In the shadow of war, life begins anew in a Congolese maternity ward

Grace Tumaini’s round face twists with the pain of an early contraction. Her brow furrows and her eyes close. She is preparing to give birth to her first child in a small maternity ward in a displacement camp 40 miles from her home.

On the hot July morning when Ms. Tumaini goes into labor, eight women occupy the ward’s five beds, their legs twisted with those of strangers in the tight space. 

As the women cry out for their own mothers, their sobs mingle with the mewling of newborns, who will spend the first days of their lives in tents built precariously atop rocks and gravel. Their families are among the nearly 2 million people who have fled surging violence in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past two years. 

Since the beginning of 2024, some 1,200 babies have been born in this room, a testament to both the trauma of war and how, in spite of it, life carries stubbornly on. 

Far from home 

As Ms. Tumaini breathes through her contraction, midwife Daddy Ngeve walks down the row of beds, stepping carefully on a floor still slick with turpentine from cleaning. She bends over each woman in turn to lay her reassuring hand on a sweaty shoulder or to whisper encouragement. 

This maternity ward is one part of a small Médecins Sans Frontières-supported clinic in Goma, Congo. Uniformed doctors dart in and out of brick-walled rooms, and tents have been set up in the courtyard to deal with triage. In the distance, the dilapidated structures under which displaced people have sheltered are just visible. 

Over the last 13 years, Ms. Ngeve has delivered thousands of babies, each born into one of successive waves of conflict in eastern Congo. 

Over that time, the midwife has learned the languages of the different parts of the country, ripped apart by war, so that she can offer her patients words of comfort from the homes they left behind. “Push. Breathe,” she tells them. “It will be all right.” 

The women now in the ward fled fighting between the Congolese army and rebels from the March 23 Movement, better known as M23. Backed by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, the group was formed by dissatisfied Congolese soldiers in 2012 and stepped up its military activity in early 2022. 

M23 claims to protect Congo’s ethnic Tutsi population, but has unleashed its violence indiscriminately on farming villages, forcing civilians to flee their homes.    

Ms. Tumaini arrived in Goma in late October 2023, taking refuge in one of the mushrooming camps on the city’s outskirts. She and her husband joined the tens of thousands of people who are currently living on any unoccupied land they can find in North Kivu’s lakeside capital, sheltering under whatever they can scrounge together to keep the wind and sun off their backs. 

Ms. Tumaini knew that for a healthy pregnancy, she needed to gain weight, but she could not farm in the displacement camp, and she feared being raped by armed men if she ventured into the surrounding fields to look for something to eat. 

Now, waiting her turn to give birth, she worries she has already fallen short as a mother. 

“When you are pregnant, you have to feed the baby, and I couldn’t feed two people,” she says nervously. 

Suddenly, Ms. Tumaini’s bedmate cries out. Her baby is coming. 

Ms. Tumaini moves to the adjacent bed, watching in numb anticipation from a plastic-covered mattress as the woman pushes the baby into Ms. Ngeve’s waiting arms. As the infant wails, the mother flashes an exhausted thumbs-up. Ms. Tumaini and the others clap. 

Helping women 

Ms. Ngeve lives for these moments. Helping bring life into the world, she says, feels akin to being a “second God on Earth.” 

She first became interested in medicine as a young girl, marveling at the doctors and nurses in bright white coats whom her parents called to treat her when she was sick. 

“I feel good when I can help women like me who are facing difficulties,” she says in a tone both warm and matter-of-fact. “I am happy to practice what I love.” 

When Ms. Ngeve is not tending to pregnant women, she manages a clinic caring for survivors of sexual violence and she gives lessons in family planning and contraception to displaced men and women alike. 

Sometimes, after the mothers in the maternity ward take their children back to their plastic tents, Ms. Ngeve does not see them again. But others return to her proudly, showing off the growing children she helped to deliver. 

Always, she has the same hope for them. 

“I want them to grow up in health and know something other than war,” Ms. Ngeve says. “I hope they will not know the same misery that their parents experienced.” 

Small celebrations 

Ms. Ngeve’s aspirations are shared by the young women she aids. They find ways to celebrate their new babies however they can, often parading from the maternity ward back to their tents, singing and drumming on yellow plastic jerricans as they go.  

A Monitor reporter met Ms. Tumaini again two days after she’d given birth to a baby boy named Gabriel. 

In a tent made of dusty tarpaulin and fragile bits of wood, she held him tightly on her lap, cooing to a small newborn hidden in a bundle of woolen blankets. 

Two aunts and the boy’s father looked on proudly. They’d gathered as many potatoes and bags of dried beans as they could and bought some soda, throwing a small party to trumpet Gabriel’s arrival. Even without much food to eat, they shared whatever they could with friends and neighbors.

Someday, Ms. Tumaini prays, she will return to her village, to the farm where she once grew cassava and maize in abundance. 

Gabriel will eat as much as he wants, every day, and she will make enough money to pay for him to have a good education.

“He could become a nurse or a doctor,” she says, “and provide help to the population as people here do for us.” 

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.