Healthcare to Save Mothers and Babies

It is difficult to imagine having no access to health care.   In the remote villages of North Darfur, there is no help within reach.     In the first village we adopted 16 years ago, a community of just over 2,000 people, called Um Ga’al, the nearest hospital was 80 miles away across desert scrub.  There were no roads.   The journey was so hazardous that people chose not to go, which meant that many problems spiralled out of control and people died needlessly.    But although the hospital had a doctor, it had no anaesthetic, no oxygen and beds were empty because people could not afford to pay medical fees.   Sixteen years later, little has changed although there are now two doctors in the hospital and Kids for Kids has provided basic medical equipment including a proper sterilising unit instead of the camping gas burner and metal tray they had used in 2001.   There are still no roads and without Kids for Kids mothers in labour would still have to go to hospital on the back of a donkey. 

Thankfully we have been providing two village midwives in each of our villages, transforming the health of both mothers and their babies.    Not only that, but we are now building Health Units and providing medical drugs.  

Nadia was one of the first midwives we trained.   In the first year she delivered over 800 healthy babies, and managed to persuade 14 mothers to go to the hospital in time to have caesarean sections when she realised, thanks to her training, that they were unlikely to be able to deliver their babies naturally.  

This year, thanks to our supporters, we are training ten new midwives in the five villages we are adopting in 2017.   At the village meetings when volunteers are democratically elected for training, Ahmed Adam, Sheikh of Absharback said “It is an honour for a lady to be chosen to be trained by Kids for Kids as our first midwife.   Perhaps our young women will no longer fear childbirth as they used to do.    I lost my first wife when she had our son and hope that now this will not happen to another child.    If only we had had our own midwives years ago.   Thank you Kids for Kids.”

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