Esraa Hesbalrasoul snatched her premature twins from an incubator and fled in a panic when a maternity hospital in the capital of Sudan came under fire.
Only one of the infants made it out of the chaos.
Hesbalrasoul is currently caring for her infant in a small hospital in Omdurman, the capital’s twin city, which has been struggling to survive the nearly nonstop fighting for weeks.
Fighting between rival generals and the forces they command began on April 15 and has since shelled numerous medical facilities.
According to the United Nations, the fighting has rendered only 16 percent of Khartoum’s hospitals fully operational, endangering countless lives.
But despite the overwhelming odds, the tiny Al-Nada hospital in Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city, continues to be a lifesaver by keeping its doors open and providing essential medical care.
Hesbalrasoul told AFP that when earthquakes occurred on April 20 near the facility that was initially caring for the twins, “we were told we had to evacuate everyone right away.”
We had to move our infants as best we could because there weren’t any ambulances available, she said.
However, one of them passed away from a lack of oxygen.
Her tragedy is hardly an isolated one.
The UN estimates that there are “219,000 pregnant women in Khartoum, including 24,000 women expected to give birth in the coming weeks”.
Al-Nada is one of the rare facilities they can turn to.
Its director, Mohammed Fattah al-Rahman, in particular credits a generous donation from the Sudanese American Physicians Association (SAPA-USA), which has allowed it to keep running.
With this money, “we have been able to deliver 500 births, naturally and through caesarian sections, and to admit 80 children”, he told AFP, surrounded by premature babies in incubators.
But the war is never far from the dimly-lit facility. Sounds of gunfire and blasts can often be heard echoing in the distance.
There is no air conditioning, only overhead fans that attempt to relieve the heat which often reaches up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) even before the blazing peak of summer.
As the war rages, killing hundreds and injuring thousands so far, much of Sudan’s meagre medical resources have been diverted to tending the war-wounded with urgent care.
“There have been no obstetrics or paediatric services since the beginning of the conflict,” Rahman says.
That meant that Sudanese couple Fatima and her husband Jaber could find no facilities to treat their young son for meningitis, until they arrived at Al-Nada, which offers paediatric care as well as maternity facilities.
– Fear of ‘collapse’ –
Even before the war broke out, mothers and children faced grave dangers in Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries.
Almost three out of every thousand women die in childbirth in Sudan, eight times higher than the figure in neighbouring Egypt, according to the UN children’s fund, UNICEF.
It says 56 out of every 1,000 Sudanese children die before reaching the age of five.
Last year, the UN estimated that one in three Sudanese needed to walk more than an hour to get medical care.
Today, the small team that keeps the Al-Nada hospital going fears conditions will soon force them to stop their essential work.
“Our stocks of medicines are starting to dwindle,” said Alaa Ahmed, a pharmacist at the hospital. “If it goes on like this, everything will collapse.”
The prospect of getting more supplies from the government warehouse on the other side of the Nile River is not only unlikely — it is closed and unaccessible — but possibly deadly while combat rages.
As a result, Ahmed laments, “a lot of people ask me for medicine but unfortunately I can’t give it to them”.