On my most recent trip to Haiti to continue Direct Relief’s extensive work supporting more than 115 hospitals and clinics throughout the country, I had the opportunity to cross the border into the Dominican Republic and visit two amazing Direct Relief recipients who are supporting the most needy patients in their communities with quality medical care. Fundacion Solidaria del Divino
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Saturday was an exciting day for the midwifery graduates at the School of Midwifery in Makeni, Sierra Leone, and marked an important milestone in the West African nation’s progress toward improving maternal and child health services. The World Needs Midwives I attended the ceremony to present the Direct Relief Midwife Kits to the new graduates. It was a great celebration—and at
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More than 300 delegates gathered in Dhaka, Bangladesh last week at the International Society of Obstetric Fistula Surgeons (ISOFS) Congress 2012. The meeting theme this year: Fistula: An Injustice to Women- Let’s Work to Bring Justice, calls upon all of us to work together to address this devastating childbirth injury, suffered by an estimated 2 million women in developing countries.
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Many women with obstetric fistula suffer for years or decades before they are able to access surgical treatment. Fortunately for Beatrice, who was 16 when she developed fistula, it was less than a month before she received treatment at the Nyanza Provincial General Hospital in Kisumu, Kenya – where Direct Relief has worked since 2009, with the support of The
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Down a bumpy dirt track nearly three hours south of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, Edna Adan and I crawl our way to the town of Baligubadle, just steps from the Ethiopian border. At the Maternal and Child Health Center in this small town, which serves approximately 25,000 in Somaliland plus those from neighboring Ethiopia, we meet Sado, a
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Today Direct Relief partners Dr. Raj Panjabi and Agatha Sandy visited our headquarters to discuss their work with Tiyatien Health, an organization in Liberia seeking to bring health care to the world’s remote villages by training local women, former patients, and refugees to be frontline health workers. In the post-civil war country where 2/3 of the women were raped during
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