Childbirth in Sierra Leone and How You Can Help
There are few more important events in many women’s lives than childbirth. Yet in post-war Sierra Leone you have a one in six chance of dying while giving birth. This is compared to 1 in 4,800 in the United States! Sierra Leone was, until recently, the poorest country in the world. A 10-year civil war had taken a heavy toll on an already poor country and healthcare has suffered to such an extent that it now has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, as well as the highest number of deaths in under five-year-olds. Having discovered these facts, I struggled with the knowledge that while I was here in Bermuda trying to enable couples to enhance their experience of birth, in Sierra Leone many women could only hope and pray to survive it. This set in motion a series of events that led me to be put in contact with a local midwife in Sierra Leone, Isha Daramy. Since that time, and through my link with Isha, I have become involved with the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown. She has been instrumental in founding an organization called ‘The Friends of Princess Christian Maternity Hospital’ whose remit is ‘To effectively reduce the maternal and infant morbidity and mortality in Sierra Leone and to raise the profile of professional midwives”. Further aims and objectives are listed below:
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AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
· To help by providing financial and technical support to the day to day running of the P.C.M.H.
· To mobilize resource for improving the quality of patient care.
· To help maintain the physical facilities and provide equipment at the P.C.M.H.
· To promote education within the community.
· To help restore Midwifery and for Midwives to be the key persons to attend to all normal pregnancy, labour and postnatal care and do an early referral where the midwives deem it necessary.
My commitment to the organisation is at the moment a financial one, whereby I donate 10% of all I earn through Birth Matters and my doula work.
The specific project that I am hoping to fund shortly is the training of Traditional Birth Attendants in Magbil. Isha has a connection with this community which is seventy eight miles from Free Town in the Port Loko District. She decided to work in Magbil because the people living there clearly needed help and were very cooperative, recognised their needs and were ready to work to help themselves. In addition, there is no nearby health centre and it is a well populated area. The role of the TBA is to look after pregnant women and offer the possibility of a safe delivery, but also to generally educate their communities about other health issues that have an impact on the family. More recently there has been an increased emphasis laid on the early detection of high risk cases, early referrals, institutional delivery, HIV and other communicable diseases in the community. Over the years, especially during the war, the numbers of trained TBA’s in the area has dwindled so out of the 40 trained in 1992, only 15 are still living in the area, hence the need for a new training programme and a refresher for those that are still working in the area.
I love the idea that birthing women in Bermuda can help inform, educate and change the circumstances of birthing women in Sierra Leone by attending Birth Matters Workshops and using me as their doula.