31/03/2023
Marternal health
Close to 15yrs ago when I was crowned Miss Uganda, I remember a journalist asking me: "Aha, now that you are our Miss Uganda, what are you going to do for us"?
I took some time to answer this question cause honestly, there was no way I would promise heaven on earth in just one year yet there are so many who have come before me and many who would come after me to use the same platform. So I dint want to lie!
I however answered using the words of Edward Everette Hale " I am only ONE, but still I am one. I cannot do everything but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do" (read it slowly- slowly, you will get it 😅)
This statement aligns with my beliefs!
During my reign, I never had any "grand" campaign. I kept telling my then managers that am not going to fake anything. I want to use this platform to leave a legacy and do something for mothers and their newborns cause that is where my passion was from a tender age but I just dint know what or how I will manifest this.
I launched the Dorah Mwima Foundation and would champion causes here and there and its not until I conceived my son at the tender age of 19, 3 months before handing over the crown to my successor (Right pic: yeah zoom in, zoooooom in, the bump was already bumping 🤣🤣🤣)
Anyway, I have shared that story before but what most don't know is that, 4days after my sons birth, my son got diagnosed with high levels of jaundice.
He had to get a blood transfusion and shared an incubator with other newborns.
This was 13yrs ago and I kept asking myself, if this is happening at Nsambya Hospital, how about other hospitals?
Meanwhile, I was still nursing 8 stitches, and I wasn't able to afford a private room as my son got treatment at the hospital.
I stayed nursing my wounds and baby at the children's ward for four days.
There was like a general ward for mothers next to the nursery (not sure if its still there cause alot has changed), but anyway, I was in that ward.
I remember paying "kintu-kidogo" to an askari at night to let my mother come in to help me during the night shift since the stiches were so painful.
My mother slept on the floor, and at some point I woke her up and asked her to sleep on my bed as I sat flat on the cement floor "to help my stiches heal", but she couldn't enjoy sleep cause she was scared of being caught.
It was just too much for her that night and I just asked her to come in every morning and I will find a way of handling the nights which I did thanks to some nice nurses on those night shifts.
I don't even know how I was in that place without people noticing that "eh, isnt this Dorah our former miss uganda"? But Waaaaaah, when life humbles you, my friend, those things of status have no meaning and I guess it was a way of God showing me what so many women go through post delivery regardless of ones status.
Its from this experience that I zeroed down to what I truly wanted the foundation to do: To see maternal care improve for all! For mothers to be treated with respect and dignity. For them to acquire basic needs, better obstetric, neonatal, and emergency treatment, and lastly, a decline in maternal and infant mortality in my country.
13yrs later, when I look back at that experience and all the experiences I have encountered while childbearing in this country, I am not any special!
I haven't been exempted from not knowing what it means to be in a facility without money and not sure if I will get treatment. I haven't been exempted from seeing my son fight for his life in an incubator alongside a dying newborn. I haven't been exempted from walking in pain, in a lesu, from on end of the room to the other just to go and have a quick bath with no attendant. I haven't been exempted from wrong diagnosis that almost costed the lives of my twins. I haven't been exempted from being induced with no medical reason whatsover just because I looked like I could afford it.
What drives me? "Passion"!
You won't imagine how many times I have said to myself "Dorah just fold back and literally mind your own business, you have come a long way, worked your way up. You have a loving husband who lovingly annoys, oh sorry, adores you😁, 5 beautiful children and flourishing businesses, naye ofaki?"
And just before I am about to give in to that thought, a mom calls me in tears, lamenting her childbirth experience. A sister to an expectant mother with no money to pay for an operation sends me a message. I go into my inbox and someone is asking for advice on how to overcome childbirth trauma. Someone sends me a message and tells me how so many years back I helped them conceive and now a little one calls them "mama". Another sends me a message and tells me they want to send 8m to support mothers with start up capital who have attended our "lean on me" therapy group.
Ai, yawah... I am only ONE and I can't do EVERYTHING but I will NEVER REFUSE to do something that I can do.
If I want BETTER, I want better for ALL!
