Truelly a miracle

Shortly after Blessing arrived in the world, her mother placed her in a plastic bag and left her to die. How long baby Blessing remained in that stretch of veld in Meredale, southern Johannesburg, no one knows.

On Friday morning, two gardeners who work at a nearby townhouse complex heard a baby crying. They called for help, and for two hours they searched the thick bush. They eventually found the baby in a plastic bag. By then she had stopped crying and when Johannesburg Emergency Management Services paramedic Tracey Visser arrived at the scene, her first thought was that the child was dead. "She wasn't responding, she was blue and very cold."

Eventually, when Visser was able to get a whimper from the newborn, she realised she was still alive. The baby, Visser said, still had the placenta attached. Visser rushed to a nearby townhouse complex and ran a bath. "I knew I had to warm her up or she would die," she said. Even after the bath, the baby was still unresponsive and cold. Visser then realised she had to use her own body heat to keep the newborn alive. "I tucked her into my top. I hoped that the skin-to-skin heat would warm her little body," she said.

The baby was rushed to Netcare Mulbarton hospital, where doctors Iselle Combrink and Derick Reinecke continued the task of warming the newborn up. Four days after she arrived at Mulbarton, she has a name and is on the road to recovery. Baby Blessing is feeding well and makes all the right cooing noises when the nursing staff vie for her attention.

Cuddly toys and donated baby products have been piling up net to her incubator. Visser has visited her every day since she rescued her in the veld. So has Juliet Msibi, who was part of the search team that found her in the veld. Msibi hopes to adopt her one day. For Visser, Blessing is her miracle baby, the one who survived. "In my eight years working as a paramedic this is the first abandoned baby to survive," she said proudly.