Why maternal mortality is not easy to solve

My manager at GE healthcare and I went to Canje (pronounced Kanj), the "headquarters" of Zanmi Lasante (Partners In Health in Haiti).  It was truly exciting to get an opportunity to visit the place where Dr. Paul Farmer started his inspirational work.

On our way there, we encountered a group of 12 men who were carrying a women on a stretcher. Turned out it was a woman in labor, who also had eclempsia (caused due to hypertension, and one of the leading causes of maternal mortality globally). The lady was from a village on a mountain. She had gone into labor around midnight. Around 6am, somebody recognized the symptoms of eclempsia setting in, probably because they had seen it before: Haitians have a VERY high fertility rate - 1o to 12 pregnancies is the norm. They started gathering the family members and the neighbors, who all mounted the lady on a homemade stretcher (an iron bed with two big logs ran under, and a sheet to cover the lady). They had been walking for 3 hours, and had another hour to go when we ran into them.

The number of challenges that come up in that story are immense: detecting hypertension (cause of eclempsia) and other conditions early, educating the traditional birth attendants, providing a means for communication in case of an emergency, providing an ambulance/means of transportation, and facilities for operating and blood transfusion, etc. Many many things to think about, and that incident has definitely sparked a slew of conversation here.

The story has a happy ending. We turned around, offered the car to the lady and her family, who drove her to the Canje facility. When we got to Canje (after hiking a bit), we learned that the doctors had performed a successful c-section. The mother was being closed up when we last heardc, and was stable. We actually saw the baby being given oxygen. In the words of the pediatrician, the baby "was not crying as vigorously as we like".

I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking:

Group carrying the stretcher - note the roads

Close up of the group carrying the stretcher - they had to come down moutains like the ones you see in the background

Mother in labor on the stretcher

Lifting the mother out of the stretcher

Loading the mother into the car

The "stretcher"

The baby being administered oxygen

Closeup of the baby boy