Wow! What a day. Yesterday we went to the landfill to offer
our services to the people living there. Yes there is people actually living in the
active landfill here. I would say that these families are the poorest of the poor.
The area is more like a land full of garbage, not a land fill because there is
no hole that the garbage goes in like at the garbage dumps that I have seen in
the states. The garbage was just piled up creating mountains and mountains of
garbage for miles. I had to put on a straight face and pretend like the awful
smell didn’t bother me. Tons of plastic bags were blown by the wind and stuck
to the fences around this landfill. The people that live there start early in
the morning and “shop” within the mountains of garbage for things that they
need. Most of the houses are made out of scrap pieces of wood and garbage;
there were some houses that had cement/brick walls. My heart goes out to these
people. Our team walked around from house to house asking if there were any
pregnant woman they knew. After searching for awhile we found and went to a
house of a woman who was pregnant and when we told her about us, she was so
happy and blessed that we were there and soon enough we had 12 buntis(pregnant
woman) at this house waiting for a checkup from us. The news that we were there
went around fast. The entire crowd of woman had not received any prenatal care
yet in their pregnancy, and even though some are due in a couple
weeks they had not yet been seen by anyone and didn’t really have a plan of who was going to be their birth attendant at the time of birth. Some of you reading this are probably thinking. “What
is the point of helping these woman when their babies are going to be born in a
garbage dump and probably live very poor lives, if they even live past childhood.” Well, the point is that every woman has the human right to a skilled
birth attendant being with her and her baby at the time of birth no matter if
she is the poorest or richest woman alive; and if we can get that mom and new
baby off to a good start bonding and breastfeeding, we can promote safe
motherhood and child survival. We were
able to give all the woman prenatal vitamins and some of them iron supplements,
because most were anemic due to malnutrition. I pray that they choose to have
us attend them at the time of birth, but we never know which moms are actually
going to contact us when they go into labor. Our team will keep going to the landfill every Friday to do checkups. I
am glad that we found an area where the woman are willing to let us help them.“If we are to heal the
planet, we must begin by healing birthing.”~Agnes Sallet Von Tannenberg
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| It is hard to see in these pics but this is all garbage-the big mountain thing on the right is a huge pile of garbage |
