World’s Only Nonuplets Celebrate First Birthday
By Admin
Four boys and five girls in Mali — the Guinness World Record-breaking nonuplets — celebrated a very important milestone this week: their first birthday.
Halima Cissé and husband Abdelkader Arby welcomed their nine babies in Morocco on May 4, 2021. Now the children — who arrived at 30 weeks and are still under the care of the clinic where they were born — are all “in perfect health,” their father told BBC Afrique on Wednesday.
“They’re all crawling now. Some are sitting up and can even walk if they hold on to something,” added Arby of the infants — daughters Kadidia, Fatouma, Hawa, Adama and Oumou as well as sons Mohammed VI, Oumar, Elhadji and Bah.
Although he admitted that taking care of nine babies can be “tiring at times,” he said everything fades away when the parents think about how fortunate they are for their children’s health.
The couple are also parents to daughter Souda, 3.
“It’s not easy but it’s great,” he said.
Cissé, now 26, was transferred to a clinic in Morocco shortly before her babies’ birth, Dr. Fanta Siby, Mali’s minister of health and social development, announced in a statement last year. At the time, doctors believed she was expecting only seven children.
“So you can imagine our surprise when we discovered nine of them during the birth,” Casablanca Ain Borja Clinic’s Dr. Youssef Alaoui said during an interview with Today last year.
“Luckily this didn’t faze us, since we have one of the largest neonatal resuscitation services in Morocco,” added Alaoui. “Our teams were ready to welcome these children into the world and able to treat them in the best conditions.”
