I want my toddler sons back
“If I don’t get my children back today I am going to kill myself.”
Panic-stricken and distressed, a mother whose toddlers were taken away by health officials for COVID -19 isolation has made a desperate plea for them to be returned.
After a harrowing 10-days of fruitless efforts to find out from health officials where exactly her children were isolated, Magdeline Malaki, 34 phoned The Voice Newspaper to send out her plea for help.
The young mother says it was a call from her funeral service provider on Wednesday that scared her even more and prompted her to escalate the search for her children
“I might be hallucinating but when my funeral service provider called me to ask a few questions about my policy I panicked. They have never called me before and I have been using them for years now. But today they called to ask me if I still have my funeral policy subscriptions up to date? Why? I want my children,” she said in distress.
Malaki’s ordeal began when her first-born son got in contact with a positive case at his school around mid-October.
“My older son tested positive on the 20th of October. They told us to keep him at home. They (health officials) did not come to take him for quarantine. It was only at the beginning of November that they came to test the rest of us,” Malaki tells The Voice reporter as she struggles to keep tears from running down her cheeks.
According to her, the family’s results came back, and only she tested positive.
“I received a call on the morning of November 9 that we were all negative. Surprisingly the officials called back later that evening to change their earlier statement and said only I had tested positive, meaning my two young children, age one four as well as their father were negative. I could not believe it because in the morning they had told me a different story,” she said.
To her surprise, health officials came back the next morning and took away the children leaving her at home.
She said she accepted the protocols but only got worried after the 10- day quarantine elapsed and the children were not returned.
She further claims health officials have not been forthcoming about the children’s whereabouts and their expected date of release.
“I just want my toddlers back home. They tested negative; I should have been the one isolated, not them. I begged them to take me and leave my children and they refused. They have been gone for more than the recommended 10 days. If I don’t get my children back today I am going to kill myself,” she said.
“My youngest child uses nappies and drinks milk. He doesn’t have all of that. I should have been isolated with them, they need their mother. They are too young. They are not used to being with their father because he is always away working and comes home late. I am told they are always crying. I am convinced this is true because the one-year-old cries a lot,” the young mother further lamented.
She said every time she wanted to know where the children were kept she was told only management could provide that that information.
The father of the children could not be reached on the phone either, she said.
However on Wednesday this week, she was finally told that the kids were transferred to another facility but she was neither told why not the name of the place.
The Voice reached out o Presidential Task Force Coordinator, Kereng Masupu who assured he would personally assist the young mother because she shouldn’t have been separated from her young children in the first place.
