Visiting Remote Ethnic Villages in Laos with Clean Birth Kits

As we visited the clinics in Tahoy District, I got a sense of the grinding poverty of the area.  People live on $1 per day.  The life expectancy of women is short, either due to childbirth (8-12 births) or disease.  Most will lose several babies, as the under 5 death rate is very high.

What do you see when you walk into the villages?  Naked kids with runny noses.  Mother with babies in slings.  Bamboo and wood one-room dwellings on stilts.  No electricity, not a single store.  The people are still living as they have for centuries.  They are forest people and foraging is still part of how they survive: rodents and roots supplement subsistence rice farming, which was introduced in the past decade.

The outside world is creeping in, however, due to a road connecting Thailand and Vietnam.  Until 5 years ago the Tahoy people were completely isolated with little exposure to the outside world (except for the bombs the US rained on the area during the war with Vietnam)[1] The trip from the town of Salavan, 4 hours from the Thai border in southern Laos, took us 2-3 hours this week on the new road. It used to take 8-10 on treacherous, often impassable dirt terrain.   Change is not all good: issues of human trafficking, HIV, and environmental degradation have already emerged.  However, it is hoped that the road will also enable increased access to medicine and education.

Education and healthcare, in the case of birth, go hand in hand.  Birthing is steeped in religious tradition, often with fatal consequences.  Due to animist religious beliefs, women and girls give birth alone in the forest.  However, if they give birth at the clinic, they can have the support of the nurses.  Knowing that not all women can reach the clinic, the nurses and I agreed to initiate a “Safe Birth Outreach”.  They will educate women and families:  in the villages close to the clinic they will encourage birthing at the clinic; in the far away villages they will encourage women to get help.

The clinics will use the Clean Birth Kits to reinforce the message of the “Safe Birth Outreach”.  The picture instructions show that the mother has a helper, who washes hands, uses the kit supplies, wraps the baby and immediately facilitates breastfeeding.  The nurses have suggested adding receiving blankets, so I will begin accepting donations of gently used blankets to be used at the moment of birth.

CleanBirth.org will also develop illustrated posters to be hung in villages that caution against harmful behaviors in pregnancy (e.g. smoking), explain the warning signs of possible problems (e.g. pre-eclampsia) and show hygienic birthing practices using the Clean Birth Kits.

I learned so much from OV staff and the nurses.  They told me what they need and we developed a plan to begin lowering maternal mortality in their villages.

A wonderful, productive trip. Now on to fundraising to make this happen…