February 8, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Lynn Hoffman-Brouse
A couple of years ago, while escorting a donor on a tour of rural Tibet, where the charity she founded aids local pregnant women, Arlene Samen got a stark reminder of why her group’s work matters.
Summoned to help a villager who was in labor, alone in her family’s dimly lit animal shed, Ms. Samen, a nurse practioner, found herself playing midwife. The mother delivered a healthy baby boy, but the event was harrowing: Ms. Samen was without her medical tools and, she says, the family could offer only “a set of filthy sheep shears” to cut the umbilical cord.
“OK, now I get what these women are up against,” she recalls thinking.
Women in rural Tibet are up against traditional local beliefs that the blood of childbirth is polluted, and that strangers in a birthing room can bring bad spirits. As a result, they often deliver their babies without trained medical help, in the same sheds that shelter their families’ livestock. The result: One in 10 Tibetan babies die within their first month.
But One Heart (Health, Education, and Research in Tibet), with offices in Ms. Samen’s home of Salt Lake City and in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, seeks to improve those odds for Tibetan mothers and their babies. It provides midwife training to local physicians, and also prepares women and their families for impending births by giving them basic medical supplies and instruction in dealing with complications.
The charity, which began its work in 1998, expects to spend $720,000 this year; most of its money comes from individuals, but it also gets support from the federal government and grant makers.
The group’s efforts have started to pay off: Last year 90 percent of women in Medro Gonkar County were assisted during childbirth by an attendant trained by One Heart; only one woman in the county died in childbirth, and the infant mortality rate has been cut in half.
Here, Tibetan women in a One Heart midwife-training program learn how to care for a newborn by practicing on a doll.
