Empowering Our World through Mama Haiti Baby
July 26, 2011
The following is an update from a wonderful Naturopathic Physician, Dr. Zeenia Junkeer. We have been able to sponsor her for the past few months as part of our charitable contributions in our “Empowering our World” program. We are proud to be able to help her serve the wonderful women in Haiti.
Hi Everyone!
I hope you have had a chance to follow my blog or at least stay updated as there have been some really amazing things going on here in Haiti. I am now the only Physician here so things have become a little more stressful but patients are being seen daily here at the clinic and we have had a huge month for births-about 30 with only one midwife!
Besides treating patients in the clinic I have been working closely with a friend of mine to reach out to the community and speak about topics such as breastfeeding, family planning, domestic violence and childhood nutrition. The community has been really supportive and we often have over 30 people coming to hear what we have to say. It is so important that we get out and educate the community as that is really the only way to empower people, through education and knowledge. There are so many fact and ideas we take for granted as we heard them over and over growing up however most of my patients have a 5th grade education at best so even understanding such concepts as illness, disease and nutrition are so very foreign to them. We work to get the knowledge out there so we see less of the patients like the young woman who came last week; her 10 day old baby was unresponsive and flaccid when she brought him in-we asked about how often she was feeding him and she said that he was, “too tired to eat” and that the last time he fed well was here after birth. This mother was completely unaware that her child was essentially dying from dehydration and starvation because she was not feeding him. We kept them here over night working on education as well as helping to re-feed the baby. This story had a happy ending but many don’t.
I hope to help prevent stories like these by spreading knowledge throughout the community as our mission here is to reduce fetal, neonatal and maternal death rates as they are the highest in the western hemisphere here in Haiti.
I wanted to give you all a quick thank you and reminder that it is because of your generosity that I am able to work here in Haiti. Without your donations I would not have been able to stay here at Mama Baby Haiti and treat the thousands of kiddos and adults that I have in my 7 months here. It has been wonderful to be able to volunteer here as a doctor and it has changed my life in many ways. Again, I cannot thank you enough!
Best,
–
Zeenia Junkeer N.D.
Staff Physician at MamaBaby Haiti (www.mamababyhaiti.org)
Twitter: twitter.com/NaturallyZ