
Following the election of Hamas, the world choked off funding for the
Palestinian Authority, which suddenly found itself unable to pay its
doctors and nurses. After several months medical staff went on strike,
refusing to take anything but emergency cases. For more than three months,
the maternity wards of the West Bank were empty and echoing. Beds lay,
perfectly made, waiting for patients who could not come.
In all this time, there were
no vitamins handed out, no ultrasound scans, no detection of congenital
abnormalities. Imagine that the NHS had simply packed up and stopped
one day and did not reopen for 12 weeks, and you get a sense of the
scale of the medical disaster.
Some women were wealthy enough
to go to the few private hospitals scattered across the West Bank. Most
were not. So because of the international boycott of the Palestinians,
every hospital warns there has been an unseen, unreported increase in
home births on the West Bank.
I found Dr Hamdan Hamdan,
the head of maternity services at Hussein Hospital, Bethlehem, pacing
around an empty ward, chain-smoking. "This ward is usually full,"
he said. "The women who should be in this hospital - what is happening
to them?"
They have been giving birth
in startlingly similar conditions to those suffered by Mary 2,000 years
ago. They have delivered their babies with no doctors, no sterilised
equipment, no back-up if there are complications. They have been boycotted
back into the Stone Age. The strike ended this month after the PA raised
funds from Muslim countries - but the effects of stopping maternity
services are only now becoming clear. Hindia Abu Nabah says: "There
is a clear link between the deteriorating health situation and the international
boycott.
Amid this horror, one charity
has been supporting pregnant Palestinian women even as their medical
services fell apart.
Merlin - one of the three
charities being supported by the Independent Christmas Appeal - has
set up two mobile teams, with a full-time gynaecologist and a paediatrician,
to take medical services to the parts of the West Bank cut off by the
Israeli occupation. They provide lab technicians and ultrasound machines
- the fruits of the 21st century.
I travelled with the team
to the Salfit region - scarred by Israeli settlements pumping out raw
sewage on to Palestinian land - to see women and children desperately
congregating around them seeking help. Amid the dozens of nervous women
and swarms of sickly children, Rahme Jima, 29, is sitting with her hands
folded neatly in her lap. She is in the last month of her pregnancy,
and this is the first time she has seen a doctor since she conceived.
"The nearest hospital
is in Nablus, and we can't afford to pay for the transport to get there
through all the checkpoints," she says, revealing she is planning
- in despair - to give birth at home. Even if she had the cash, she
says she is "too frightened of being detained at the checkpoint
and being forced to give birth there". She sighs, and adds: "I
will be so relieved to finally be seen by a doctor, I have been so worried."
But when she returns from seeing the doctor, she says: "I have
anaemia, and they have given me iron supplements," supplied by
Merlin. She can't afford to eat well; she lives with her husband and
four children in a room in her mother-in-law's house, and her husband,
Joseph, has been unemployed since his permit to move through the checkpoints
expired. "The doctor says I should have been seen much earlier
in my pregnancy. My baby will probably be born too small."
All the problems afflicting
these 21st century Marys are paraded in Merlin's clinic. One terrified,
terrorised mother after another presents herself to the specialists
here, and leaves clutching packs of folic acid, calcium, iron and medicine.
Dr Bassam Said Nadi, the senior medical officer for this area, says:
"I thank Merlin for the specialist care they have brought. Not
long ago, we didn't even have petrol in our cars. Alongside other organisations,
they are helping us survive this terrible period in our country's history."
Merlin can only maintain
these mobile clinics with your help. Leaning in the doorway of her bare
clinic, Hindia Abu Nabah says: "Tell your readers that we need
their help. There are no Hamas or Fatah foetuses. They don't deserve
to be punished. I couldn't stand to look another anaemic woman in the
eye and tell her that her baby will be underweight or malformed and
we don't have iron supplements to give her. I can't go back to that.
I can't."
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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