In 2011, a fellow birth worker, Sarah Blight, of Your Baby Booty introduced me to an organization called the African Mothers Health Initiative (AMHI) and the founder, an American nurse-midwife serving in Malawi and now in Ghana, named Joanne Jorissen Chiwaula. As I read Joanne's blog and the story of how AMHI was birthed, I was struck to my very core as a woman, a mother, and a doula. Words fail me when I read the accounts of women who die during or shortly after childbirth and babies who suffer simply because they live in a place on the map where maternal and infant mortality is terribly high because adequate health care is not readily available. While I'm quite aware of the short-comings and ways that maternal health care needs to improve here in the US, I'm floored when I consider that for the most part, we actually have access to medical care and much of the developing world does not.
I chose for my 2011 giving to go to AMHI.
If you would like to donate directly to this organization, you can find out more here. I love what's shared on their site as concrete ways donations are dispersed:
- $15 will sponsor a postpartum follow-up visit from a trained nurse-midwife
- $60 will purchase a month’s supply of formula and fund a home visit by a nurse to an orphaned infant
- $500 will cover home based support to one baby or one mother for a year
