Story

Halima—a reminder of life past and present

As the sweltering heat climbs over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the Deliej clinic in West Darfur fills with exhausted mothers, screaming babies and listless toddlers too weak to raise their heads or play with the other children waiting to see a doctor.

One elderly woman, Halima Adam Atima, slowly makes her way through the crowd, peering into children’s faces with a girlish giggle while scooping up screaming hot babies and bobbing them on her hip—the mothers smiling with relief.

Halima is no stranger to making mothers smile. She is the “mother of Arwallah”—the beloved midwife of a once-thriving agricultural village, which she fled over a year ago before finding refuge in Deliej.

As a nurse aide with International Medical Corps, Halima utilizes her gift with children to care for those patients most in need, casting a hawk eye across the waiting room and pulling feverish children from the throngs of patients for a cooling sponge bath or an emergency oral re-hydration salt (ORS) drink.

Young mothers call out Halima’s name, waving with respect to the midwife who brought them into this world and would deliver their own babies—a living reminder of their home, an inspiration that her capable hands would somehow connect them to Arwallah.

“She is like our mother, she helped bring me and my three children into existence,” affirms Aisha Abdul Aziz, an International Medical Corps clinic assistant working in the health field for the first time in her life, now responsible for monitoring ORS consumption for patients too ill to drink themselves.

Halima—sprightly beyond her years—genuinely does not know her true age, guessing that she was born some 60 years ago on a farm where her family had grown fava beans, mangos and peanuts for over a hundred years.

Growing up in Arwallah without a midwife was the only reality she knew, until the Sheik beckoned her when she turned 20 to go train in Nyala, stating that she was smart and had a destiny to help her village.

Halima has since delivered thousands of babies, and with traditional home delivery being the preferred method across Darfur, she still renders her services to the hundreds of families now cramped into makeshift grass structures and forced to sleep on dusty floors in Deliej, the once-quiet village of 3,500 now struggling with a population explosion up to 21,000 due to the ongoing conflict.

“I am a midwife by trade, but my work with International Medical Corps is opening many new possibilities for me, I am learning a lot,” enthuses Halima.

During a three-day community health education training on oral hydration, Halima would not stop clapping with excitement, ready to take the knowledge and get to the community, helping those in need as quickly as she could.

“Halima has the heart of a nurse—she is the sweetest, loving, and most caring woman with children,” International Medical Corps community health nurse Charlotte Geier says.

Halima is providing relief to children from all the villages and tribes seeking treatment at the International Medical Corps Deliej clinic, never running out of the energy required to make children and mothers laugh, while simultaneously reminding families of happier times past.

“When young children gather from my village, I see the memory of their home slipping, and I tell stories to remind them of our green farmlands, dreaming that the babies born here will one day see their true home,” Halima sighs.

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