:::: ESPERANÇA - SAVING CHILDREN'S LIVES ::::

Women stay in the village while their husbands leave for months at a time to find stable work in bigger cities. Alone and without resources for a hospital, women give birth in their home. Training midwives to step into this situation and prepare for the child’s birth, including a birthing kit with rudimentary sanitary supplies, greatly improves both the mother’s and child’s chances of survival. Providing the mother with a small loan afterward to start her own business and care for her child increases those chances even more.

There are more than 1 billion people worldwide who live on less than US$1 per day. The majority of these people live in shacks with corrugated tin roofing and dirt floors. They are subsistence farmers, fishermen, merchants, teachers and health care workers. Poverty looks very similar in these countries.
Women who participate in Esperança’s international programming most likely live in one of these homes. They also most likely have not finished school, have no job training and have had multiple pregnancies. Raising healthy children and ensuring they receive regular meals becomes their top priority.

When Louisa became pregnant at age 17, she was elated. She and her new husband Fernando were recently married and were living in a small home near her parents in the mountains of northern Nicaragua. Without the resources of prenatal care or even employ a community midwife to be present for the birth, Louisa and her child were at risk. The baby was born on the dirt floor of their home and his umbilical cord was cut with one of Fernando’s work knifes. They did the best they could, but Louisa lost a lot of blood during the pregnancy and soon became too weak to breastfeed. The baby was also struggling with a bacterial infection. Without his mother’s nutrition, he soon went into shock. Louisa and the baby died before they could be brought to the central hospital.

Esperança holds community training sessions for midwives to prevent this situation. Community health workers are given sanitary birthing kits – nothing more than a small sheet of plastic, a shoe lace (to tie off the umbilical cord), a sanitized razor blade and a bar of soap. With these simple tools, and the knowledge to recognize a pregnancy in danger, Esperança is reducing the rates of maternal and infant mortality in villages internationally.