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 < Go BackJuly 2010 What Can One Woman Do?  Information recently arrived from a new maternity facility that we built at a rural Malawi hospital. This is in a greatly under-served part of the country's western central region.
The numbers suggest that at least some Malawi women may be moving toward the same level of confidence as U.S. women that they and their children will survive labor and delivery. In a country with a high maternal death rate, this would be significant. June 2010 Relief  The photo above was taken in a southern Malawi village where we worked in January 2006 during a severe famine. In the background is a truck that we rented to convey emergency food. We had undertaken several health measures in a context of high HIV prevalence and then the people fell into a precarious nutritional position. We committed $185,000 for food to orphans, vulnerable children, and ill people and their various caregivers during those November through March "hunger months." As far as I know, no one died -- not one orphan, not one ill person - due to famine in those villages. May 2010 Mothers  May is the month of Mother's Day. Many of us owe to our mothers more than we can even estimate. They have given us and do give us love, protection, and loyalty that the rough and tumble world can never efface. April 2010 Ten Years On You can see in the photo some of the orphans whose food you help us to purchase. In the Malawi way they give thanks to God for the food they receive and for the gift of life.
What we have all done together is good. It is very good. And I thank everyone for your wonderful help. March 2010 Twins  On the left is Blessings, on the right, Mercy. They are twins. As toddlers both children were the same size. They were admitted as infants to a Malawi orphanage whose food budget we support. At age two Blessings was taken by his mother back to the village. Mercy stayed where she was. Four years later the mom died and Blessings returned to the facility. He was reunited with his sister, and now they live in the same building. He has begun standard one (first grade.) During his four years in the village the boy gained only 6.6 pounds. Forty percent of Malawi's children are stunted because of malnutrition. This year the rains did not arrive on time during the planting season, so a serious food shortage will likely occur during the November 2010 through March 2011 "hunger months," after the grain reserves have been exhausted We will do our best to help the people. Your wonderful, wonderful support enables us to reach a lot of orphaned and vulnerable children. You can see the fruits of your good commitments by looking at Mercy, so aptly named. February 2010 Safer Motherhood in Chisala  In 2009 we collaborated with some extraordinary young adults with a passion to learn about Africa and improve lives there. Maggy Keet, her husband Andy, and a friend, Emily Kerr-Muir, raised the funds and oversaw the construction of a birthing clinic in the remote Malawi village of Chisala. The three met when Maggy was studying in England. While helping to build a school in Chisala in 2008 Maggy noted the urgent need for a safe birthing clinic. Mothers from the area's 19 villages mostly gave birth at home, because the nearest hospitals and clinics were many kilometers away. (The forbidding distances to trained healthcare providers and the absence of reliable transportation helps to account for Malawi's having one of the world's highest maternal mortality rates.) The three friends worked hard to raise money in England and the US through website, cupcake sales, walkathons, and grant applications. Last September they headed to Malawi, rented a small house, and began mobilizing the villagers. The people made 170,000 bricks, extracting mud from the village's huge abandoned anthills, negotiated with the District Health Officer to ensure proper supplies and staff for the clinic, and did everything in between. Andy became the expert driver of a three-ton ton truck, and all deftly managed the project's supply stream, keeping construction materials on hand, on time, so the work could continue without interruption. Despite a national fuel shortage the trio kept the project on schedule and on budget.  Most impressive was the investment by all area villages in the project. Each contributed its share of bricks, but because one village was over 20 km away it was not practical to pay for the diesel fuel to convey these to the construction site. So the headmen raised money to pay nearer villages to produce their share. When I visited Chisala, two elderly headmen, dressed in neatly pressed second hand suits, presented their funds to the local maternity committee and to Maggy. This amount was equivalent to the annual income of most Malawians, somewhat like a small U.S. farm town raising $30,000 for a community project.Now the dream is a reality. Chisala has made birth a safer experience for the 3,000 women of childbearing age who live here. We think this is an outstanding achievement. Ellen Schell January 2010  You see the apprehensive face of a Malawian boy waiting for one of our Clinical Officers to conclude his exam.When we took this photo in October lots of children visiting our mobile health clinics were expressing malaria symptoms. The disease is the biggest killer of Malawian youngsters under age five. If an infection is not too advanced the child will be treated with the standard medication and watched for improvement. But cerebral malaria is a nasty disease, and if it is suspected, she or he will be given a quinine injection and quickly conveyed to the district hospital in a GAIA ambulance. Aggressively our staffers push people who might be fighting malaria to be treated as soon as possible. Prevention is crucial. We have distributed many anti-malarial bed nets to villages where we work. Not all can be given nets because we don't have enough of them, so we focus on pregnant women and very young children. Our caregivers help the people understand the importance of having children sleep under the nets, and of regular net repair. We had recently partnered with Dr. Kim Baltzell in the U.S. and Mr. Joel Phiri in Malawi to diffuse over 113,000 bed nets through several hundred villages in Zomba District. These are greatly reducing malaria incidence there.  Presently we are working with Kim, Joel, and the Malawi Health Ministry to obtain more nets for our Mulanje villages, and still others to be distributed by our mobile clinics in a third area. Adding malaria treatment and prevention to our HIV work is a consequence of a GAIA trustee decision a few years ago to broaden our HIV focus a bit. It seemed right to address this and other lethal diseases while providing HIV-related basic health care in contexts of deep poverty. The cost of purchasing one bed net, and of training a village family in its proper use and maintenance, is about $7.00. The payoff for that might be the life of one child saved. To me this gives new meaning to the word bargain. Many thanks for your help. William Rankin |
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The kids shown above are only a few of the 2,700 orphans we together cared for in 2009.
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