Optimistic Voices
Vital voices in the fields of global health, global child welfare reform and family separation, and those intent on conducting ethical missions in low resource communities and developing nations. Join our hosts as they engage in conversations with diverse guests from across the globe, sharing optimistic views, experiences, and suggestions for better and best practices as they discuss these difficult topics.
Optimistic Voices
Tiny Miracles: The Story of Joseph
Join us for a deeply inspiring episode that follows the miraculous journey of baby Joseph, born against all odds in a rural clinic in Sierra Leone. This episode highlights the intense realities faced by healthcare workers like midwife Hawa Zoker, caught in a life-or-death situation while managing multiple deliveries. Tune in to hear about the pivotal moment when help arrived in the form of Canadian nurses, who brought both medical expertise and critical supplies that ultimately saved Joseph's life and that of his mother, Nancy.
As we unravel this powerful narrative, we delve into the impact of maternal health training programs, exploring how education can transform lives. You'll hear about Hawa's journey as she changed from a burned-out midwife to a dedicated trainer, sharing skills needed to save lives and creating a ripple effect of change in her community. The episode not only chronicles Joseph's fight for survival but also challenges listeners to consider how small, compassionate actions can lead to significant shifts in healthcare systems.
We invite you to reflect on the importance of collaboration in healthcare as we discuss the crucial role of community support and training. Be inspired by Joseph’s story and learn how hope and dedication can pave the way for a healthier future for mothers and children alike. Remember to subscribe, share this episode, and leave us a review! Your support helps us amplify these critical narratives of hope and resilience.
Travel on International Mission with Helping Children Worldwide to Sierra Leone, meet the local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. You can step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.
https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html
Helpingchildrenworldwide.org
Welcome to Optimistic Voices, a child's view, where we share incredible stories of resilience and hope through the eyes of children.
Speaker 2:I'm Natalie Turner and this is my co-host, melody Curtis. I'm Natalie Turner and this is my co-host, melody Curtis. Together, we'll talk about real kids who face tough challenges, even during birth, and the amazing people who helps them find a brighter future.
Speaker 1:Each episode features a special guest who'll take us on a journey, one filled with adversity, compassion and hope, and today's story is especially inspiring. Imagine, if you will, a tiny life hanging in the balance, a newborn struggling to breathe, in a clinic stretched to its breaking point. Our latest episode takes you inside a critical birth, where an overworked midwife, facing life or death situations, realizes the profound impact of skills training. Hear how one baby's fight for survival became a powerful testament to the life-saving potential of maternal health education, and why a single training session could transform an entire community. So let's welcome today's guest, yasmin Vaughn. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. It's nice being on this side of the microphone.
Speaker 3:Before we dive in tell us a little bit about yourself and your connection to Joseph. Yeah, so for those of you who are not longtime listeners to the podcast, I'm Yasmin Vaughn. I'm the Technical Advisor for Global Health and Missions at Helping Children Worldwide. Part of my work in global health is being the project manager for our maternal health mission. If you're not familiar with our maternal health missions, I'd encourage you to listen to some of our other podcast episodes about that. I believe we just re-shared one, but the mission is a collaboration between members of the Together for Global Health Network to improve the maternal and child mortality rates in Sierra Leone through the training of midwives. So the story I'm going to share today is about a child named Joseph who was born in a rural clinic in Sierra Leone and how his birth story not only transformed his life, of course, but created change in his community. And also just FYI, the names and details in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of the patients.
Speaker 1:So, Yasmin, let's begin with the child's story. What was happening when you first met baby Joseph?
Speaker 3:So I'll begin with how his story began. Really story began really. Joseph was born on January 18th of last year, 2024, to his mother, nancy, in a small community clinic in Jerahoon Village. Jerahoon Village is a relatively large community area, not just encompassing the village but also the catchment areas of other communities, and it's located on the road between Bow and Kenema, which is the Bow-Kenema Highway is a large highway between the two cities.
Speaker 3:Joseph's birth was a really complicated situation, due both to his individual circumstances and systems factors. On a systems level, despite this clinic, you know, having significant access because of the highway, it was still really difficult for people in the community and surrounding villages to access health care services for advanced care, as the clinic itself did not have a working ambulance or a driver to refer clinical patients. They also really struggled with obtaining the supplies they needed to support deliveries. The midwife who delivered Joseph was named Hawa Zoker. They also really struggled with obtaining the supplies they needed to support deliveries. The midwife who delivered Joseph was named Hawa Zoker. Hawa was the only midwife on staff that day, as the other midwife who was stationed in the clinic had been on leave for about three months and couldn't be contacted or located. So this meant that Hawa had either been on call or working at the clinic 24-7 for the last three months. So she was incredibly burned out and in serious need of support. So that's kind of the system's overview of where Joseph came into the world.
Speaker 1:Wow, that sounds like an incredibly dangerous situation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, on the level of the clinic, there were five deliveries that were happening there that day. A woman had just delivered about an hour ago and now Nancy was delivering Joseph. After Joseph was born, nancy started to hemorrhage, she was bleeding more than is normal and Joseph himself was born and was not breathing. And then, on top of that, there was another 19-year-old girl named Esther who was in labor, but her labor wasn't progressing normally and because she was young and tired out, she was really starting to wear thin and needed some support with progressing in her labor.
Speaker 3:So Hala, the midwife, was really overwhelmed in this situation. There are a lot of things going on, and being alone in the clinic meant that she needed to manage each of these situations effectively and draw upon training that she'd had previously and to have the knowledge and the confidence to save 10 patients you know, the five mothers and the five newborns and this is a difficult situation for any midwife to handle. If there are any medical professionals listening now, I'm sure that they are deeply shocked at one midwife trying to handle five deliveries at a time almost. But Hawa was stressed and overwhelmed from her nearly constant work and she really didn't have the foundation of knowledge and confidence to handle these circumstances.
Speaker 2:That's very difficult for one midwife to handle alone and having so many mothers to take that need care with limited resources available.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's kind of scary just to even think about, but I think this is where the story started to turn around.
Speaker 3:I think help arrived Is that right, in a miraculous turn of events, these nurses were traveling with an organization called Embrace International. They'd been invited to be a part of this training as trainers by the Healy International Relief Foundation, and so they were going to be a part of the training that was happening in Bow the next week. So we were going to train about 100 midwives on two particular curricula actually Helping Babies Breathe, which is an infant resuscitation curriculum, and managing postpartum hemorrhage, the two things that were happening in this case. We wanted to make sure that these international trainers had some on-the-ground experience to observe local practices, how deliveries were done in clinics, and so I had been a part of a visit to that clinic earlier in the morning to see if there were any deliveries they could observe. And we also asked Hawa at that time if she was planning on attending this maternal and child health training, and that morning Hawa was really not sure if she was going to be able to come. She was really overwhelmed, of course, and really didn't at that time see the value that the training could bring to her work.
Speaker 3:So, as Hawa is managing Nancy and Joseph's situation, as she's helping Esther, trying to figure out what she's going to do next, these nurses from Canada arrived and they saw that there was a need for immediate intervention, that this was all timely things that needed to happen right then, and so they jumped into action. They resuscitated Joseph until he was breathing on his own. They started implementing the protocols for stopping bleeding for his mother, nancy, the 19-year-old mother. They decided needed an IV and there were fluids at the clinic, but there weren't any IV kits to put in the IV to administer the fluids. Thankfully, the Canadians had some of those kits in their car. They were planning to donate them to a facility anyways, so they were able to get an IV started.
Speaker 3:Despite these interventions, nancy continued to bleed. Esther was still not progressing in her labor. So they worked together with Hawa and made the decision to call the government hospital in Bow and all of them were transferred to the hospital. And they actually had to use the vehicle that the Canadians were in to be able to do this transfer, because neither of those families had arranged for there to be a vehicle in case of emergencies. So everything worked out well in terms of getting them transferred and all of that. But without the intervention and support it's more than likely that one or all of them would have died.
Speaker 2:So, when all of this was happening, where were you, yasmin? I don't know.
Speaker 3:I was not at the clinic during these events, which is probably a good thing. I'm a little more squeamish than I like to admit to a lot of people. I was at the missionary training center waiting for this team to finish doing their shadowing. They were supposed to have lunch with us after that, and then lunch turned into dinner and they hadn't shown up, and so I was texting with them to see where they were, and after things had quieted down a little bit, they were able to share a little bit of the story with me. And then the next day we visited Bow Government Hospital to do some shadowing there and were able to do a follow-up visit with the patients.
Speaker 2:Did you get to?
Speaker 3:see the baby Joseph. I did, I did. I got to see him and his mother. Joseph was a handsome term baby. Seemed to be doing super well. His mom looked a little tired but she was all smiles when she saw the Canadians walk in.
Speaker 1:I feel like we ought to have some kind of a trumpet fanfare for the Canadians walking in, so let's just take a moment to celebrate these people who made such a difference here. I wish I knew the Canadian National Anthem. I would play it for them right now.
Speaker 2:So what happened after that? Was Joseph okay and did Haba attend the training?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Joseph and Nancy were continued to be followed up with at the government hospital. The Canadian nurses were able to text with Hawa and with the Bo government team and check in to make sure they were recovering well. Nancy, of course, was incredibly thankful that Joseph was alive and that the nurses had saved her life as well. Nancy, of course, was incredibly thankful that Joseph was alive and that the nurses had saved her life as well. Esther, the 19-year-old mother, actually delivered her baby in the vehicle on the way to Bow, which was quite a shock for the driver, who I don't think had ever been a part of any sort of medical intervention like that. But they were at the hospital and they were doing well too.
Speaker 3:The experience really actually had a profound impact on Hawa's life. She was really inspired by the quick action and the expertise that those Canadian nurses brought, and so she decided to attend our maternal health training. She worked super hard, she diligently honed her resuscitation, her hemorrhage management skills, and she not only was certified in being able to perform those interventions, but we asked her to be a practice coordinator, and practice coordinators are people who are responsible for sharing their knowledge with other midwives at their facility and at other clinics. So after the week of training that she did with us, she began conducting training at the clinic to equip other midwives in her area with the skills needed to handle similar emergencies. And then, as a result of her really good results with that, we invited her to attend uh the conference we did this January in Kenema so that we could observe her teaching uh, see how she's uh delivering the training to other people and her skills with training uh, and see if she could receive qualification as a rising trainer. Um, so it was. It was such a uh a really tangible way to see how, um the work that we were doing of training midwives could have such an impact on uh lives being saved in Sierra Leone. Uh.
Speaker 3:But I know some of you were listening and thinking. You know, amidst all the challenges in this story, why are we prioritizing training? I mean, it's clear that she needed support. There needed to be other midwives there to help her.
Speaker 3:The clinic didn't have the resources like the IVs and the ambulances, and so, while it's clear that these are challenges that need to be addressed, our focus stems from a reality in Sierra Leone that successful clinics are the ones who actually attract more support.
Speaker 3:So we're hoping that by empowering midwives with the skills to handle these complex situations, the Ministry of Health and Sanitation and other partners will recognize their capability and increase the support of these clinics to foster this cycle of improvement, so that you know they're demonstrating success and receiving resources to succeed even further. The situation is still not perfect, but joseph's birth story resulted in hawa being able to be better prepared to handle difficult situations and to help other midwives do the same. So while her training and her training others is only a fraction of the healthcare needs, her commitment to sharing these skills does have a ripple effect of improved care, and so we're hoping it'll attract attention to strengthen the maternal health system across the how the impact of people coming together and agreeing to collaborate on something can just show up as a miracle in one child's life.
Speaker 1:Speaking of miracles and things that make you think, what's a note of optimism you'd like to share with our listeners to take away from this story? Yasmin, Now's your opportunity to answer the question you ask of your guests.
Speaker 3:I guess I just want to share that. I'm really glad that we're doing these episodes of A Child's Voice and highlighting the individual stories of people whose lives are being changed by our work. I do also all of our data monitoring and evaluation and it can be really easy for me to get caught up in the statistics or to become really discouraged when there are still systematic problems like the ones highlighted in this story. But by sharing stories like Joseph's I'm reminded of the impact that we're able to make and the amazing results that it can have.
Speaker 2:Not only Joseph's story, but Hawa's story as well, is that the knowledge and dedication of others has the ability to save this newborn child as well as improve the safety and resources of a community. It really shows that it's never too late to learn or become involved, wherever you may be, as it just may have a great impact on others and others.
Speaker 1:We hope today's story has inspired our listeners to look around and think about how they can be a part of someone's journey, whether it's through kindness or volunteering or simply listening. Small actions can make a big difference, and showing up at the right time requires you to show up, so if you're choosing to show up, you may be there at the exact right moment to make a big difference.
Speaker 2:Thank you, yasmin, for sharing this incredible story, and thank you, listeners, for joining us today on Optimistic Voices A Child's View.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you guys for having me. I'm really thankful to be a part of this team and thankful for all of those in this story for the incredible work that they did. So, if you're listening, we appreciate you and the impact that you've made.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, share it with friends and leave a review.
Speaker 2:Until next time, remember there's always hope and every voice matters. Bye for now.
Speaker 1:Bye Natalie, Bye Yasmin, Thank you.
