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There is nothing more painful for a mother than burying her child. For Nachiwelo Malewele, a grandmother who does not know her age but could as well be in her late 60s, it is a hard story to tell.
At that age, she breast-feeds, all in attempt to save her grandchild from dying.
Difficult to believe, but here is a woman who was once happily married and blessed with seven children — four boys and three girls. The couple brought up the children and saw them all getting married and having children of their own. Today there is only herself and one granddaughter, a one-and-a-half-year old baby-girl Isilere.
“Isilere is all I have now,” said Malewele in a brief interview last Saturday at Nkhoma Synod headquarters in Lilongwe, where the National Bank of Malawi donated assorted food, fertilizer, secondhand clothes and blankets worth K1 million ($9,259) to over 7,500 orphans the synod is looking after in 25 centres established in 21 of its 106 congregations.
She said she hates to be reminded of her departed husband, children and grandchildren and that had it not been for the great love she has for her only surviving granddaughter, she would have wished she were no more herself.
“Isilere is the only reason I want to live, otherwise I wish I had also died to join my family in the land of the dead,” she said.
She is not sure what caused the death of her entire family but suspects Aids.
“Maybe it’s this mliri (Aids pandemic) that wiped out my children and grandchildren. All of them were very ill for a long, long time before they started dying one by one. At first I thought it was witchcraft but eventually I came to believe that it must be Aids,” said Malewele.
She does not understand how she manages to breast-feed but is happy it works.
“It’s a miracle. I have been breast-feeding Isilere from the time her mother died in July last year. She was six months old then and I have breast-fed her for a year now,” said the old woman, a subsistence farmer.
“I grow maize and other crops on a small field to fend for myself and the baby. It’s tough for an old woman like me, but what else can I do? I can only pray to God that His will be done,” she said.
Asked whether it is indeed possible for a woman of Malewele’s age to produce milk, Dr. Joyce Munthali, a gynaecologist at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital and lecturer at Malawi College of Medicine, says it happens.
“It depends on the hormones. Even a girl of nine can produce milk if the [milk] hormones are excited,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.
Malewele comes from Kwanange Village in the area of Traditional Authority Chaima in the capital Lilongwe.
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