'Women Need Services....So I started with my mom'.

My name, Oko, where I come from, is a generic name for “first male twins.” So, logically, if people hear [my name], “Oh, you’re Oko, you’re a twin!” And then I got to wonder, “Oh, yes, I am a twin, because everybody with my name is a twin.” But I realized I don’t have a twin brother or a twin sister, so what am I? A single twin? 

I started asking questions—you know how curious I can be. I was asking my mom, I was asking my grandmother. My dad won’t even talk about it anyway. So it’s quite fishy because you go to school and people ask, “You’re Oko, where is your twin?” And you go, “Okay, so Mom told a few lies, covered up, my twin lives elsewhere.” But you know as I grew to the age of 10, 12, 13, still more questions. I was getting curious, and it was at that same age I was experiencing changes in my body, trying to understand all that is happening. 

Then one time I was just—I’m always reading—I was grabbing a few books and some antiques at home, and I found my birth certificate. It was wrapped with my twin sister’s birth certificate. So I’m like, “Oh, wow, I have a twin! That’s her birth certificate—it’s true!” So I was very happy, and then I walked to Grandma: “You guys weren’t telling me the truth. Where is my twin sister?” 

And she was like, “Okay, fine. I give up. I’m fed up. I can’t keep telling lies anymore, I have to tell you the real story.” I lost my twin sister, two weeks after birth, and you see right after that, the next child that my mother brought—she also lost it because it was a stillbirth. Then I had to understand that my mom had previously been through a lot, and it was a woman’s issue, so she found it very hard to discuss, especially with me when I was a child asking all those questions. I understood my mom and understood my grandmother. Digging deep, I found out that even before I was born, there was another girl that was given birth to, but my mom also lost her. I was much, much younger then, but I also had to understand the trauma, the pain that she’s been through. 

I was like, “Okay, what can I do about this?” I was still trying to actually understand what had happened. Looking around the same community, I realized my mom was not the only one who had been through that. There were many young women who had probably suffered one complication or another who were not accessing services. So as curious as I was, I went around asking very weird questions like, “Would you visit the midwife or the clinic if you had any problem?” They were like, ”Oh, no, me go to the midwife or nurse? No, no, no. They’ll treat me badly; I won’t go!” So I asked the young girls, “Are you comfortable with your body?” Even then, I was trying to understand what was happening to me, seeing a beard and all sorts of things. I was trying to understand, and I asked people, and I realized there’s a huge gap. 

Women need services. If my mom had understood her body and knew what was happening within when there were complications or problems, she could have figured it out, walked to the health center or clinic, or sought counsel or services or something. But I have to trace it back to even when she was growing as a young girl—she had no information or services…. I realized then that much more of the women like my mother in my community need education. They need some basics…. 

Earlier when I started educating women and talking to girls, I had to start the education right at home before I stepped out…. So I started with my mom, to get real basic anatomy of her body and how things function, periods, very basic reproductive health…. She’d open up to me about some really bad things that she’d been through. That was a turning point—if this is a point I can come to with my own mother to make sure that she’d get the right services, and she’s really up to her game, she knows what to do at what time, then, yes, I can go out and do it. 

Photographer: David Alexander

Interviewer: Liz Futrell

Originally posted on  The Knowledge for Health (K4Health)  project and  Family Planning 2020's Family Planning Voices (#FPVoices) 

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