Kute Buem (Plying Death)

The following blog post was taken from the Maternal Health Channel blog:

“Plying death” is a term used by the people of Kute-Buem, a village in the Volta Region of Ghana. The term refers to the path taken on motorbikes over the poorly constructed dirt roads. Motorbikes go out of the village for two main reasons, transporting farm products to and from the market and carrying pregnant women in labor to the hospital.

To say the road in Kute-Buem is poorly constructed is a gross understatement. The road is a narrow strip of red dirt, unpaved, water-logged and pocked with extremely deep manholes. At different points the road swells and shrinks in breadth, too narrow for two cars to pass side by side. The town is a relatively influential one in the region, a large producer of fresh-grown fruit, as well as providing much of the forest products that partly accounts for Ghana’s foreign income from exportation. Still, the efforts of the people to have the road fixed by the government have fallen on consistently deaf ears.

When one imagines a woman in labor passing on a motorbike over the roads of Kute-Buem, probably at night, when the majority of women go into labor, in the complete darkness of an isolated road without any streetlights, it is easy to understand why it is that most women do not risk the trek to the hospital to give birth.

It is unacceptable that women should be unable to reach a hospital to deliver safely because the roads surrounding her town are too rough to navigate but is a story re-told the country over. Even in a town like Kute-Buem, a town of good people who contribute to the nation’s well being, even these women are plying the death.