As we are drawn to reflect on how to honor and thank our mothers on May 8th , I am fortunate to have more than one mother to acknowledge and thank. As an adoptive parent of two phenomenal children ages 8 and 10, I have two additional mothers who have been powerful forces in the life of my family . Twice, I stood by my children’s birthmothers in the delivery room while each of my children was born. I was fortunate to build a relationship over months to the two strong, young mothers who knew that they were not ready to raise their unborn children and chose me to adopt and care for the infants they were soon to deliver. For some, it’s a complicated issue to understand–why would a mother give up her child at birth? And it may really only be the adoptive parent who can truly understand that an adopted child can be loved and treasured just as deeply if born of another woman’s womb. I bonded immediately with my infants and the gift I received from these two women has forever changed my life.

My children were delivered in well-staffed and resourced hospitals after nine months of quality prenatal care. That simply is not the case for the majority of women around the world. Millions of women every day cannot access a functioning healthcare clinic that is staffed with clinicians and has the medicine they need to stay healthy. Pregnant women face these barriers everyday and the result is devastating. This Sunday on Mother’s day, over 2,000 women will die from complications of pregnancy–and yet those complications could have been averted if they had access to perinatal care or were able to get to a functional clinic when their complications arose.

Prior to adopting my children I worked in rural Cambodia and East Africa for a decade as a clinician and could recall several times when a mother passed her tiny newborn to me. She wanted me to take the baby home because she was too weak due to anemia or malaria–chronic illnesses that make it nearly impossible to manage a resource-poor household and to keep young children nourished and safe. I treated women with post-partum hemorrhage or with urgent infections from septic abortions. I held five month old babies who were not named at birth because their mothers knew that they were underweight and undernourished and might not survive. I saw, first hand, the barriers that pregnant women face and the consequences that result and I was forever changed. I was drawn and determined to bring awareness to this global problem. I worked first as a clinician and now as an advocate to serve this population.

I co-founded C2C 2 ½ years ago with another phenomenal woman, Allison Howard Berry. We were both driven by the belief that woman and children in resource poor communities should have a right to simple primary healthcare. Our innovative model converts used shipping containers into high quality medical clinics and deploys them in partnerships with local organizations that staff and operate them with the aim to improve the outcomes for pregnant women and their infants.

On this Mother’s Day, I have three mothers to thank and countless women to honor as they serve as the foundations of their community, their families and the world.

Good.is and Cole Haan teamed up and are asking folks to submit doodles that inspire them – anything in the world, skies the limit. Prizes include gift certificates to Cole Haan of monetary amounts that reflect your creative talents 🙂 Check it:

Yes, I have the power of C2C’s new generator. A few months ago, Grace Children’s hospital started having trouble with the facilities behemoth generator; as a result, operations in the C2C clinic were stressed: no AC, and as power came in and out so too came our ability to run lab tests.

Energy and electricity are vital for development.  In Haiti, consistent electricity is a luxury. The city of Port-au-Prince can’t meet its constituents’ energy demands, so we often have blackouts. As such, power inverters and generators are a big business here and their prices are quite high. But when you’re running a health facility, you assume those costs because the ends justifies the means.

The C2C laboratory was suffering enormously from the erratic electricity. Imagine a patient who comes to the lab for a test, the lab tech does the blood drawn and starts the test on the centrifuge machine or the thermo spectronic  and zap! the power shut down. Then the blood sample is no good anymore and the patient who’ll come for her result the day after will be surprised to know that she will be subjected to a new blood draw instead. This wasteful scenario happened a few times recently, and as it became clear that GCH was not close to a solution for the hospital power, I took matters into my own hands.

Now, I have the power.  You can’t imagine how I feel as facility manager every time a patient is getting angry at the lab tech and then the lab tech turns her look at me as to say: “You see what you’ve done”. Now, we are all happy, and the biggest happiness will come from the patients when they get their lab test results on time and when they won’t need to be subject to multiple blood draws.

Yes, I have the power to continue providing high quality health care to so many women in need.

Two weeks ago, Liz Sheehan and C2C Chairman of the Board, Keith Angell, went out to California to visit the construction site of the second clinic under production with Allied Container Systems as well as to attend the premiere of Christy Turlington Burns’ directorial debut “No Woman No Cry,” the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States.

Hello everybody,

I learned something very interesting last week:  A pregnant woman is not considered a “patient” at Grace Children’s Hospital, but rather a “client”. The rationale for this is that a lady who’s pregnant must not consider herself “sick,” which the term “patient” connotes. Certainly now you are digging in your head to understand more or less what this really means in a social context. So many questions are popping up in my head about this distinction and the way women here understand it.  Miss Jocelyne Arnoux, head nurse at GCH, was the one to explain it to me, and she is a nurse with 17 years of experience; certainly she knows what she is talking about, so let’s dig into this concept for more clarity.

At the C2C maternal health care and women’s clinic at Grace Children’s Hospital we are facilitating services to a lot of ladies from near and far, old and young, for a range of services: prenatal care, gynecological check up or follow up, family planning with complications and some other related cases.  As far as I was concerned – as the de facto manager of the clinic – all of these women were “Patients.” Now this concept of pregnant woman visitors as “clients” isn’t innate to me, so I ask myself: what is the condition and situation of most of the pregnant ladies I’m seeing at the clinic? They don’t feel good, especially if they don’t know yet if they are pregnant; they are seeing some changes in their bodies; they are worried about their increasing body temperature; they just did not have menstruations for the past months or weeks … The reasons are various.

Some of our visitors, when they come to the clinic they are very anxious or are in a rush to meet the doctor. Sometimes they act like a dying person who wants to enter an emergency room. “Don’t worry Madame, you are not sick, you are just pregnant”, I would like to tell them. But how would they understand it?  How would they feel it, if I tell them that they are just client, so they have to act as client? A privileged client who have paid less than $1 for a very good quality service in a high quality structure. I see the value of teaching women that pregnancy is not a sickness and encouraging their positive feelings toward it. Unfortunately, women here don’t often see it like this.  I can understand the logic in it, but they cannot, which – I think – is a manifestation of poor education, starting with basic health ed. The problem here beings as fundamentally as women “clients” not knowing their age or health histories. So it’s no surprise that when something feels slightly off (as in the case of pregnancy) they consider themselves sick, and nothing or no one can put something else in their head since they were not educated for it. Someone who feels sick, thinks sick and will normally act sick. The medical system can consider them as client until it’s blue in the face, but those ladies I’m seeing and questioning everyday will forever consider themselves “patients” for a long time if we don’t start teaching that pregnancy is not a sickness, but certainly something new to be managed about their personal health.

At the end of the day, the best reward is that at C2C’s clinic at Grace Children Hospital, however the women are labeled and whatever they’re feeling, the staff will do the best to provide them the services they need in a secure, well-resourced space. “Patient” or “Client” is just a difference of words.

These past few weeks, the world has been very tumultuous. A powerful earthquake happened in Japan, leaving the world under a nuclear menace. The beginning of aerial bombing in Libya to apply the UN council resolution for the “no fly zone”. The continuous fights in Ivory Coast, and the Middle East’s revolutions. All these hot spots eclipsed some important stuff happening in Haiti.

Important is certainly a word to put in bold, because the future of this Caribbean nation was advanced last weekend. Let me recapitulate for you. After one year of extreme struggle, Haiti had to deal with two major political and historical situations. Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Haiti. After creating a lot of noise locally and internationally, his return was soon forgotten. He is eating publicly in the best restaurants, and even attended a Jazz Festival where people and the press have seen him sipping some good French wine and enjoying life. But does time cure all? Is 25 years passage enough to forgive a dictator’s cruelty: I wonder. If we can learn from actions, forgive and decide to move forward, then I interpret it as “a wind of hope” for Haiti.

Now, there is a quite big gap between 25 years and 7 years. For seven years, Jean Bertrand Aristide was exiled in South Africa. A week ago tomorrow, he returned to Haiti, just before last Sunday’s presidential run-off election.  Now, seven years does not allow a whole generation of Haitians to forget.  For example, with Duvalier, I only know of his actions through stories and films; with Aristide it is totally different. I know what his reign was about and I even fought to throw him out of the country. There is not time enough here to refresh your mind on how he was destroying the country by arming his famous militia “the Chimere,” but suffice it to say that many fear his return would destabilize our tenuous peace and democratic process. Much to my amazement, everything happened smoothly. Now, while everybody is talking about chance or luck, I am thinking of “a wind of hope” for Haiti.

People predicted a disaster and major troubles during the votes. But, as always and faithful to her reputation, Haiti created the surprise. We had a nice, smooth and quite fair election day March 20^th. Beside logistic problems with the vote materials in some vote center, overall the day end up very positively.  The elections went well. Of course you won’t hear of it in the news, it’s not news, it cannot be Haiti. Now the speculations go around the coming results. I’m totally confident that we’ll keep up this good way. As people are saying that it’s a miracle. I am thinking of “a wind of hope” for Haiti.

And in the meanwhile, our thoughts are with everyone effected by the disasters that are in the news this week.

Today celebrates the centenary of International Women’s Day, and there’s chatter all around the world and all over the news about measuring women’s progress since 1911, the unique challenges to their pursuit of health and happiness and the importance of captivating their intellectual capital.

Arianna Huffington had one of my favorite posts of the day. In thinking about women and their unique way of looking at the world and problem-solving, Ms. Huffington had this (and much more) to say about her mother:

For example, she taught me that there is always a way around a problem — you’ve just got to find it. Keep trying doors, and one will eventually open.

And, by word and by deed, she regularly demonstrated the value of having a support group of family and friends — what I call my “fearlessness tribe” — in place to give you honest feedback, to support you when the going gets tough, to help salve your wounds… and, just as importantly, to help you celebrate and appreciate the good times too…

As working women, we have to weigh the psychic cost of not trying a new job or venture against the possibility of not succeeding and being embarrassed by our efforts. The former creates regret, the latter a few hours — or perhaps a few days — of licking our wounds. I’ve learned again and again over my career that if you want to succeed, there is no substitute for simply sticking your neck out.

And the world desperately needs women willing to do that. That’s because women are ideally suited to supplying the qualities we need in our leaders right now — being strong and decisive while at the same time being nurturing, wise, and respectful enough to tell the truth with a moral authority that inspires and empowers.

Ms. Huffington advocates a breed of woman who is fearless about her priorities and relationships, and I buy into that wholesale. However, to be so fearless is a luxury, I think, and not one to which most women around the world have access. Everything starts with health and education, and so it is this question of access to luxury (or: opportunity for fearlessness) that C2C seeks to address. Healthy women are more empowered women. This is where it starts.

In Haiti, having a day off is welcome. Any situation, any reason is good enough to take a day of rest with friends, take care of other businesses, or even just to sit at home. This past year, the country had many occasions for “days off.” When it’s not a natural disaster, it’s political trouble. Unfortunately, “days off” also apply to the healthcare system.

Every year, Haiti celebrates Carnival forty days before Holy Friday and Easter. Because of the devastating earthquake that shook the country last year, we missed the 2010 carnival. So this year, we were ready to make up for it and pack two years of celebrations in one. Funny, though: if we’re honest with ourselves, nothing has really changed about the reasons the government canceled 2010 parade. We haven’t come very far…

The Haitian Carnival is very expensive. The 2011 allowed budget for the carnival celebration is 90 million of Gourdes (or $2,250,000 USD). This is insane you will say. It probably is crazy, but the government officials won’t miss the opportunity to earn some money from the treasury two years in a row. You see, the Carnival is perfect for money laundering. Anyway this is another side of the problem. Let’s stay focused on how the country will be turned off for almost 6 days…

From Friday March 4^th to Wednesday March 9^th, schools, hospitals, businesses will all be closed for Carnival celebrations. What is really funny in all this is the fact that there will be no real carnival celebration.  The parade will be just a “masquerade”, a joke on the Champs-de-Mars near the Palace where 75 000 people are suffering, starving and dying under tents. Most the music bands, dance group have decided to boycott the celebration. So there will be no real carnival, but only 4 “days off.”

The C2C clinic at Grace Children Hospital will be open for a half day on Monday and closed for Mardi Gras (Tuesday) and Ash Wednesday. This will happen not because the Nurses and doctors will attend the carnival, but again because any holiday is welcome. Even in the health system.  So, sadly if a lady has a problem and needs care for those days, she will have to wait for Thursday to stop by the clinic and meet a doctor.  This is deeply sad and unproductive, so let’s hope everyone returns with a vigor on Thursday…

C2C recently traveled to Fond des Blancs to look at a new potential site in Villa (about 1:30 from FdB by way of seriously adventurous roads and rivers…) in partnership with St. Boniface Haiti Foundation. More on the partnership and opportunity in Villa as it develops but for now, check out the great work St. B’s is already up to…