love and mucus sucker balls

Hi Everyone!  

Well, Project 1 has finally been accomplished.  Today I gave out the midwife kits to 11 local midwives.  They were very excited and receptive to get stethescopes, mucus sucker balls, gauze, gloves, a nylon sheet, baby wash, umbilical cutters, umbilical twine, and more.  Many thanks to all of you who helped.

Learning to use the stethoscopes.

Saying "thank you."

The ladies and their kits.  Aren't they a good looking bunch?

i project

So, I thought I would let you all know about the little projects I am working on right now.  They aren't vast, expansive efforts carefully researched for their sustainability.  One of them isn't even really related to my program at all.  But they are things I think I can do, that I am interested in, which I think have the potential to improve some people's lives just a little bit.  

Project 1:

As I have written before, the local midwives (comadronas) meet for additional training once a month in the Puesto de Salud, where I lead a charla.  We started out talking about things like hygiene during the birth, giving good prenatal care,  danger signs in the pregnancy, birth and newborn.  Then things got technical.  I began doing a lot of research every month and spoke to them about how to cut the cord and care of the placenta.  Finally, we have started to cover broader topics like domestic violence and sexuality.  These ladies are fun.  They are also very intelligent.  Unlike some other groups, they come to every meeting ready to learn.  They participate and add their own comments.  So, when a women's organization called the Zonta Group out of Sarasota, FL with the motto "Advancing the status of women worldwide" donated kits for midwives, I was very excited.  Because almost everything in the kits is disposable, I looked for things to supplement them, like stethoscopes to hear the fetal heartbeat, and those little mucus-sucker-ball thingys.  The kits, while an amazing and generous gift, were a little disappointing when we realized that each one could probably only used for one birth.  I am still looking for more TempoDOT themometers (so they can tell if a woman has a fever--a danger sign) and some rags.  Even though it's not the most sustainable gift, I think it will help the midwives and raise consciousness about hygiene.  Also, I feel good about giving this donation to a group that works hard and always comes in to charlas.

Project 2:

Because of the scarcity of digital cameras, money to make prints, etc, most people have few pictures of their children.  Also, exposure to the arts is limited.  Likewise, I live in a mostly forgotten corner of the world that is not remarkable enough to merit significant coverage in geography or social studies classes.  So, a couple of months ago, I took pictures of all of the students in the sixth grade, and sent them to an art teacher from my home town, Kathy Thompson.  She found a group of artists and interested youth who will paint portraits based on the photos I sent earlier (most of them are from Epworth First Baptist Church, as I understand it, although there are other community partners as well).  Students here will receive portraits of themselves that will hopefully become a cherished keepsake for them and their families for many years.  The artists will receive some cultural education about life here in this rural Guatemalan village as well as the satisfaction of brightening the life of a child.  The portraits are currently under way and should arrive mid to late June.  

So, those are the long term projects I am working on.  If you are interested in getting involved, there are ways you can help!  Just leave a comment or email me.   Many thanks to the Zonta club, Mrs. Thompson, Epworth First Baptist, Demosthenian Literary Society, Len and Carol Crawford and all other community partners involved in these exciting projects!

why?

There's been a lot of anxious hustle and bustle at the health center this week based on a new statistic that is out. Last week we suffered our first maternal mortality this year.

Can we organize the midwives and do a seminar on how to prevent a death like this? Who should visit the family to find out what went wrong? Are supervisors from the Ministry of Health going to come investigate our health center?

The mother who died was only sixteen--practically a child herself. In the past, women knew that the most dangerous thing they would do in their lifetime was to give birth. But over the past 100 years, maternal mortality rates have dropped dramatically, even in countries like Guatemala.

I wonder: Did she know the danger she was in when she felt her labor pains? Had she spent her pregnancy eagerly anticipating a new baby, or was it a time filled with anxiety about how she would feed and clothe her son, much less survive the birth? Did she get to see him at all? Or were her last moments a delirious blur of worried faces due to blood loss?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Nor do I know the answer to a more profound asking of "Why?"

But I think it has something to do with the social and economic factors that lead up to an uneducated sixteen-year-old to give birth in a non-sterile environment (a tiny home with dirt floors) with an incompetent midwife. When it comes to poverty, all the issues are interconnected--health, education, wages, family.

Consider her son. He will now be deprived of the most nutritious food available, breast milk. This is an enormous disadvantage. His family might not be able to afford powdered milk or formula, putting him at great risk for malnutrition. Because it's so hard to sterilize baby bottles, he's also at greater risk for many diseases, including the diarrheal diseases that are too often fatal to poor children here.

Socially, his father, if he was involved at all, will not be able to spend much time at home as he will spend his days farming. There's a good chance he'll go to be a migrant laborer, either in the fruit and coffee plantations on the coasts or all the way to the US. Without the proper love and discipline of a parent, he will be at greater risk for dropping out of school, and becoming a teenage husband himself.

Poverty is a giant, indescribably ugly circle.