by HELEN GRADY & ANNE SOY
IMAGE/Charlotte Edey
Five years ago a midwife in Kenya delivered a child with male and female sexual organs. The father told her to kill it, but instead she hid it and raised it as her own. Two years later, the same thing happened again – and before long she was forced to flee to save the children’s lives.
It had been a tricky birth, but nothing Zainab couldn’t handle. The umbilical cord had got twisted around the baby’s head and she’d had to think quickly, using a wooden spoon to untangle it.
After clearing the baby’s airway, she washed the child and cut and tied the umbilical cord. It was then that Zainab saw something she’d never seen before.
“When I looked to see if it was a boy or a girl, I saw two things protruding – this baby had male and female parts,” she says.
Instead of saying what she usually said at this point – “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” – Zainab handed the baby to its mother and simply told her, “Here is your baby.”
When the exhausted mother saw that her child’s sex was unclear, she was stunned. But when her husband arrived, he was in no doubt about what should happen next.
“He told me, ‘We can’t take this baby home. We want this baby to be killed.’ I told him that the child was God’s creation and must not be killed. But he insisted. So eventually I told him, ‘Leave the baby with me, I’ll kill it for you.’ But I did not kill the baby. I kept it.”
The father came back several times to check that Zainab had done what she’d promised. She hid the baby and insisted she had killed it. But this would not work forever.
“A year later, the parents somehow heard that their baby was alive and came to see me,” Zainab says. “They told me I must never reveal that the baby was theirs. I agreed and since then I’ve been raising the child as my own.”
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