It was October 11, 2004, and the world looked beautiful to KMG Prinsika.
She had given birth to her third child, a wide-eyed baby girl she and her husband named Pushmi Moonesha. The happy parents told the gynaecologist that they’d had enough children, and it was time for Prinsika to be sterilized.
On December 26, 2004, the world became a horror for the couple.
The Asian tsunami took away Pushmi Moonesha — ”blooming flower” in the Sinhalese language — and their 7-year-old son, Panitha. The couple’s 11-year-old daughter, Pujitha, survived.
Now, Prinsika (31) is joining many other Sri Lankan mothers in seeking solace in surgery: A reversal of her tubal ligation to allow her to have more babies.
”I want my other children back,” said Prinsika, sitting on a plastic chair in the family’s two-room apartment in this town on Sri Lanka’s southern coast.
But those children, she knows, are not coming back.
Prinsika has already spoken to the gynaecologist who sterilized her, and is awaiting word from the hospital on what tests need to be done to determine if she can have the surgery.
”The moment she entered my chamber she started crying and then told me what the tsunami did to her family,” said her doctor, Dr. PM. Liyanage of Colombo’s Nawaloka Hospital.
The waves killed more than 31 000 people on this tropical island. Forty percent of them were children.
The Sri Lankan government says it will help families pay for the surgeries. Some private hospitals, including Nawaloka, say they will perform them at reduced or no cost.
”It is an important issue and if we are requested we will help,” said Sri Lanka’s Minister of Health Care, Siripala De Silva. ”Nothing is more important than seeing life emerging again from the devastation of tsunami.”
Sri Lanka, a nation of 19-million people with many working women, has one of the region’s most successful family planning programmes.
Many Sri Lankan mothers choose to be sterilized after their second or third child, normally through tubal ligations. The surgery involves cutting a woman’s fallopian tubes, then tying or closing them to prevent pregnancies. In the reversal surgery, the tubes are reconnected.
The surgery to reconnect the tubes is expensive by Sri Lankan standards, about 50 000 rupees ($500), and success is far from guaranteed.
It first requires a small incision in the abdomen to see if the tubes are large enough to be rejoined. There is no national data available on the success rate. Before the tsunami, most reversals were requested by women after their second marriages.
The other option, artificial fertilization, costs as much as 400 000 rupees ($4,000) — an enormous amount of money here. Prinsika doesn’t work, and her husband earns 16 000 rupees ($160) a month working as a driver for the state electricity company.
While there are no available statistics on how many women want to have the reversal surgery, doctors and officials say the number has grown since the tsunami.
”We will see more and more cases like these in coming months,” said Dr. Gamini Perera, an obstetrician in the tsunami-battered town of Galle, about 40km west of Matara.
”Until now the basic issue was how to survive, now some have started to think how to get the family together again,” he said.
Perera says he was approached by a mother in late April who lost all three of her children in the tsunami, and wanted the reversal surgery.
”Her husband had gone to the market when the waves struck,” Perera said. ”She told me she held onto something and manage to escape the waves, but all her three children were gone.”
Aid workers are torn by the sudden interest in the surgeries — encouraged that these women are looking to the future, but also eager for people to remember the children left orphaned by the waves.
”It is important for mothers to come to this state of mind by rising above the grief,” said Maleec Calyaneratne, the spokesperson for Save the Children in Sri Lanka. ”But some mothers can go for other options, like looking after the children who have lost parents.” For Prinsika, the choice is simple.
”I am waiting for the day when I will have my babies back,” she said.-Sapa-AP