Can you help?
Rotary D9510online eClub invites Clubs to partner with us for this immediate project in the AFAR district of Northern Ethiopia. One of our overseas members, Valerie Browning AM lives and works as a volunteer in the AFAR.
After many years of drought, flooding rains, swarms of locusts and civil unrest have hit the region, Valerie co-founder of the AFAR Pastoralist Development Association (NGO) has established 1 project to support her greatest needs.
Valerie has written:
Unlike any of the Australian maternity hospitals and health services, most (81% overall and in remote communities, 100%) deliver in a mobile, nomadic house like this: the house is conical not to blow away in the wind, is portable to go onto a camel when the family move in search of water and grazing pasture and made of dried palm leaf mats hung over a stick frame. There is no close-by water – water is collected daily from natural rainwater storage places; no shops and often no road access. In tradition, other than the cutting knife to open along the mother’s female genital mutilation scar, there are no support facilities: no soap; delivery gloves; no medications or even a clean area to undertake the delivery. https://rotaryeclub.org.au/afar-valerie-browning/
It is Afar Pastoralist Development Association (APDA) who is trying to cover the vast areas where there are no clinics on foot with house-to-house maternal health service and then to rescue the mother when the unforeseen delivery problem happens.
Now with two ambulances, that is hardly enough: the organization mobile health workers and women extension workers average 2 to 3 calls from distant places daily for immediate rescue.
Just as I write, I have sent an ambulance around 95 kilometers to pick up a mother who has been unable to deliver the afterbirth (placenta) for 3 days – eventually, the health worker got to where there was a
mobile telephone network. She will have extensively lost blood and may well be infected.
Valerie Browning
While APDA does teach the traditional birth attendants (TBAs) the basis of clean delivery and stopping traditional birthing practices that can kill in the delivery period, coverage is far from adequate and the maternal death rate is around 340 deaths per 100,000 live births having fallen from 936 per 100,000 at the start of the program now 25 years ago.
Your financial support will help us make our own birthing sets including adding soap and
a new razor blade for the cord; training and
re-train the health workers, women extension
workers and TBAs annually taking their antenatal, delivery and postnatal reports connecting this rural effort to a 35 – bed emergency obstetric and Genecology hospital. Because of the vastness of the geography, APDA supports waiting areas inside government health centers for mothers identified at risk.
ALL of the 81% of mothers without institutional care are APDA’s responsibility – therefore by any means we need to go further and improve.
Even now into the 10th month of a severe drought with high food insecurity, the first sufferers are Afar mothers and their babies – unborn and born. APDA now is fighting to reach over 5,000 mothers registered with malnutrition in danger of dying when they push the baby out. Living on dry bread, they have no protein to uphold their blood hemoglobin and on the final push to get baby out, they may go into heart-lung failure and die since they have not got enough circulating oxygen to make it. Possibly that baby can be pulled out alive, APDA is trying to reach them with supplementary food giving protein and iron for hemoglobin, but the past 2 months, 5 mothers died at the point of delivery.
https://rotaryeclub.org.au/afar-valerie-browning/
To see and learn more about this unique way
to work at reducing maternal mortality, read on https://apda-afar.org/
Donations can be made directly to the eClub’s account; Bendigo Bank:
E-Club D9510online, Charity Account
BSB: 633-000
Account No: 207 417 171
(please mark reference – AFAR + your Club Name)
Further information contact:
Graham Fussen Club Treasurer, graham@rotaryeclub.org.au
Thankyou for your support,
