AT 6 A.M. each day, Tephanie Niña Dublin, 25, would bring their family’s goat to graze outside their home in Barangay Maya, Daanbantayan in northern Cebu.
A break in her daily routine happened last Wednesday morning when she found a newborn baby boy wrapped in a plastic bag in front of their home’s gate. Traces of blood were still on the baby’s body and the umbilical cord still attached to its navel.
Tephanie hurriedly brought the baby to her mother Nympha, a rural midwife, who rushed him to the nearest Rural Health Unit (RHU) for immediate treatment, said Daanbantayan Municipal Social Welfare Officer Heidie Aplece.
It was the baby’s crying that caught the attention of Tephanie as she was on her way out of their house. “(Tephanie) even almost stepped on the baby,” Aplece told Cebu Daily News by phone yesterday.
Tephanie and Nympha claimed they heard a dog barking and a rustling sound outside their home Tuesday night but did not pay it much attention.
Aplece said health volunteers concluded the baby was born premature and only six months old.
Aplece, quoting a local police report, said the baby was believed to be only about a day old when found.
After receiving intravenous fluids and antibiotics at the RHU, the baby was brought to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) in Cebu
City on Thursday night and is now confined at the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
“We have already spoken to the (Cebu provincial government). They will shoulder the bill,” the town official said.
Aplece said they are still making inquiries regarding the baby’s parents.
Once the foundling is in stable condition and can be released from the hospital, Aplece said he would turn him over to the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Central Visayas (DSWD-7).