Global Poverty Monitor

The bus arrived soon after, and we started the journey to the day hospital – the Central Hospital of Maputo. Looking back, I’m not really sure what I expected, since its always hard to remember expectations after you have seen the real thing. I think I expected large rooms with lots of beds, maybe 20 to a ward, bur brightly coloured and with people of all ages in the beds. I had an image of us walking around and talking to the patients (somehow overcoming the language barriers), some of which would be old and some young, and making them happy by giving out our gifts. But I did not expect to see bed after bed of tiny babies, each ‘bed’ just a frame with a mattress, sometimes one blanket, sometimes nothing at all, with a single chair next to each bed, usually seating the mother of the baby, and in one case, the father. These babies all looked so young, like newborns and tiny infants, but we learned that most of the babies were around 11 months to a year and a half.

These babies were badly malnourished, and were desperately below the healthy weight of a child of their age. One baby was 11 months old, and weighed a tiny 3kg. Looking at this baby, wearing a cloth nappy that looked enormous on its tiny body, and arms and legs the width and strength of twigs, I knew that there was no way this baby would survive. Indeed, we were told that 90% of the children in the hospital were HIV positive, and would either die of malaria, diahorrea, malnutrition, or pulmonary disease. Basically the HIV virus has weakened their tiny immune systems, as is the nature of the disease, and they will die of whatever illness reaches them first. The nurse who was showing us around (one of the only white people we have met or even seen since arriving in Mozambique) showed us one baby that was suffering from malnutrition. He was frail and weak looking, but his poor little stomach was round and protruding – just like the children often shown in magazines and World Vision pamphlets. The malnutrition has caused the child to have an enlarged liver and spleen, causing the rounding of the belly. Another baby was suffering from a skin disorder, and the mother obliged in taking off the baby’s nappy (a plastic bag) and showing us the baby’s skin around his rear and legs. He has large white patches all over his dark skin in those areas, and the nurse explained that this is caused by the mother carrying her baby on the back, leaving the legs exposed to the sunlight.

I felt so sympathetic towards the mothers, more so than the children. While a normal, healthy child of 12 or 18 months would have an idea of what is happening to them, and would feel pain, suffering or fright, these children were too far gone to have those emotions. Some cried a weak half-cry, most made no noise. The mothers sat in their chairs with such a distant, removed look in their eyes. Most did not touch their babies, just sat next to the beds staring. The nurse told us that they actually teach the mothers to play with their babies, as it is not a common practice in their culture to do so. Some of the others in the group found this hard to believe, and thought that surely it must be in a mother’s nature to play with their baby – but [I suppose] Western parents only play with their babies because we are accustomed to doing so, in that we see other parents doing so, and in our culture it is more than accepted, it is expected that babies will be played with. But in some cultures, including the Mozambicans, the idea of playing with children is foreign. Mothers will struggle to provide food for their child, and will protect it against everything their possibly can, but playing is not in their culture. Westerners see playing with a child as essential to the child’s development, and as such, the staff at the day hospital teach the mothers that it is important to play with their children.