Indian Doctor Who Performs Seven Caesarean Operations a Week in Nigeria

 

There’s nothing odd if a Nigerian or African being is found to be a Hindu worshipper, but when you see a Born Again, tongue-speak­ing and Holy Ghost filled Indian national, something out of the ordinary certainly must have taken place. OVIE DANIEL spoke with one re­cently and filed in this report.

Dr Ambuja Eberendu is a Nige­rian-Indian by marriage born in Hyderabad in the Middle Belt re­gion of India in 1954 to a business man father and a simple house­wife mother.

The 3rd of four children, Dr Eberendu as she prefers to be called is married to Mr. Sistus Eberendu, a son of Mbaise East Local Government Area of Nge­ria’s Imo State. A medical prac­tioner of many decades in three countries, Eberendu took our cor­respondent to the circumstances that made her prefer a Nigerian to an American engineer for mar­riage and the encounter that re­vealed Jesus Christ to her as her Lord and Saviour:

Growing up in India:

As an adolescent growing up in her home country, Eberendu attended the standard six class under India’s primary education­al structure and went on to the senior high school for five years. Thereafter she enlisted into the Pre-Nurse City Coast before join­ing a specialized medical school. It wasn’t in her dream to be a doc­tor, she told Daily Times.

“I did not decide to be a doctor, it is God’s will. I applied for all the courses after my secondary school but one of my relation sug­gested I apply for medicine also, so I rushed to get all the papers for the medical course, and when the list came out, I was the first on the list.”

She said of her husband: “We courted for six months then we got married on the 13th of De­cember 1982. We stayed in Delhi for six months and on the 7th of May 1983 we came to Nigeria and stayed in Kano”.

The mixed marriage produced a son and a daughter. The son, whom Dr Eberendu calls ‘Baba’ is Kelechi John Eberendu, now 26 read applied zoology but did his second degree in aircraft maintenance engineering. Now a graduate of aircraft engineering Kelechi is working with an airline here in Lagos while the daughter of the family is in Canada read­ing medicine. He said of having a Nigerian father and an Indian mother:

“Well there’s really no special feeling, except that the lifestyle of my mother is clearly different from the general lifestyle we have with mothers in Nigeria. The In­dian mother is more disciplined and straightforward. She tells you things strict and don’t attempt to pet you”.

Of his Nigerian father he said: ‘My father is the typical Nigerian father, so we grew up in a very dis­ciplined home’.

At the opposite end of his fa­ther’s profession, Kelechi feels that flying is a boring job; ‘Excit­ing to some other people may be, but to me, it’s a routine profes­sion: what the pilot did today is what he’ll do tomorrow, but in engineering we’re diverse and dy­namic; we do a lot of things and is a lot more handy’.

I was recalled to Nasarawa Hos­pital after a time and I constituted the team that opened the new the­atre at Sabo Bakin-Zuwo. After that I sort a break from the Nigeri­an environment and went to Sau­di Arabia where I worked for two years. In 1992 her husband called me and broke the news that our property in Kano has been robbed during the Hausa-Ibo crisis. I had to leave the job and returned im­mediately to Nigeria in 1992 be­cause apart from the property, our two children were in Kano also.”

Of medical practice in Nigeria she said:

“Well it was very good; at least I was doing about seven caesareans a week and other surgeries are there in between. I was very busy at Adeniyi Jones.”

Specialists in her team include a surgeon, entomologist, derma­tologist, paediatrician, Ear Nose and Throat (ENT), orthopaedic, cardiologist, and a respiratory doctor.

Comparing the difference in medical practice between Nigeria and India, Eberendu said there’s a vast difference:

‘We Indians don’t work because of money, we work because it’s our duty; we devote our lives to­wards our patients; we work hard to make sure our patients are al­right. But here in Nigeria’, she hesitated, and shook her head; ‘I don’t know, please don’t let me say anything about medical practice in Nigeria; I don’t want to commit any offence.”