Mum on the run…
An early morning jog took a strange twist for three friends.
THE last thing Lungile Nzama from Leisure Bay expected to do while out jogging with friends was to help deliver a baby. Lungile was out pounding the pavement early one morning when she saw a metered taxi driver dragging a woman, obviously in labour, from his vehicle.
A mother herself, Lungile and her friends Brenda Mdlalo and Shoray Muzungu stopped to assist. To their horror, the taxi driver sped away. “He was more concerned about his car than with helping this poor woman,” said Lungile.
At her instruction, Lungile opened the mother-to-be’s bag and removed a towel. She then carefully moved the woman onto the grass at the roadside. In the meantime, Brenda used a cellphone borrowed from a bystander to summon an ambulance while Shoray ran to a nearby shop to fetch plastic bags.
However, babies are not known to wait once they decide to put in an appearance and Lungile helped deliver the infant at the roadside before medical assistance arrived. “When I heard the baby cry I was so happy to know it was breathing,” she said, smiling. What Lungile found surprising was although quite a crowd had gathered, no one offered to help. “I just knew I needed to help this woman. I would not have forgiven myself if I had passed by and something had happened to her,” she said.
Unwilling to wait for an ambulance, the women borrowed a friend’s car and drove the new mum and her bundle of joy to a clinic in Port Edward where staff apparently told them they don’t deal with these cases. So the women continued on to Amadiba clinic in the Eastern Cape where they gladly assisted. At the time of going to press, mum and baby were doing well.
