Woman who has repeatedly given birth to quadruplets struggling to provide for her 38 children after husband abandons her

'My man has passed me through a lot of suffering,' says 39-year-old Mariam Nabatanzi

A woman who gave birth to a record-breaking five sets of quadruplets is now struggling to look after her 38 children alone after her husband left her.

Motherhood began at 13 for Mariam Nabatanzi when she delivered twins a year after getting married.

Five more sets of twins followed, along with four sets of triplets and the five sets of quadruplets. The previous record of four quadruplets, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was set in 18th Century Russia.

She is now 39 and lives with her extended family in four cramped houses made of cement blocks and corrugated iron in a village north of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

“I have grown up in tears, my man has passed me through a lot of suffering,” she said. ”All my time has been spent looking after my children and working to earn some money.”

Whatever she makes through hairdressing, decorating, brewing gin, collecting scrap metal and selling herbal medicine is quickly swallowed up by paying for food, medical care, clothing and school fees.

Twelve of her children sleep on metal bunk beds with thin mattresses in one small room with grime-caked walls. In the other rooms, the luckiest children pile onto shared mattresses while the others sleep on the dirt floor.

Older children help look after the young ones and everyone helps with chores, which are listed on a small wooden board nailed to a wall.

On another wall hang portraits of some of her children graduating from school, gold tinsel around their necks.

“Mum is overwhelmed, the work is crushing her, we help where we can, like in cooking and washing, but she still carries the whole burden for the family. I feel for her,” said her eldest child Ivan Kibuka, 23, who had to drop out of secondary school when the money ran out.

Her husband was absent for long periods of time throughout the marriage, but finally walked out for good following her last pregnancy two-and-a-half years ago. It was a complicated delivery and one of the twins – the sixth set – died in childbirth. Five other children have died over the years, but 38 survive.

Ms Nabatanzi says her desire for a large family resulted from a tragic event during her childhood.

Three days after she was born, Ms Nabatanzi’s mother abandoned her, her father and her five siblings.

After her father remarried, her stepmother poisoned the five older children with crushed glass mixed in their food. They all died. Ms Nabatanzi was visiting a relative at the time.

“I was seven years old then, too young to even understand what death actually meant,” she said. ”I was told by relatives what had happened.”

Her greatest wish now is for her children to be happy. “I started taking on adult responsibilities at an early stage,” she said. “I have not had joy, I think, since I was born.”

Additional reporting by Elias Biryabarema of Reuters