Mariam
has 38 kids and may just be the world’s most fertile woman – and although
making ends meet is a challenge, this single mom adores her brood.
Ever
since she was a little girl, she’d wanted lots of babies – new life to help
ease the pain of a childhood shrouded in abandonment and death. Six kids was
her ideal number, she thought, enough to fill the house and her heart. But by
the time Mariam Nabatanzi had been pregnant six times she was already the
mother of 18 kids – and things didn’t stop there.
Over
the past 26 years this 39-year-old Ugandan woman has given birth to six sets of
twins, four sets of triplets and five sets of quadruplets. Of the 44 children
Mariam brought into the world, six died from complications that often arise in
multiple births.
Today
she has 38 kids, making her one of Africa’s most fertile women. Using oral
contraceptives isn’t an option for Mariam because they aggravate a hormonal
condition she has.
Raising her big brood
has been tough on the single mother, whose husband walked out on her and the
kids three years ago.
“All
my time has been spent looking after my children and working to earn some
money,” Mariam said. She manages to put food on the table by turning her hand
to everything: hairdressing, event decorating, collecting and selling scrap
metal, brewing local gin and selling herbal medicine.
It
takes up to 25kg of maize meal to feed her family for just one day, she says,
so she hustles to make sure her kids don’t go to bed hungry.
Fish or meat are
rare treats. The money she makes from her many jobs is swallowed up by staple
food, medical care, clothing, school fees and keeping a roof over their heads.
The
older children help look after the young ones while Mariam works, and everyone
chips in with chores such as cooking and cleaning the house.
Her
eldest son, Ivan Kibuka (23) had to drop out of secondary school when she
couldn’t afford to pay his fees. He does what he can to ease his mother’s load
but it’s Mariam who endures the backbreaking pressure of supporting so many
people.
“Mom
is overwhelmed. The work is crushing her. We help where we can, but she still
carries the whole burden for the family. “I feel for her.”
Mariam’s
desire for a big family has its roots in tragedy. Three days after she was
born, her mother abandoned her, her father and her five siblings.
“She
just left us,” she said sombrely. Her father remarried but Mariam claims her
stepmother killed her siblings by mixing crushed glass into their food. Mariam
escaped because she was visiting a relative at the time.
“I
was seven years old then, too young to even understand what death actually
meant,” Mariam said. Five years later her father and stepmom married her off to
a man 28 years her senior. At age 13, Mariam gave birth to twins.
After
her first set of twins were born, Mariam went to a doctor who told her she had
unusually large ovaries and advised that birth control like the pill might
cause health problems. Although she wanted children, at one point it all became
too much, and Mariam took the risk and used an intrauterine contraceptive
device. She started bleeding and was hospitalised for six months, she told Al
Jazeera.
“The
doctor said my hormones weren’t compatible with family planning.” So, the
children kept coming. Now Mariam’s family is believed to be the biggest in
Uganda, where the fertility rate averages out at 5,6 children per woman.
In
her home village of Kabimbiri, she’s known as Nalongo Muzaala Bana (the twin
mother that produces quadruplets).
Her
father had 45 children with several women, and they all came in sets of twins,
triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets, she said.
Dr
Charles Kiggundu, a gynaecologist at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda,
confirmed Mariam’s extreme fertility is hereditary.
“Her
case is a genetic predisposition to hyper-ovulate (releasing multiple eggs in
one menstrual cycle), which significantly increases the chance of having
multiples,” he told Ugandan newspaper the Daily Monitor.
The
single mom and her 38 kids live in a set of four cramped houses made of cement
blocks and topped with corrugated iron in a village surrounded by coffee fields
about an hour outside the capital, Kampala.
Twelve
children sleep on metal bunk beds with thin mattresses in one small room. In
the other rooms, some kids are lucky enough to pile onto shared mattresses
while the rest sleep on the dirt floor. Portraits of some of the children
proudly graduating from school hang on one wall.
A
roster on a small wooden board nailed to another wall spells out washing and
cooking duties. “On Saturday we all work together,” it reads.
Many
hands may make light work, but Mariam admits she nearly reached breaking point
when her husband abandoned her three years ago.
To
compound matters, she had just given birth to her last set of twins and one of
the babies had died in childbirth.
“My
man put me through a lot of suffering,” she told Reuters, clasping her hands as
tears welled up. “He was violent and would beat me at any opportunity.
Despite
the fact that it’s an arduous task, she’s happy to be raising her kids on her
own.
“I started taking on adult responsibilities at an early stage and I have
grown up in tears. It’s not easy to take care of my children but I made it easy
because they are my children. “I will never abandon them. I love them.”
No comments:
Post a Comment