Healthcare to Save Mothers and Babies

"I will never forget the fear on the faces of young girls when I first went to Darfur and they told me how babies are born with no medical help in their villages - rope delivery is unimaginable" - Patricia Parker MBE 

Amazing news for you all - our midwives training in El Fasher have just started their final exams and by the end of November will become qualified village midwives! They will graduate by the end of the month. All our fantastic supporters have made it possible for us to train another 37 midwives that will return to their villages in Darfur and provide life-saving services to mothers and babies. Rural villages have no health care and hospital is miles away - there are no roads, so you have to ride on a donkey to get there if there are any birth complications. At best hospitals are basic - many have no anaesthesia - and everything has to be paid for, which is often impossible for a mother living in a village.  Our midwives are trained in pre and post-natal care, and they help women to give birth safely. We are wishing them all luck for their final exams! Please send your positive and well wishing thoughts to our midwives. Just think how many lives they will be saving so soon! 

Things we had not expected as additional bonus for these wonderful volunteers:  women who are midwives have a qualification, a means to earn an income, and a much higher status in their villages. You have helped them to achieve this. You have changed their lives for good and all the women and babies they will be helping. 

With the holiday season right around the corner, this is the perfect time to donate to help us train more midwives to save more lives in Darfur! If only every village in Darfur could have a skilled midwife to help them, what a difference it could make. Can you help us train another midwife this year?  Every donation enables us to do more! In 2019 we will be adopting five new villages and training 10 volunteers as midwives - 2 in each village -  but we need your help!

All donations made through this project can be made on behalf of a loved one. Simply print off one of GlobalGiving's Gift Certificates or get in touch with our US volunteer, Mary Jane, directly at MaryJane-US@KidsforKids.org.uk so we can make you a special personalised certificate (see example below).  If you are in the UK or anywhere else in the world, please reach out to contact@kidsforkids.org.uk for your personalised certificate. 

Links:

• The importance of donations this time of year
• Why Empowering Women is So Important in Darfur

• We can create a certificate for any occasion! (PDF)
  

What must it be like to be pregnant during a famine, unable to feed yourself or your unborn baby, fearing for the life your child will be born into where you will not be able to provide adequate milk or food to eat when they are old enough? 

There is little food in Darfur and families survive on what they can grow. Where drought is common, the harvest is unpredictable, and this year in particular, there has been a famine worse than imaginable.   Women and children have suffered all year with nothing to sustain them and it will still be months until the harvest. A mother in Darfur works unbelievably hard to sustain her family: walking for hours across the dangerous desert to collect water, searching for wood to build a fire to keep her children warm at night, taking care of her animals and livestock, and caring for her children because she cannot afford to send them to school. Most days she will wake up not knowing how she will provide anything for her little ones to eat.  Pregnancy is something to be feared.  A recent survey in village midwives we have trained showed that anaemia is a norm and hard work and poor diet combine to cause many miscarriages - or worse. 

On top of the daily struggle a woman faces in Darfur, childbirth remains frightening and dangerous. The average age of women in rural Darfur villages is only 34 years due to the high rates of maternal mortality. There is no health care available in villages, and few go to the far-off hospital because they cannot afford to pay.  If there is an obstructed birth, rope delivery is the only possible aid but causes damage to the baby - if it survives.  With FGM a common practice in villages, obstructed labour is frequent.  At Kids for Kids we feel that it is unacceptable to do nothing to help women in Darfur give birth safely, whilst we in the UK and US give birth in the hands of a professional, with all the equipment and help we could imagine. 

We do all we can to prevent problems becoming catastrophes.   The answer for mothers in Darfur is healthcare close at hand: we need to provide midwives in every village. Women and their babies should not be dying during childbirth when we can train local women to provide the assistance necessary for safe delivery.   Please can you help us?  By supporting this project, you will save the lives of countless women who are giving birth every day with no help at all.