Hello! And welcome back to Sixty Seconds with Second Mile.
We’re so glad you are here!
Have you enjoyed our stories from the early years?
We hope so.
We wanted to focus today on where that fateful first step has taken us. Specifically, to the eventual opening of not one but two Maternity Centers!
Have we told you the story that led us here?
Do you know the faces behind why it felt so urgent to figure out how to give more women good maternal health care.
It was this little one and others like him.
In 2016 and 2017, 20% of the children at the Malnutrition Treatment Center were being cared for by someone who was not their mother. We saw Aunts, Dads, Grandmas, Sisters, Cousins.
And while we loved to see these family members involved from such a early age, we had to investigate the underlying issue.
Mothers were dying in child birth. They were dying in the days and weeks after, and they were dying while pregnant from eclampsia and preeclampsia.
There was Philomene, a grandma of 62 years who came to the center with twin girls. Her daughter had no prenatal care and died after her birth. There was Ardiane whose daughter died just after her Grandson, Emmanuel was born. She came to the center with Emmanuel when he was 10-months-old.
There was Planika and her aunt, Suzanne. Planika was 5 when she came to the center. 4 years old when her mother died of eclampsia. Suzanne had to grieve the loss of her sister. Planika lost the baby sister she had been expecting. She lost her mother. And she became very, very sick.
We knew that maternal mortality was high in Haiti, 1 in 254 births led to a mother’s death. But then we surveyed our community and learned that only 2 in 10 women had a skilled birth attendant at their last birth.
Access to quality Maternal Care was a huge problem.
A problem that you’ve been helping us solve for 5 years now!
If you came to our Maternity Center today, you would have seen 75 women in line for Prenatal Education. On busy months, we have as many as 60 new babies born at the center. Yesterday, 107 parents travelled to the center for vaccination day with their newborns.
And lately, we’ve been seeing between 60-80 clients everyday for the rest of our services (prenatal care, postpartum care, and family planning)
We are quite literally busting open at the seams.
What’s that look like on a grand scale?
5,189 women have sought care at our this center since 2018.
Space is starting to become a huge problem. For the first time, we find ourselves having to limit the number of clients we can see each day. And closing the doors to new patients earlier and earlier each morning.
It would kill us to keep turning people away. Especially since there isn’t a comparable alternative.
So, it’s time to expand.
Did you guess what was coming next?
That’s right. We’re building.
How can you help?
We are going to need $40,000 to make sure that we don’t have to turn any one else away. We would like to start building as soon as possible. The plans are drawn and the builders are on call.
If we raised every dollar today, we could start tomorrow!
What exactly will an expansion look like?
It will look like more rooms so we can have more Midwives. And more comfortable spaces for people to sit while they wait.
A birth garden for laboring women and their support people. More space to move about.
A shaded seating areas outside the gate, for family members who attend the appointments & need a shady place to wait.
And it will look like more space for local entrepreneurs to make and sell food to the hundreds of people that come and go from the Maternity Center each day.
We’re very excited.
We have a generous donor who has committed to match every dollar donated to the building project over the next week.
Donations will be matched through May 31st.
Isn’t that wonderful?!
You’ve helped us build so many safe spaces. This will be no different.
Can you help us reach our goal before the 31st?
Love from Haiti 🇭🇹