Remember your last pregnancy? You worried about your baby’s nursery, sleepless nights, and sibling adjustments. You worried about post-partum blues and baby weight. However, as a healthy women living in central Virginia, you probably worried very little about your life—or your baby’s. Not so if you are a woman living in Haiti—a two-hour flight from Miami and the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere to give birth.
As a Haitian woman, you are sixty times more likely to die in childbirth than in the US. If you live in a rural area like the majority of Haitians, the chances of being attended by someone with any training or supplies for delivery is only one in fifteen.
Enter a modern-day David, passionate about slaying this Goliath of an issue: Nadene Brunk.
Nadene Brunk, a certified nurse-midwife from Mechanicsville, VA, began dreaming of a way to save mothers’ lives in Haiti after a medical mission trip in the summer of 2003. Although the doctors on the trip did all they can, they were ill-equipped to handle women’s health issues. “That trip changed my life because I had never ever seen such terrible poverty. I realized that most women get no prenatal care at all. When you read the statistics and hear the stories of losing sisters, daughters in childbirth….” Brunk trailed off. “I couldn’t get it out of my head; I couldn’t stop thinking about it. [I decided] Something’s got to be done.”
Not sure where to start, a volunteer from the clinic where Brunk served on the mission trip told her to contact the president of the Haiti Outreach Ministry. “It was one of those God moments,” Brunk said with a laugh. “It turns out this guy ‘from the US’ lived in Mechanicsville!”
By the fall of 2004, volunteer midwives—paying their own way—began traveling to Haiti to teach basic skills that save lives in childbirth. They also began offering prenatal care in a dangerous slum outside Port-au-Prince. Although violence in the area halted their efforts temporarily, by the fall of 2006 Brunk and the other volunteer midwives began a training program for nine Haitian students. Teaching the basics under a grove of trees at a nuns compound, the volunteer Americans came armed with delivery kits, inexpensive medications, and a set of hot-pink scrubs for each student.
The basic education and inexpensive medication that these midwives provide prevent common causes of death—postpartum hemorrhage and seizures. Haitian women are often severely anemic, increasing their risk for hemorrhage. Their poor diet also contributes to risk for hypertension, compounded by very little education about the dangerous symptoms of pre-eclampsia that would have an American woman rushing to her nearest hospital.
Over the next four years, women in the Central Plateau of Haiti have come to know these students of midwifery, lifesavers in pink scrubs.
But it’s not all victories. “Honestly, it can be so discouraging,” says Brunk. The sheer magnitude of poverty and disease is heart-wrenching. The funds necessary to keep the program growing and provide basic care for the women seems virtually impossible to provide.
Over the past years, Brunk has had several Davids join her cause—most notably Virginia Women’s Center, her employer here in Richmond. A Virginia Women’s Center OB-GYN, Stephen Eads, M.D., first visited Haiti in October 2006. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” reports Eads, who needed a year to get up the courage to join Brunk and the other midwives in Haiti. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Brunk and the other physicians of the center, who pledged funds to translate A Book for Midwives into Creole, another treasured gift for the Haitian midwifery students and the entire country’s healthcare system.
On March 9, Brunk, Eads and a midwife from Northern Virginia leave to begin the second inaugural class of twelve midwifery students. Armed with the Creole textbook and twelve pairs of hot-pink scrubs, they bear hope and healing for many, through the training of just a few.
Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Brunk and her team have endured, living their passion in faith. Brunk explains how she continues to slay the giant: “you have to believe that if only one woman is changed, it’s worthwhile to do it. You want to do so much… But when you change one woman and give her empowering information, she has knowledge to make a difference to other women. We are empowering woman who are powerless, in a system that is broken, to become agents of change. We change them, but then they change others. We empower them to save lives.”
Just $25 supports one woman’s prenatal care for her entire pregnancy.
To donate or find out more, visit www.midwivesforhaiti.org.
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