Sulav Al Hamza is a midwife in the new MSF maternity clinic in Tal Maraq. She is from Bashiqa, a town close to Mosul that was taken over by the Islamic State (IS) group in june 2014. She has worked for MSF since November 2014, when MSF started running mobile clinic in the northern city of Zakho where many people from Tal Afar district had fled to escape IS.
Why did MSF open this maternity clinic in Tal Maraq?
Because women in this area don’t have access to health care of good quality. In the whole district there are only a few midwifes and no hospital. To reach Zakho or Dohuk is very far and too expensive for many of them, so the women deliver at home or sometimes in small midwife clinics. Here in our clinic we have a gynaecologist, around 10 midwives and six nurses. It is a place where women can deliver safely.
What kind of services does the clinic provide?
We do pre-natal and post-natal consultations, including family planning, and we assist all normal deliveries without complications. We can’t do caesarean sections and if it is a high-risk pregnancy, like if the woman suffers from preeclampsia, we have to refer her to the hospitals in Dohuk or Zakho. For that we have an ambulance that is provided by the Directorate of Health.
What kinds of people request our services?
All kinds of people, and we welcome everyone! The famous people and the very poor people, IDPs and the people from here - all are received and treated in the same way. I like this very much about MSF – we don’t make a difference between people. When we first opened the clinic in October there was not so many women coming, but the past month we have assisted more than 110 deliveries. One day we had 11 deliveries!
When did you start working with MSF?
I joined MSF when they first started to work in Zakho, at the end of 2014. There were many displaced families there from Sinjar and Zummar and they were living in terrible conditions. They had no shelter, no toilets, no clean water, and not enough clothes. It was winter and very cold but even families with small babies were sleeping in the open. When I saw them, I cried. I am an IDP (internally displaced person) myself, and I felt so sorry for them. MSF distributed plastic sheeting, put up separate toilets for women and men, and provided clean water. I worked as a nurse in the mobile clinic. Every day we went there to provide general consultations, paediatric consultations and treatment for chronic diseases. We saw many children with burns because the families were cooking on open fire.
You were also displaced – can you tell us about your experience?
Yes. I lived in Bashiqa, a town very close and to the east of Mosul. It was a beautiful place where people from different groups lived together. People in Bashiqa are educated and nice, and there is even a special language that everyone speaks. It is a kind of Arabic that is specific to Bashiqa and everyone speaks it, also the Christian population. I studied nursery there until the beginning of 2014. When IS came in June that year we left to Dohuk. In Dohuk I first worked in a private hospital for some time. Then I started working with the mobile clinics of MSF. At the same time I also worked as a volunteer in the intensive care unit in a governmental hospital. There were many war-wounded coming to the hospital, and I wanted to help and get more experience as a nurse.
My husband is from Istanbul and when we married in November 2015 I planned to go there with him. But I couldn’t get a visa because my papers were in Mosul. So I returned to Dohuk and started working in Shekhan hospital. When I heard that MSF was looking for midwives for a new maternity in Tal Maraq I immediately applied.
What are your feelings about working as a midwife here in Tal Maraq?
I love it, because I know that I do something good for people. Especially when we can help the poor and the displaced - that makes me feel good. I also like that MSF has medical protocols that everyone has to follow. It guarantees that all the patients receive the good care as they have the right to. We also get very good feedback from our patients.