A photographer whose brilliant first photo series documented new mothers and their day-old babies has released a second collection, this time featuring women who gave birth in the world’s poorest country.
Jenny Lewis started the One Day Young project, a seven-year effort capturing 40 London mums, to show women currently pregnant that giving birth is absolutely nothing to fear.
More recently, as part of a collaboration with the clean water charity Water Aid, Lewis visited the Simulemba health centre in Malawi, where every year more than 510 women in 100,000 die during childbirth.
Staffed by just two 24-hour midwives and with no running water, the Simulemba centre delivers three babies per day. Pregnant patients and their families must visit the local village and collect water from a pump there, with many walking up to three hours daily to get what they need.
One mum whose photo is part of the latest series, Esther Banda faced a two-hour walk to the centre once her contractions started. Once she reached Simulemba, her delivery was dramatic: “I got scared because the baby came face first,” says Esther. “But the midwives were scared that if they took me to Kasungu [the area’s only major hospital] the baby would die on the way.”
New mum Alinafe, who travelled to the centre by motorbike when she went into labour two weeks early said the water available near her home is dirty and the well is frequented by cows: “When I was two months pregnant I thought I was going to die.” she said. “My stomach was hurting badly and I was doing diarrhoea. I felt like maybe I would lose the pregnancy, that I would have a miscarriage.”
Luckily, Alinafe gave birth to a healthy baby boy she named Boyson.
“Everyone seems to have this fear and anxiety about birth,” says Lewis. “After my son was born, I felt a responsibility to tell people I met who were pregnant that it’s going to be OK. That was true in London, and should be just as true in Malawi.”
The series was created as part of an awareness campaign for WaterAid’s Deliver Life Campaign.
