NEWS
August 15, 2008
BRINGING LOTS OF HELP TO SOROTI
IMA’s Program Director, Jennifer Braun, is back in Soroti, Uganda, helping to support our operations on the ground. She will be abroad from August 4 through September 24 providing assistance to our clinical work and ensuring administrative functioning is in order. This time, Dr. Claudia Wyrick, board member and medical doctor, is accompanying Jennifer. Claudia is helping Dr. Nathan Eriamu and Comprehensive Nurse Charles Ongura with the clinic’s general medical operations. She has been welcomed with open arms, and Charles and Nathan are very pleased to have someone there especially to support their work.
As well, two young ladies have traveled to Soroti with Jennifer and Claudia to help with Teso AIDS Programme’s (TAP’s) daycare. Marissa Shevins and Marlene Kountze will be in Soroti for three weeks volunteering their time before returning to Denver to resume high school.
COMBATING HUNGER
The United Nations recently listed Uganda as one of 16 “hunger hot spots” around the globe. With gas prices soaring everywhere, a food crisis has emerged in much of the developing world. Uganda has not been immune to the effects of high food prices, and the most vulnerable in society are the first to suffer. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are the poorest of the poor. Often unemployed, lacking traditional family structures to support them, IDPs risk starvation. The most vulnerable among them are the pregnant women and children. To help our clients, each pregnant mother receives soya powder, beans and rice after every visit to our clinic. IMA instituted this practice long before the current predicament, but now more than ever it is critical for these mothers to receive this extra help for themselves and their children.
IMA BEGINS WORKING IN HAITI, EXPANDING OUR REACH TO TWO COUNTRIES!
This July, IMA sent Pam Chandler to Petit Trou de Nippes, Haiti, with the representatives from the Colorado Haiti Project to begin a long-term partnership in which local women will be taught basic lifesaving skills. The method taught to community women is called home-based life saving skills (HBLSS). HBLSS is basically first aid for mothers and newborns. It is most needed in rural areas that lack formal medical care and the basic infrastructure to get a woman in labor to a skilled practitioner. Haiti is a country in crisis. It has the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western hemisphere and has an exceedingly high infant mortality rate. With nearly seven women dying every 1,000 births in the general population and 100 infants dying every 1,000 births (among the poorest 20 percent of the population), death is all too common. Pregnancy and childbirth are very risky events, and your average Haitian woman will undergo the experience about five times.
It is crucial Pam and the Colorado Haiti Project team up to offer these life saving skills to women. Among the poorest 20 percent of the population, only four percent of women give birth with a skilled attendant present. This means the overwhelming majority of poor women rely on one another during labor and childbirth. Pam is just the person to undertake this new project. She is a certified nurse midwife with 30 years of experience working in both the developed and the developing world. She is passionate about issues relating to access to care, and Pam considers safe childbearing to be a fundamental women’s right.
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IMA in the NEWS
Read articles by Jennifer Braun in Reality Sandwich!
From Midwifery is Messy: "Midwifery is the standard of care for pregnancy worldwide. Most women in America have access to regional anesthesia during childbirth, the epidural, and many women use it. Although epidural anesthesia carries substantial risk, many US hospitals have epidural rates of 80 to 90%. In many countries with better outcomes than ours, epidural anesthesia is not available to laboring women. Those women have no belief that they might 'need' an epidural. It's simply not part of their culture of childbirth." To read more, click here!
From Onward to Afghanistan: Midwifery in a Warzone: "It is almost impossible for me to reconcile our experience of struggle against diseases and injustice in America with the fact that one woman is dying every minute of every day, one woman per minute, because of pregnancy or childbirth. These women are dying in the developing world, from preventable causes. A huge number are in Africa. How many friends do you have who died in childbirth? Can you imagine one in seven, as it would be if you lived in northern Afghanistan? What does 'reproductive freedom' mean in an environment where mothers are dying in childbirth on a regular basis?" To read more, click here!
