New lives enter a devastated world

Making do: Pregnant mothers sleep on beds in the makeshift maternity ward in Galle, on the devastated southern coast of Sri Lanka. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Only a few thin blankets lie between the pregnant women and the hospital's unforgiving balcony floor.

There are no mattresses to cushion the expectant mothers, or their unborn children, as they lie outdoors waiting for a bed.

Yet the women rest in silence, uncomfortable, uncomplaining, eyes closed in the humid and still air, because there is nowhere else to go.

Galle's Maha Modara maternity hospital, with its neonatal and intensive care units, was destroyed when Sri Lanka was pounded by the Boxing Day tsunami. Incredibly, only one baby died as flood waters engulfed the lower floor.

With a second, a bigger wave threatening, two care nurses gathered two of three ill babies and their incubators, and rushed them to an ambulance to be evacuated.

When they returned, the third child and its incubator were lost.

Now 90 new or expectant mothers wait for care at a makeshift ward, a teaching hospital across town.

This coping or making do without is just one example of many in Galle and other devastated communities along Sri Lanka's southern and eastern coasts.

The maternity hospital is likely to be housed in its temporary home with spartan facilities for years, until something new is built or the old hospital repaired.

There are beds for 20. The rest of the women must wait outside, lying on the ground or sitting close together on the one or two wooden bench forms.

Inside, the women rest. Two, sometimes three share corners of the decades-old hospital beds. One out of eight ceiling fans tries, but largely fails, to cool them.

Within 12 hours of giving birth, they will be asked to leave to ease the overcrowding, half the time they were given before the floods.

Six other women lie in the dimly lit, grim, surgical ward, others are seated on chairs at the end of beds.

"You can see the patients, how they suffer", registrar Saliya Ovitigala says.

He was on duty on Boxing Day morning, helping other doctors save patients and deliver those babies who would not wait.

One woman was still in surgery after a caesarean birth, when the electricity and lights failed.

Only the tiny light from an auriscope could be found to help doctors complete the operation.

Mother and baby are now doing well, we are told.

Dr Ovitigala remembers how he heard of the tsunami only when a nurse came running to tell him the beachfront hospital was flooded. He told her not to lie, and carried on his gynaecological ward round.

Moments later he was urging his patients to get up, and run for their lives.

He went to the maternity ward to help evacuate, using his cellphone to call his own pregnant wife and mother to say he could not leave and they should try to get to safety.

"We thought the hospital was evacuated, but I heard a sound, someone shouting, Dr Ovitigala told the Herald.

"I had to choose whether to run and save my own life, or go back. But I am a doctor and I cannot leave someone. So I made the decision."

What he and fellow doctors Prasad Wicramasingha and Upul Wicramasingha found on the hospital's top floor was a woman, alone, desperate, trying to have her baby.

They could not move her, and hoped for a normal delivery. It wasn't and there was no anaesthetic.

"I told the mother we were going to help, and to bear the pain. She agreed."

Later, they carried her on her iron bed down three flights of stairs so she and her healthy newborn could be evacuated before the second surge devastated Galle.

No doctors or nurses at the hospital died that day, and since the flooding 160 new babies have already been born at the temporary hospital.

But the shift looks likely to be long-term as it could take years to repair Maha Modara, ward by ward, and even then the old building may be useful for no more than a decade. A grant of government land and money for equipment will be needed.

Head of Obstetrics, Professor Malik Goonewardene, who completed a two-month sabbatical in Auckland last year, wants a new hospital. And he wants it built away from the sea.

Not because of fears of another tsunami, but because his medical equipment keeps rusting.

He is contacting friends overseas, asking for help.

"I have a very big problem on my hands. My entire hospital is gone."