When a young woman was having trouble giving birth outside the clinic gate in Burgersfort, 55-year-old street vendor Gladys Mokgotho came to the rescue.

55-year-old street hawker Gladys Mokgotho of Limpopo wept in anguish as she cut the umbilical chord from a newborn boy’s neck in front of locked hospital doors. It’s possible that the onlookers would have recoiled at each swipe of her palm across the baby’s neck as she sought to carry the newborn, who was born outside the Burgersfort medical facility’s gates.

 

In the meantime, nurses allegedly declined to help, citing a lack of readiness because of an untimely start to their shift. These incidents occurred on Tuesday at about 6:30 a.m., half an hour before the medical center opened to the public.

Social media shares of a video documenting one of the incidents have prompted an investigation by the provincial fitness branch. The branch has also stated that services begin at 7 a.m. and that 24-hour availability was discontinued years ago after a group of night shift employees were attacked.

Mokgotho, a seasoned vendor who has set up shop outside the clinic for years, decided to start selling vetkoeks to the clinic’s patients at 6 a.m. on Tuesday after she had a hunch about how popular they would be. A normal workweek for Mokgotho came to an end when he assisted 27-year-old Thandi Phasha in giving birth to her second child.

“I abruptly got out of the restroom and had my son watch it with me. When I arrived, a mob was already yelling at the guards to let them in.” “Other women had been crouching across the mother, shielding her with their shawls so she might have some privacy,” she said.