FOR THE LOVE OF BABIES
I visited a market place sometime back. while strolling and checking in the vegetable stalls, something caught my sight. Before me was a woman with a baby. I could have passed her and went on with my own business, but there with her was something else out of the ordinary that caught my attention. She was changing her baby's diapers. And what was she removing that covered her baby's buttocks? Old tattered rags that appeared with no doubt were somebody's or her own old clothes. For one sleeve and neck parts still remained attached.
My eyes shifted to the baby's flesh that had been uncovered. Sore blisters sprout of which some had burst and were bleeding. The baby's flesh was thin, so near to its underlying bones. The baby kicked and my attention changed to its head. So tiny was it that for sometime I wondered if this was a normal baby. I gotten alittle bit scared of its image.The baby was too dark, maybe because it was a Nilot. Naturally, talking about Africans, Nilots are dark in skin hue.
It's the size of the baby's head that wasn't corresponding to the baby's skin color. While the head suggested that it was a newly born baby, its skin hue suggested that it was an old baby on earth surface.
I looked at the the tomatoes that the woman sold. They were too little and of poor quality. Resting my gaze on her face, it hit me hard that she must have been going through hell. She looked haggard and tired with the world. The smell of her sweat mixed with the ammonia from her baby's diapers sneaked to my nose. Instead of wrinkling my face from the resultant bad effect I got, I sympathised. Putting on a smile, I went to the woman and bought all her tomatoes.All this I did not because I was willing but because something so strong pushed me from inside..
I was deeply disturbed. This woman was evidently suffering from woes brought about by poverty. Everything about her spoke loudly that she was suffocating financially. Maybe married maybe a single mother.
As I put the tomatoes I had bought in my handbag to leave, some chuckling children arrived. With time it revealed itself out that they were the woman's older children. Three of them. All of them the same size that I was left wondering if they were triplets. I wished I could have asked the woman but I just didn't have the guts.
If I was this woman I wouldn't have gotten pregnant a second time after conceiving the first child. She was just too poor to add more children on earth surface.
Today as I finish this story I am wondering, what makes a woman give birth to more children even when she is wallowing in poverty? The woman I met at the market place is not the only one in the world. There are more others like her.What makes us women behave like this? is it merely for the love of babies?
