"Through the Maternity Center, it is our desire to impact orphan rates in Haiti by empowering women and giving them the tools to parent to the best of their ability. We are seeing plump, healthy babies born on a regular basis! We are seeing attentive mothers bonding with their newborns immediately after birth. We are seeing the women of our program passing along the tools taught by our midwives to their family members and friends who are outside of our program. We are seeing the birthing process being honored and women being spiritually and physically supported during their labor experience. We are seeing their lives being transformed from birth.
Below is an excerpt from a Heartline volunteer who was taken to a public maternity hospital not far from Heartline in Port-au-Prince.
“‘No…’ I thought to myself. ‘That can’t be the hospital.’ I was staring over a crumbling wall at the dingy building scrawled with the words Lospital Maternite-maternity hospital. Though I was sitting in the back of a pickup in 100+ degree heat, I suddenly felt cold. Looking at the faces of the others in the pickup bed, I knew they felt the same. Beth McHoul wanted to show us the public hospital, the place expectant mothers were taken when complications arose that the midwives at Heartline’s birthing center could not handle. Beth wanted to convince us that Heartline needed its own clinic. We went through a set of guarded gates and my eyes saw something which my brain failed to register for several seconds. The people I saw before me-lying in the dust, on concrete rubble, walking back and forth in the dark alley-they were pregnant women. On the verge of giving birth, these women were doing whatever they could to achieve some measure of comfort or distraction from the pain. Such horrific conditions…and we weren’t even inside yet. Inside the barred doors, my nose was assaulted by the scents of sweat, blood, urine, and bleach. Yellow lights cast an eerie glow on more women walking the halls or poised on benches. They clutched their backs, their bellies, their heads while screams echoed from beyond. Yet these weren’t the screams of healthy babies filling their lungs for the first time but the screams of anguished women with no comfort in reach. Beth led us slowly into the interior, looking for one of only two doctors in charge of the entire place. As she opened a glass door around the corner, I simultaneously noticed the man closest behind her blanch just as my shoulder was grabbed by the Haitian who had accompanied us. He shook his head and said, “No men.” In a dim reflection of the glass door I could tell that it was a hallway lined with beds. I saw pairs of black legs pulled up in the delivery position with what I later learned were 5-gallon buckets hanging beneath them to catch the babies. After a few moments the doctor appeared, beads of sweat covering his face. Beth presented him with a gift-a new blood pressure cuff-that caused a smile on his lips and tears in his eyes. I was later told he’d needed that for almost a year. The rest of the tour (pre- and post-natal, pediatrics, and urgent care) was just as nightmarish: squalid conditions, lethargic newborns, exhausted mothers, overworked caregivers, glazed eyes everywhere. Where was the privacy? The joy of new life? How many mothers would give birth on the floor tonight or in the alley outside?”
The Heartline Maternity Center is keeping babies out of 5-gallon buckets and giving mothers the chance to cherish their birthing experience.
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