Asunta Wagura: Babies don't come cheap

Asunta Wagura in 2009. She has lived positively with HIV for over 34 years and has five HIV-negative children. [File, Standard]

Asunta’s journey of life has been a rollercoaster of sorts. For her, life has been out of the ordinary. “I believe as a human being we can live our dreams, we simply have to believe.” Immediately after her statement, she says she still can’t believe that at her age she has twin girls who are now the apple of her eyes.

“I have always been longing for a daughter, and God is a God of miracles, He gave me twins, I still think it’s just a mere dream, how can you believe that at my age the miracles happened,” Asunta avers.

With five boys, it would become easy to understand Asunta’s yearnings. “It is not that I don’t hold my sons in high regard, I love that, in a way I can’t explain, I just wished I could get daughters as well and God has been more than kind to me, look I now have not a daughter but daughters,” Asunta says with a tinge of joy in her voice, I hear a chuckle after that statement.

The three-week-old daughters tested HIV negative just like her five boys and mid-next month they will undergo another confirmatory test

On Monday this week, defying all odds, including the scientific tenets, Asunta shocked many when she declared that she had delivered twins.

“My pregnancy was secret until near delivery when it was obvious. For reasons did not know how to handle people in case I lost the pregnancy,”

Asunta says it once happened in the past and the most haunting thing was when people asked her how the baby was doing when she had not carried the pregnancy to term.

“I did not even buy clothes until the twins were born,” says Asunta who relocated to Ontario Canada ten years ago where she now does the empowerment of vulnerable people in Living in the city.

The mother of seven now, says the reason for her keeping everything secret was because she did not want people to talk her out of the decision to have a baby.

“I regretted when I shared my intention to conceive Joshua. All manner of delegations were sent to me to sell fear and scare me out of the idea. I went ahead and vowed never to share dreams beforehand,” she averred.

She said that when she wanted to have Joshua, his 18-year-old son who is set to join college soon, she shared over newspapers her intentions and the delegations from family, and community leaders, and one was the wife of an ambassador.

“They told me I would not be setting a good example as a leader and a woman for that because other women might copy me. Close family members argued I wouldn’t make it out of labour ward and some peers argued because of the time I had lived with HIV it was likely my baby would be infected and die shortly after,”

Despite their opposition, she argues that they lacked any data to support their arguments or basis for discouraging her hence she went ahead, and the more they discouraged the more I longed for the baby.

“Today Joshua is headed to 18 years soon to be in college. That’s where I encourage whoever goes for your dream you will cross bridges when you reach them. At about 60 people are asking me why I did it, I did it because that is what I desired most- a retirement plan if you will my divine gold handshake pension I think that is how I can describe it,” she says.

Asunta says that she feels reborn, refreshed and happy beyond measure including the colic trips at night. It is all part of her joy package.

“After five boys I always longed for a daughter, when my firstborn Peter married, I was happy because I had a daughter, now I have two more, my boys cannot get enough of the girls,” she said.

Asunta notes that she does not have a husband and got her through Nairobi Fertility Centre. “Majority of my kids have been through fertility treatment, where most women go through the closed approach at the clinics, it is only younger women who go for specific male seeds,” she explained.

She says it costs about Sh700,000 with no after-medicines but if one includes travel accommodation and pre-medication it goes to Sh. 1.2 million, not forgetting supplements to nurture uterus health and a whole turn of multivitamins and minerals.

“If you bounce, which happens, you dig deeper into your account. It is a game of chances, a kind of trial. When you lose you pay for another because the clinic claims it also has lost, but they maximize chances like ensuring best embryo testing before transfers among other measures,” she explained.

The story of the Asunta began in 1989, she nostalgically remembers one morning in 1989, as the country trudged with a pandemic, she was called to the principal’s office.

 “Curt and unapologetic the principal of the then nursing school in Nairobi expelled me from college and gave her six months to quit.

Asunta had tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) , a sexually transmitted infection that was then a huge scare not only in Kenya but globally.

“I believe the principal was giving me time to go die in peace away from the presence of his other students.”

She notes that the principal had summoned Asunta’s mother to the office as he gave his edict on her expulsion. “For the period I would remain in college, arrangements were made to have me sleep separately from other students, just lest I infected them with the pandemic that was then feared like death itself.”

“I was secluded and no one wanted to interact with me, not even sharing my utensils, bedding, and any articles of clothing,” says Ms. Wagura in her autobiography; From Heartbreak to Daybreak: My Journey with HIV.

In 1994, former President the late Daniel Arap Moi declared the AIDS epidemic a national disaster after he announced that about 100,000 people had already died from AIDS.

Asunta to lessen the pangs of stigma started the Kenyan Network of Women with AIDS (KENWA). Through KENWA, she together with others began making home visits and providing basic foodstuffs, bed management, and care, at one time reaching upwards of 10,000 people.