Open The Gate. My wife is Dying

Perfect Daba, 23, bled to death in three extraordinary hours during which she failed to reach the hospital. She had delivered a baby girl in the middle of the night but started bleeding badly. Sammy his husband tried to rush her to the hospital but sadly, the only exit out of their village, a metal gate was shut for the night. The gate separates Torgome village from the Kpong Power Plant managed by Volta River Authority in Volta Region, Ghana. The gate is shut at 10 pm every evening. Nobody comes in, nobody goes out of the village.

Perfect and her husband got to the gate at 3 am, desperate to get to the hospital but the gate was locked. The gateman was nowhere to be found. It took Samy an hour to locate him but it was too late. Perfect was hanging unto dear life. By the time they reached the hospital, she had bled to death.

“When Perfect died, it felt like someone took my heart and threw it into the lake but with your support, I can hope again. I still believe Perfect could have lived if that gate was open that night but I’m not bitter. I will never forget her face as we were looking for the security guards. The VRA gate has been there before I was born, but thanks to you all, the security guards are now letting people pass the gate at night, small small. Other good things will follow because I believe that no matter how long it takes, Torgome will never be the same again. Perfect has not died in vain. I look at my last born and remember her, every day” Sammy.

Why?

Prof. Emeritus Henry Wellington, the architect of Torgome sets the records straight.

“I did not design it as a gated estate. That gate in the story was not part of the original planning scheme!”

“Thanks for your mail with the sad story of Perfect. The story meant a lot to me. I presumed it to be a true story and related to a real-life situation that came close to me, emotionally and intellectually, for three significant points in the story. I cannot but share these with you as follows:

I was the architect/planner who designed Torgome as a resettlement community. Incidentally, I did not design it as a gated estate. That gate in the story was not part of the original planning scheme!

I was born in Akuse hospital about 70 years ago. My parents were working at Akuse for His Majesty colonial government. My father was the post-master.

Like Perfect’s child, I was born as a premature baby. I survived without an incubator because God gave an idea to the doctor in charge to keep me warm. This was done by the nurses being asked to constantly circle me in bed with warm pieces of stone, which had been warmed in fire, taken out and wrapped with sheets. The name of this creative and committed Doctor was AMORIN.

My Mother survived the threat of death caused by my pregnancy (the 13th) and lived on to age 79 when she died in my hands at that time when there was a national strike of professionals in I think 1976 when I had taken her to that small military clinic in Kumasi. Thank God I survived my birth as a primy to become a professor.

God bless you for your service in the interest of mothers.