"A joyous inauguration” or "How Mama Lynda caught a baby"

Day 2 - December 4^th

On Sunday afternoon after the village church service—a long church service, in our knee-length skirts and tennis shoes, very stylish—some of the team members ventured down to the medical clinic to explore the site where we’ll be working later in the week.

A woman in labor was being helped out of a pickup truck when they arrived. They could see that she was in labor, and quickly crowded into the delivery room with her. For the next three hours the team assisted Joseph, the male physician assistant, in birthing this woman’s baby. She is 16 years old and this is her first child.

“She was very stoic,” Lynda, who helped with the delivery, says. “Very much reluctant to scream out in pain.”

Lynda assumed the role of assistant to this gentleman at the foot of the birthing table. Amy and Alecia prepared the supplies and managed the patient and complications of the afterbirth. 

“We could tell she was in excruciating pain,” Lynda remembers. “Having a Pitocin drip without any anesthetic is pretty brutal.”

Holding the drape at the foot of the birthing table, there by mere happenstance, she delivered her first child in Uganda.

“It was such a miracle. It really was a joyous inauguration to clinic work in ‘the bush.’”

This was the first baby to be weighed on the new baby scale our team brought from America, which will allow the clinic to weigh newborns and more accurately calculate medication dosages to babies of certain low weights. 

The next morning during at our first clinic staff meeting the clinic’s midwife, Gorret, stood to thank Lynda for providing this much needed baby scale to the clinic. 

The name given to her: Mama Lynda.