Imagine a warm sunny morning after several days of rain. You have spent your night in a small two-room cement home with your husband and children, and your husband has left very early to go out on the ocean to fish. The labor pains start fast and hard, and you know the baby will be born today. Your labor is too difficult to allow you to walk up the steep hill to ask the “Big Man” on the island for a ride to the clinic in the back of the only truck in your community, so some neighbors pick you up on the springs of your mattress and carry you up the hill.
You ask for help getting to a distant clinic and the “Big Man” says he would love to take you, but the dirt roads will be impassible, you will have to stay here. By good fortune, the Team has doctors and nurses here this week who have experience in deliveries, newborn care, and resuscitation of newborns. The Women Elders in the community have a special “tea” to help and a clean string for tying the cord, and there is a nearby mango tree that provides shade, although no privacy from all the schoolchildren who have stopped on their way to school. Your brother, who helped carry you up the hill, is the perfect back rest for you to deliver your baby.
Proud sisters
You deliver your baby safely and within your community, and over the next several days are visited by members of the Team to be sure all is well. A year later, you bring your healthy boy into the clinic at the church for the Team to admire.
Home visit
I cannot express the feeling of relief and joy to see this delivery progress smoothly and safely, and the gratitude of this Mother for being able to have assistance in her own community. This is what we are working for on Ile a Vache, but we need your help. We need to finish the Peter Y. Whitehead Clinic and have a sustainable income in order to recruit and keep medical personnel in this community. Trips by Teams every few months are helpful, but this is not enough.
In addition to having one time donations when our donors are able to give we now need sustaining members so we have an income to rely on to keep this clinic running: for a salary for a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, and a community health worker. Please consider setting up a monthly payment to support this effort. Any amount is helpful.
This can be set up through PayPal or, even better, with a monthly payment through your electronic banking. You will still get a yearly statement for a tax deduction and we will have a working budget to keep the clinic functioning year round. Best of all, you will be helping one more Starfish back into the Sea!
Very nice, Kitty!