The phone torch years

Sister Agnes has delivered babies in Rakai for fifteen years. She has a quiet voice and a habit of tidying whatever is in front of her while she talks.

"The power goes off two, three times a week," she says. "Always at night. Always at the worst moment."

Learning the wrong skill

Every midwife she knows has delivered a baby by the light of a phone. Some hold it in their teeth. Some ask the mother's sister to hold it. Some balance it on a shelf and hope it does not fall.

You learn to hold the phone with your chin. You should not have to learn that.

Bad light is not only uncomfortable. It makes it harder to see bleeding, harder to check a tear, harder to resuscitate a baby who does not breathe straight away. And the phone in your teeth is the same phone you need to call for help.

What she wants

Agnes joined MANCO because, in her words, "somebody needed to say these things out loud". She now leads the Kyalulangira Center council, which asked for a small solar system for the delivery room as its first cause.

"It is not a big thing," she says. "One panel. Two lamps. But for the mother, it is everything. She can see my face."