Nov 3, 2026
3 min read
With no medical help on board, passenger Shanaz Joseph and others delivered a baby boy at sea, then worked to get the newborn to respond when he did not immediately cry.
The mother, Pauline Cyrus, went into labour aboard the MV Ma Lisha during a routine journey to Kumaka. According to the Public Works Ministry, labour began at about 1:10am, with the vessel roughly 22 nautical miles offshore. The baby arrived at 1:50am.
Joseph, who was travelling with her three daughters, said she first became concerned when she noticed Cyrus repeatedly pace and hold her back.
“I noticed something was off with her, so I was sitting and she come and get some water and she gone back and she come back and I asked she again, I said, ‘You all right?’ She said yes. So okay, so she went and like around near twelve something, like just after twelve she come back again and she look at me and I watch she, and she smiled. So I said, ‘What happened? You all right?’ She said, ‘No, I getting pain,’” Joseph recalled.
Joseph then realised Cyrus was in labour and went to alert the crew. She returned to help, drawing on what she had learnt from midwives and from her own experience of childbirth.
The birth, however, brought a new scare. The newborn did not cry, and Joseph said those gathered around feared the worst.
“They was just standing, and it was like the baby had died, and I said, ‘No, the baby ain’t dead.’ So the mother start fuh suck he nose. Well, I sucked nose, like one time and then the mother suck he nose, and then she blow, blow in his mouth, like three or four times she blow in his mouth, and then he made, like, a shake, and I started to rub his back and try for, you know, like to see he respond. And I, when he tried to make, like to cry, I pushed my finger in his mouth, and he cried a little,” she recounted.
Professional help arrived more than four hours after the birth, when a Coast Guard team led by Petty Officer Wendell Walcott reached the vessel at 6:20am. Cyrus and her newborn were then transferred to a Coast Guard vessel, taken to Kumaka and driven by ambulance to the Mabaruma Hospital for post-natal care.
Joseph said she was relieved that both were safe. The experience, she added, convinced her that passenger vessels, especially those serving remote routes, need better medical preparedness.
“The boat should or must be, must have someone, like maybe a doctor or something just to be traveling on the boat, just in case of an emergency like that,” she said.
Under Guyana’s Shipping Act, certain ships carrying at least 100 people must have a qualified medical practitioner aboard. That requirement, however, does not automatically extend to every domestic passenger ferry.
