International Midwife Assistance

If anyone would like to donate to a relatively new charity this year, here’s a worthy cause:

International Midwife Assistance

In 2003 a Boulder Colorado writer and activist, Jennifer Heath, returned from doing humanitarian relief work in Afghanistan. The child of a diplomat, she spent her formative years living in Kabul, and was devastated by the current condition of Afghanistan. Struck by the huge, painful, obvious need for maternal/child healthcare, a group of women in Boulder came together to implement her vision of outreach from American women directly to Afghan women. Working as the Midwife Training and Infant Care Program working group, these women fund-raised and organized a trip to Afghanistan for Carmela Weber, Executive Director, and Jan Lapetino and Jennifer Braun, midwives.
After that April 2004 trip to Afghanistan the working group was convinced that they could make a difference in Afghanistan – and eventually other places as well. IMA incorporated and began planning for a long term presence in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. We believe in supporting the training of Community Midwives, as it is the rural areas that suffer the most from a lack of healthcare. There are programs operating in Kabul to train midwives to work in the hospitals, but rural areas struggle to attract trained healthcare workers.

The Community Midwife Training Program recruits students from rural villages to participate in an 18 month program. All the students are nominated to the school by village elders, or shuras. After their training they will return to the villages to work in Basic Health Centers, providing care for the women and children of their area. IMA midwives are working in Bamiyan to help provide high quality clinical training for the students. The licensed and highly experienced midwives IMA provides are a vital resource to create a clinical environment that supports the students in becoming reliable solo practitioners. As importantly, we are committed to modeling kindness, compassion and strong ethics. The first group of 22 midwife trainees are scheduled to graduate in Bamiyan in spring 2006.

IMA midwives plan to help the Basic Health Centers develop relationships with the Traditional Birth Attendants (TBA) in the area around Bamiyan. In the past, TBA training has been tried with mixed to poor results. However, greater efforts are unquestionably warranted because world-wide, 60% of all births occur outside health facilities (WHO 1997). See World facts for more information about infant mortality rankings. See WHO/UNICEF report for more about maternal mortality. As more and more help becomes available, outreach to the TBAs will become vital, as these are the practitioners who need access to a referral network when things go wrong. We envision implementing educational forums for the Basic Health Centers to attract the TBAs – to make the connections that will save more lives.

Pleae consider donating as a gift for someone you don’t know what to get, but who really doesn’t need anything anyway… (like me!)