A New Chapter for Midwives For Haiti

Arriving in Hinche at sunset

It has been almost 2 years since I retired. It seems longer in many ways because we have done so much traveling with our RV. Because Steve and I are on the Board of Directors - sometimes via Zoom or Skype - we are able to keep up with the organization's major programs.

In the early part of the year the Search committee had interviewed several really good candidates and had chosen Jane Drichta to be the new Executive Director. Jane came to us with multiple qualifications including experience in starting her own NGO, working in the Philippines, Iraq, and Uganda, and having graduate degrees in Global Health and Tropical Nursing. She is also a midwife! She has worked and lived in areas of political instability but she had never been to Haiti. The BOD decided I would be the best person to take her there to introduce her to our staff and acquaint her with all of our programs.

I love taking people to Haiti who have never been before and watching them fall in love with the people and the tropical beauty. And it was especially wonderful for me to see dear friends I had not seen for two years.

 After the long but uneventful trip from Port-au-Prince to Hinche, we arrived at our headquarters in the early evening. The house looked so good! The downstairs rooms had all recently been painted in the pale mint green and everything looked so fresh and clean. Jane was thrilled with the house and with meeting all of the people who work for us there.

Sunday afternoon food and staff arrived for the First Annual Staff Appreciation party. Speeches were made and included a reminder from the head of nursing at Ste. Therese hospital to Jane - without Midwives For Haiti there would be no maternity unit at that hospital and many lives would be lost. There was singing. My favorite part of every party in Haiti is the singing!

The new class, Class 11, began on Monday. It is always exciting to meet these nurses who have been chosen from over 180 applicants to begin to become midwives. I shed a few tears as they gathered and started their day with a hymn of gratitude and introductions to all of us and all of them.

The classroom ready for Monday morning.

Students arriving at the gate

Daisy and Perrine registering the new students.

Class 11 at the beginning of an 18 month program. Lead instructors are Limone Clerveau and Daisy Grochowski.

Jane and I had other work to be done. We had a typically long wait at the bank to get the MFH account set up for Jane's use, a meeting with the staff, a review of volunteer handbooks that had somehow been lost since I had left, and went through supplies.

In the past year we had transitioned from the mobile clinics going once a month to 22 villages to placing midwives in government owned clinics on a weekly basis in 8 of the villages we had visited before. This increased the quality of care we are able to give because we can follow women more closely who need vigilance on blood pressure medicine or in other high risk circumstances. It also was welcomed by the government and as they had only one nurse at each site who did not have the skills to do prenatal care and risk screening, they were thrilled to give us a room in each clinic for that purpose.

I went to La Belone to see how the prenatal clinic works there. I enjoyed seeing the countryside on the way out. I also enjoyed talking to the pregnant women as they waited to be seen. They were all grateful for the midwives and some had walked 2-3 hours that morning to get there. They just wished there was a midwife there full-time so they could have skilled care during their deliveries. Sadly, until we get a midwife in every village, most women in Haiti still deliver at home without the skilled care they should have.

The road to La Belone

I borrowed Midwife tools for clinic.

The clinic at La Belone

Beautiful Haiti countryside

 A walk to our praying hill, an evening of heavy rain, a visit to the grocery store, and lots of long talks over our cold beers on the porch rounded out Jane's first week in Haiti. One day I made bread and ice cream. 

Making ice cream is a team effort. The 2 gallon recipe included the yolks of 15 eggs, expensive cream I had brought from Port-au-Prince, milk, raw sugar, and 7 bananas. Davide got a large rectangle piece of ice from the market. It's about 2 foot long and a foot square. Then he puts it in a bag and bangs it on the cement outside to get it into pieces small enough to fit in the White Mountain freezer around the canister of ice cream. Chunky rock salt is added to the ice and then Toro and Davide churned until it was too hard to churn. I told them how my dad would fold up a rug and put it on top for me to sit on so he could crank it harder without moving the churn. 

Breaking up the ice block

The cooks and the men got the first bread out of the oven and the first rounds of ice cream. They were very happy and I enjoyed my time working with them.

Cranking ice cream

Magdala and husband, Pastor Jude came to visit me

At the beginning of the next week, the protests about Petro Caribe were starting again. I needed to get to PAP to catch a flight on Wednesday but left a day early hoping to miss some road blocks. But near Mirabilais our vehicle sat in a long, long line of vehicles- perhaps 2 miles long, and waited for an hour or more for the road to clear. Police had to come and get the protesters to move the barricades of trucks and tires. Only one lane could go through at a time so we were happy our lane got to go first.

I never felt unsafe. However, the protests have become more violent since August. There seems to be no end in sight and I fear Haiti is headed to a huge humanitarian crisis. Without fuel and with unsafe roads, doctors are not going to work at the hospitals. Without fuel, trucks and cars cannot deliver food and goods. Our birth center manager was robbed. A student was hit in the face with a rock. At one NGO, that runs a birth center, a needed C-section did not happen when it should have and the baby died. People are starving and people will die in record numbers unless there is international intervention. 

We are no longer allowing volunteers to go to Haiti. That means the sutures, the IV tubing, the dressings, the gloves, the baby clothing and blankets, etc, are no longer coming down. It makes life very difficult in the hospital for our teachers and preceptors.  MFH is going to try to use American Cargo to ship supplies that are being donated to our Richmond office via Amazon.  The first shipment goes this Friday with a lot of prayers it is not stolen and that our staff stays safe while picking it up. 

People ask me since I am back, "How did it feel to be in Haiti and not be the Executive Director anymore?" My answer is "It was wonderful to feel the love and pride about the program's accomplishments without the burden of keeping up with all of the obstacles and problems that are inevitable working in Haiti. It was also good to see my dear friends in Haiti. But I am very thankful for Jane and to have capable staff and leadership to carry Midwives For Haiti forward to places I could not go." I am very happy to be retired. And again- grateful beyond measure for the people continuing to work to save the mothers and babies of Haiti!

Me with Mario Cleophat, Midwives For Haiti Program and Partnership Manager

I end with this quote from Leila Janah:

At the end of our visit, I watched a woman deliver on a squalid table with a gruesome expression and thought about my friends giving birth back home in beautiful facilities. How is it that such a grave disparity persists in 2019, with all the wealth in the world? Why do we allow some women to suffer so needlessly because they happen to live in a country without the resources to care for them properly? This isn't a Ugandan problem, or an African problem or even a women's problem. It's our problem. Every woman that dies or loses her baby on a threadbare cot in the heart of Uganda, in a shack in Haiti, while her sisters on the other side of the world enjoy first-class care, is a threat to our collective humanity. Italics are my additions.