What I've Been Doing For The Last 3 Weeks

It’s been a while since I last wrote something on here (as my wonderful Mom has reminded me many, many times), so I feel that I should make my reappearance by telling you what exactly has kept me so busy for the last 3 weeks.

The reason that I am over in Uganda in the first place is to intern to an organization called Save the Mothers which was started by Dr. Jean Chamberlain. Dr. Chamberlain is an obstetrician and director of the international womens health program at McMaster University who has dedicated her life to making pregnancy and childbirth safer in the developing world. She is also my boss, and she is awesome.

To give you an idea about why a program like Save the Mothers is so desperately needed, take a minute and consider this fact: In a typical North American city 1 in 4,000 women die in childbirth; in sub-Saharan Africa it’s 1 in 16.

I will write a whole other blog about these stats and the conditions of childbearing here in Uganda because to try and squeeze it in here would not give it justice. Suffice it to say that even when I was standing in the middle of the maternity ward surrounded by labouring women lying on the ground for lack of beds and others practically delivering babies in hallways, I could barely believe what I was seeing. It is no wonder that 6,000 Ugandan women will die this year simply for having a child. 

The understaffed, underequipped hospitals are not the only problem. The lack of transportation and lack of roadways only compounds it. Imagine being 4 hours into labour, hemorrhaging and having to ride 10 kilometers on the back of a bicycle on dirt roads to get to the nearest hospital. This is why many women are half dead by the time they arrive for help. Once they arrive at the hospital, they better hope that they remembered to bring their own gloves, drugs, and razor blade to cut the umbilical cord or else they’ll be out of luck. I could keep going, but I’ll leave it at that to give you just a glimpse of what it is like to have a baby in Uganda.

It is these factors (and many others that I’ll tell you about in another blog) that prompted Dr. Jean to start the Save the Mothers program in order to address the staggering maternal death rates. Save the Mothers is an international program that trains local professionals from developing countries in order to aid them in addressing maternal mortality from their own sphere of influence. 

It is clear that mothers dying in labour is a multi-faceted tragedy, extending far beyond the issues of the hospitals. There is great need to improve roads, policies, community education, funding, transportation etc. Thus, by educating professionals from all these areas about maternal morbidity and mortality Save the Mothers hopes to improve maternal and child health by addressing it from all angles. This is done by offering a Master of Public Health in Leadership (MPHL) degree to local professionals from all kinds of backgrounds.

And so, for the last 3 weeks I have been working in a classroom with 34 professionals from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and D.R. Congo as they began their first term in the Save the Mothers MPHL Program.

Our students are awesome. On the first day of classes we went around and introduced ourselves, said where we were from and why we were here. I was Laura, a nurse from Canada who had come to help out with Save the Mothers. I was the only person in the entire room who did not have a personal experience with maternal death. In fact, when I think about it, I have never in my life heard of a mother dying in childbirth back home.

As we went around the room and our students told about their professions, ranging from social worker to MP to journalist to teacher, they also told about their experiences with the tragedies of childbearing. I heard about women who had almost lost their own lives or that of their baby, men who had lost a sister or aunt and communities who had lost friends and neighbours. Recently, a Ugandan council member and her baby died during delivery after waiting 8 hours for an emergency C-section.

It was heartbreaking to hear their stories but so incredibly moving to see that they had all enrolled in this program with a passion to see a change in this disturbing trend and the desire to be a part of this through whatever way they can.

The terms are 3 weeks long, during which time the students come and stay on campus. It’s set up this way so that they can keep their jobs back home and use their vacation time to come here for classes. Since there is an entire semester compressed into 3 weeks, classes run from 8-5 Monday through Saturday. It’s a marathon of learning.  Luckily I like marathons and I love learning.

My days for the last 3 weeks have started early - up before 6 and at the track by 6:20 (oh ya, I’m training for a marathon; read future blogs for details) By 7:45 I was in the classroom setting up the AV equipment and getting everything ready for the lecturers. And then, until 5:30, I’d be in that classroom helping students, administering quizzes, assisting with field trips and doing whatever else needed to get done that day.

The courses during this term were Public Health, Epidemiology, Bioethics, Leadership, Project Planning and Foundations of Safe Motherhood. The lecturers were from a wide variety of backgrounds including physicians, statisticians, PhDs, and we even had a Canadian epidemiologist, Dr. Rob Alder, from UWO lecturing for a week. It’s really great because even though I’m here to help with running the program, I’ve learned a ton just by sitting in the back of the classroom.  Free education is awesome.

So, that is why for the last 3 weeks I have been terrible at blogging, emailing, and everything else that was not school related. It didn’t help that the place I was staying didn’t have internet. But now I’m back in my room on campus (I moved out because the students needed to stay here) and I’ve got a LOT to catch you up on!

Coming soon: ‘The Day I Almost Died on the Nile’ and ‘What It’s Like to Train for a Marathon on a Dirt Track in the Middle of an African Rainy Season’.  Stay tuned.