Elana Dallas is in Koinadugu, Sierra Leone, as part of an Amnesty International team researching maternal mortality
3 February: Today we meet some families of women who’ve died in childbirth in the past few months and the medical staff in their cases. It’s really tough listening to people whose grief is still so raw and absorbing the brief glimpses we have into their lives.
One husband is clearly depressed – he says of his wife, “we used to advise each other”. He has three surviving children (his wife died giving birth to twins, which hadn’t been picked up in her ante-natal checks), and his wife’s sister, who they live with, has five of her own.
He has very little work and it’s a daily struggle to feed eight children. They get some supplementary food, but live on a diet of one meal of rice a day. At his house, he shows us photos of his wife, who was lovely.
When we ask him how he would feel about us using his family’s story and the photos in our campaign, he says it would make him very happy for us to use whatever we can so that other families don’t have to go through what he’s been through.
Unfortunately that is the way progress does not succeed in Africa. Should women stop giving birth so many children life would be much more coloured for them!
There Should be proper education about family control programmes. The more the education citizens of any Nation get, the more will be the progress. Official at higher administrative level should be responsible and work with full honesty.