Reference :
V-P-HT-E-00385
Date :
06/01/2009
Caption :
Port au Prince, Cite Soleil. Two midwives who have helped many women in Cite Soleil.
Confidentiality level :
public
Publication restrictions :
reserved users only
Description :
MIDWIVES BRING SOLACE TO WOMEN IN HAITI'S SLUMS
Midwives, Marie and Francoise understand the suffering of the women in Cite Soleil. Their daughter and niece respectively have been victims of the rampant sexual violence in Haiti's sprawling waterside slum. Trained by the Red Cross, they help evacuate pregnant and sexually abused women to the one state run hospital operating in the shanty town.
A large boned woman with a booming voice, Marie does not mince her words as she goes on her daily rounds in Cite Soleil, Haiti's teeming slum, where 300,000 people live, most of them on less than one US dollar a day.
"These women have nothing", she says, pointing to the crowd of young mothers and pregnant girls who crowd around her, as she wends her way through the narrow dirt paths that separate the rows of back to back shacks, held together with metal and cardboard. "We are all victims here, but these women suffer more than most", she adds.
Marie and her colleague Francoise know all about suffering. They have spent most of their 55 years in the waterside slum, where between them they have brought up 18 children and buried 5 more. Their faces have become hard from the stress of daily life but their hearts remain open and giving.
"I saw a woman give birth in the street in the rain", relates Marie, when asked why she became a midwife. "I asked the owner of a nearby house if I could cut the umbilical cord on his balcony but he refused. I then pleaded with a taxi driver to take them to hospital but he drove off so in the end I cut the cord myself".
The women have been working as midwives since 2001 and have updated their skills on ICRC funded refresher courses. Since then they have helped countless women give birth either at home or in hospital.
Most women give birth at home in Haiti, too poor to pay for a taxi to the hospital, the hospital fees or even for the clothes and shoes they need to make the trip. As a result when complications arrive such as pregnancy induced high blood pressure or pre -eclampsia, which Haitian women develop at high rates, they often lose the child and risk their own lives. More women die here before, during and after childbirth than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.
The Red Cross training courses emphasise the importance of medical care, stressing that the expectant mothers should be encouraged to go to hospital, rather than deliver at home. The midwives either hail a "tap tap", a brightly decorated converted pick up truck that acts as a taxi, and take the woman to the Choscal hospital, the only public hospital in the shanty town or call the Haitian Red Cross post in Cite Soleil who then use one of the tap taps kitted out as an ambulance and protected temporarily by the Red Cross emblem to evacuate the women.
"Many women are still reluctant to go to the hospital", says Francoise, "as treatment costs just over 1 US dollar (40 gourdes), but even if we deliver at home, we make sure that they have their follow up check ups and vaccines in hospital".
Much of the midwives time is spent counselling the women about unwanted pregnancies. 23- year old Darline was already bringing up her 2 and a half year old daughter, Judeline, alone when she found she was expecting again.
"I sold everything I could to get the money for an abortion", she says, "but then I became anaemic and the doctor told me I could die if I aborted so I decided to keep the baby".
Many women try and poison themselves to get rid of the baby, unable to face the prospect of another mouth to feed. But Francoise and Marie encourage them to go through with the pregnancy and if life becomes too difficult, suggest that they may want to put up the child for adoption in the many orphanages scattered across the capital Port- au- Prince.
Some of the children are borne as a result of rape or prostitution, that is rife in the shanty town where the men have little to do and the women, desperate to feed and clothe themselves and their families, sell their bodies for as little as 100 gourdes (2.5 US dollars).
As well as ensuring women who have been raped are treated and given HIV/AIDS counselling, Marie and Francoise have their own more personal experiences of sexual violence. Marie's 13- year old daughter was raped by a 68- year old man, who is now serving time in prison, while Francoise's 19- year old niece was raped by a gang of hooded men. Both girls are now living out of Cite Soleil for their own safety and due to the stigma that rape carries in this deeply religious country.
Both women say that is now much easier for women to report rape and sexually abuse to the police or Haitian authorities who take their accounts more seriously than before.
The biggest challenge though facing women in the slums is birth control. Haiti has the highest birth rate in the Western Hemisphere, with families of 10 or 12 children not uncommon. But contraceptives are too expensive for some. A condom costs 3 gourdes, three times the price of an hour or two's supply of drinking water or equivalent to the price of one of the ubiquitous mud cakes mixed with butter and salt that the slum dwellers sometimes eat to fill their empty stomachs.
"It is a vicious circle", says Marie, as she surveys the women blocking her path in the slums of Cite Soleil. "They should use contraception and have fewer children, but they don't because they can't afford it."
Original material :
digital
Resolution :
5616x3744
Orientation :
landscape
Colour/B&W :
colour
