Mamie

She’ll never forget what mercy feels like.

At 19, Mamie was pregnant for the third time. Neither of her previous children survived infancy as both died of fevers. Mamie, still a teenager, went into labour with her third child with the assistance of Traditional Birth Attendants. They gave her native medicines. They pushed on her stomach and reached inside her to pull her baby out.

“It hurts,” she told them. They were sorry, they told her, but she had to be courageous. By the second day, Mamie no longer felt her baby moving inside of her. Once the dead child was removed, Mamie woke to find herself lying in a wet bed. Everything was soaked. Mamie was leaking urine. She had developed VVF; a hole had formed in the tissues between her vagina and bladder. Mamie’s husband, a farmer, was “disappointed”, she said. He took another wife.

Mamie returned to her village to find money and a doctor for a VVF operation. Once she gathered the money, she learned the doctor did not do VVF surgeries; he only knew how to perform C-sections. Her relatives told her they would assist by informing her when a Mercy Ship, which they knew provided free VVF operations, arrived in Freetown. By then, Mamie had been leaking urine for four years.

Mamie recovered on a bed next to another Sierra Leonean woman who also underwent a VVF operation onboard the Mercy Ship. They were struck by the care they received by Mercy Ships volunteers. “You people are doing things without asking for anything in return,” she said. “It’s wonderful. We have never seen that before.”