Meet Nyima: A Community health worker championing the health of women & Children in Kembuje

Nyima Cham

On Friday 9th August, 2024, the SheTale Media visited Nyima Cham, a locally trained Community Health worker who is working very hard to improve the health of women and children in Kembuje, Brikama, West Coast Region of the Gambia.

Nyima Cham is one of the women who were locally trained by Former President Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara’s Government to facilitate and render basic health services to the people in their communities.

  
Some of the women trained were traditional birth attendants who were tasked with helping women to give birth at home decades ago. In this day and age, they are no longer allowed to deliver women at home due to complications that come with pregnancy which cannot be managed at home.

However, they still work with mobile health workers in the communities to sensitize women on the importance of antenatal care, taking blood supplement drugs, vaccinating their children and Family Planning amongst other health-related information.

Speaking on the role she and her colleagues play within the community of Kembuje, Nyima Cham said “We were trained as local community health workers during the Former President Jawara’s regime. We were empowered with information and also given drugs to administer to people who were ill within the communities and some of us were traditional birth attendants who helped women deliver their babies in those days."

She said in recent times, with the coming of the Jammeh regime and now the Barrow Government they no longer give them drugs or allow them to help women deliver their babies at home due to complications that come with pregnancy.

She said, “What we do now is to monitor women while they are pregnant, advise them and also make sure that they go to the health facilities when they are due to deliver their babies."

She said they have a centre in the village around the mosque where women go for antenatal when they are pregnant. She said they have nurses from Brikama Health Centre who come there to attend to and give antenatal care to pregnant women. She said the nurses remind the women to go to the Brikama Health Centre to deliver their babies when they are due.

“When the nurses come here every month, I work with them to make sure that children are vaccinated. It is very difficult to get some mothers to take their children to be vaccinated, so they used us, who are closer to the women, to get them to vaccinate their children," she said.

She said due to the misinformation on the internet against vaccination, some women refused to vaccinate their children. She said they work tirelessly to change the mindset of those women to get their children vaccinated.

“We meet with women during social gatherings and events and advise them on the importance of information sharing with their partners during pregnancy. We told them if they went for antenatal and they were told that they needed to know their blood groups and have people on standby to donate blood when they were due, they should take it seriously because blood is one thing that we cannot buy from the market even if we have the money," she said.

She added that Family Planning is another area where they talk to women so they can be able to space their children.

 “We tell women that they should embrace Family planning to space their children so that both mother and child can be healthy. We also let them know that there is a lot they can do to become productive within the two years they will use to breastfeed and attend to the needs of the child while focusing on their petty trading and gardening," she said.

She said they let couples know that using Contraceptives will not stop them from having children. She said anytime they make up their mind to become pregnant again, they will when they stop the Family Planning method they were using.

She added that any woman within the community who has a problem convincing the husband to allow her to use Contraceptives after giving birth, come to us and we go to the husband and explain the benefits of Family Planning for the health of the mother, child and the husband who will be able to save money within the years they chose to rest and focus on themselves.

On Female Genital Mutilation, she said, they do their best to talk to women to desist from mutilating their children either publicly or privately due to the law banning the practice.

She said the problem is that FGM is an age-long tradition, and that makes it difficult for women to desist from it. She said during discussions with women, they will insist that the practice is something they inherited from their ancestors and they would like to perform it on their children. She said the only stumbling block is the Law banning the practice and that is why even if some women want to do it, they will not be able to do it publicly.

She said now women don’t even need circumcisers because this is something they can do themselves.

She said they still advise women against indoor cutting since children are not as healthy as before. She said they let them know that a child who is cut indoors may suffer from excessive bleeding which can lead to death.

She said they can only keep talking, and some women will listen while some will be defensive and use tradition or religion as an excuse to want to mutilate their children.

On the case of children who were mutilated, sealed and forgotten, years before the law banning FGM in the Gambia, she said as mothers, they did not even remember who was sealed or not and that is why, it is only when they got married and their husbands couldn’t penetrate them that they will realise that they are sealed.
She said most of the mothers today cannot tell you that amongst their unmarried daughters who are sealed because not all circumcisers practice sealing unless the mother requests for it.

She said her advice to those mothers who know that they mutilated and sealed their daughters is for them to explain it to their in-laws so that they can be unsealed before the nuptial night to avoid unbearable pain.

She said mothers introduce sealing as a way of preventing their daughters from bringing shame to the Family by getting pregnant out of wedlock. She said mothers can withstand anything except the pain and shame of watching their daughter being impregnated out of wedlock.

Author: Halimatou Ceesay