She joined midwifery in desperation, but is now pursuing it with passion
“It is the Girls Education Club that transformed me from a timid child to the confident, focused person that I am today."
Christine Manuela has just turned twenty, and it was a double celebration. Besides officially leaving teenagerhood, she was also successfully completing her first year of her nursing and midwifery training. And what a year it has been!
From her Adjumani home in northwestern, Christine had come to Arua City to enroll at Kuluva School of Nursing and Midwifery with very little enthusiasm. She wanted to join Advanced Level, after completing her Ordinary Level but her mother had suffered a serious kidney disease and the lengthy hospitalization led to the collapse of her small business that had enabled her to educate Christine and her young brother. The ailing woman told her daughter to forget academics and do a practical course to support her brother before he got wasted.
Christine’s soldiering then started. Arriving penniless and desperate in Arua, Christine summoned her life skills which were horned in the UNICEF supported Girls Education Club that she had joined while in Senior 3 at Mungula Secondary School in Adjumani. With determination, she took on Arua City and the seemingly insurmountable financial challenges that stood in front of her. The Girls’ Education Club was established with UNICEF support and funding from the David Beckham Foundation through the UK National Committee for UNICEF.
The church-owned nursing school in the big Kuluva Hospital complex charges an annual US$1,250, a stiff fee by any standards. But the student must also pay for the assortment of medical equipment and materials she uses on the wards. Although the government nursing school in Arua is far cheaper, charging $500 a year for the same course, Christine did her investigations and concluded that students there are not given as much practical exposure as at the mission school. So, the $1,250 required by Kuluva had to be found.
Her mother could now only retail cassava flour in Adjumani and was ready to avail whatever she made for the training fees. To top up, Christine had to rapidly become an ‘investor’ in Arua, where she became a petty trader running a yet smaller version of her mother’s flour business. She makes three packs from a kilo of cassava flour that she sells at $0.30 each. On a good day she can sell flour worth $3 while on a bad day her gross revenue can be only $0.60.
But as a fulltime student of nursing she cannot go selling flour around. Luckily, an aunt of hers runs a kiosk near the hospital and Christine keeps her stock there. When she is not at the school or the ward, she goes to the kiosk and helps. Her aunt is also supportive, and sometimes meets the shortfalls in her school fees when the administration gets impatient with the student’s delayed payments.
Amid all the hardships, Christine has fallen in love with her vocation. Her first day in the hospital was a baptism of fire – she saw three people die: two babies and an old woman. She got over it with time by telling herself that these are also people, only that they have lost their life, so she handles them with respect as she helps prepare their bodies to be presented to their families in a decent state.
As she assists the senior nurses and midwives, the only thing that still gives her jitters is handling a baby that just come out of the mother as she finds them very slippery in her gloved hands and just imaging it slipping out of her hands gives her the jitters. So she gives her utmost care and concentration to this task. She is also yet to overcome feeling the pain of the mothers in labour. This makes her more determined to handle them tenderly.
When I first met Christine mid-January 2023 at the maternity ward, I had to wait for thirty minutes from our appointed time because she was still observing the senior midwife deliver a young mother of twins. She never compromises on the time she spends in the wards and the labour suite, opportunities that she says are not that available at the government’s training institute for nurses and midwives.
Then she appeared, beaming behind her mask, and called me to go and see the twin babies, two girls.
Incidentally she is not supposed to be at the hospital, as it is holiday time from Christmas through New Year to February. But due to her obviously burning desire to perfect the nursing and midwifery crafts, she was permitted by the school principal to stay, though not in the hostel. This worked out perfectly for Christine as she stays with her aunt and puts in more time helping her with the kiosk, before heading to the wards where the action -treating patients and delivering babies – takes place.
Explaining the apparent ease with which she carries on in the ward, Christine says: “It is the Girls Education Club that transformed me from a timid child to the confident, focused person that I am today. Raising the fees for the three years here looks impossible in my situation but I am focused on getting it done and excelling at my course. There is so much we have to do to help all those women in labour.”
It is not just words, but her evident deeds. For the three days I have visited the hospital, the girl who is just a month out of her teens was working non-stop, while her classmates are enjoying their holidays. And though there is a specified time for health talk – teaching on breastfeeding and baby care - for mothers at the maternity ward, which is early morning, whenever Christine gets a free moment, she gives another health talk to smaller groups or even one-on-one, to the mothers, especially the younger ones.
She still has another two years of training and battling financial challenges, but Christine Manuela is already exuding the graceful confidence of a real nurse. Her mother’s illness may have altered the course of her academic dreams, but this young alumnus of a Girls Education Club is now determinedly running on a clear path to a career of saving countless mothers and babies.
