This time around the ward has had a few mascots! Meet Beni and Ali:
Friday, April 18, 2014
Survivors
The other night I was talking with a friend who worked with Doctor’s Without Borders in South Sudan. She was recounting story after story of women who died in child birth during the short 3 months she was there. The numbers of maternal death here are staggering. It hit me so suddenly that the beautiful women on my ward, the one’s who sing me to sleep most nights, are the survivors. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve preached about VVF in the past 2 years, whether through in-services here or church talks at home, but just now it really hit home. Pregnancy is deadly here. We focus so much on how deadly HIV, Ebola virus, and malnutrition are in Africa, but fail to see how dangerous pregnancy really is. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, or negate how serious the many problems faced here, but it’s a reality for many-especially the VVF ladies. This hit home when a caregiver's youngest sister died during childbirth on Wednesday.
This time around the ward has had a few mascots! Meet Beni and Ali:
This time around the ward has had a few mascots! Meet Beni and Ali:
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You are so right Stephanie. I think of how dangerous and a real labor of live that these women go thru to have babies and get really annoyed here in the states when I hear time and again that the only reason there is so much obstetric intervention and monitoring is because docs are only in it for the money. If you look at the extreme rate of birth injury and death of both moms and babies in third world countries that no longer exists here people should praise The Lord for all the monitoring, pain control and surgical intervention we enjoy. I know this technology saved my life as well as that of my 22 year old son set to graduate with a computer engineering degree in a month. Thanks again for shining a light on this hidden but so important subject.
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