Our clinic in Bugnay has been renovated and re-inspected and re-opened!
This week my friend Kathleen and I drove up to visit the Bugnay extension clinic to say hello and bring encouragement … mostly in the form of ice cream :).
We have been unofficially open for almost a year now but this month we finished the final renovations required by Dept of Health and had our final inspection.
This morning before writing this blog I was talking to Jackie, one of the Bugnay midwives. She shared a story about the time she saw a woman from her village almost die giving birth and how it made her decide to become a midwife.
When Jackie was a teenager, she witnessed a woman in labor with her first baby in her home village of Buscalan. She watched this woman push for almost 24 hours with only the old women in the village attending to her. Jackie was so scared to see this woman already so swollen and exhausted, hanging from a doorway trying with all her strength to deliver her baby. After 24 hours of pushing and no baby, the villagers carried the woman to the road where they waited for a vehicle to take her to the hospital one hour away.
The woman delivered via C-section and both mom and baby survived, but this experience made Jackie realize that her village really needed trained midwives and she was going to become one!
Trained midwives are the most effective way to reduce maternal mortality. More midwives, equipped birth centres and referral systems are needed all over the world to help mothers survive childbirth.
I will leave you with a picture of the beautiful village of Bugnay. Please remember to pray for this clinic and the staff there, that we will be a part of reducing maternal mortality while sharing God’s love with the people of Kalinga.
Our team consisted of the ten Canadians (doctors, Nurse practitioners, nurses, an EMT, a psychologist … the list goes on!) and about 30 local church members, midwives, pastors, interpreters and over 20 members of the Philippine Army.
