Kids for Kids charity: Midwives – Giving Mothers Hope in Darfur

Back in 2001, on her first visit to Darfur, Patricia Parker OBE, Founder and CEO of Kids for Kids, remembers seeing the fear in the eyes of the young girls there.

“The young girls were absolutely terrified of childbirth. With no healthcare in the village, young mothers had to rely on a traditional birth attender – an older lady, totally untrained in health care, who had survived childbirth. FGM is a common practise in Darfur. Obstructed labour is therefore not unusual. Without training, they would not know that the only hope would be to get the mother to hospital. Their only recourse was rope delivery. The vision of that is terrible. The mother is lucky to survive, but the baby almost invariably dies. If they do go to hospital in the late states of labour they go on the back of a donkey, or on a stretcher between two donkeys – can you imagine?! It was clear that something had to be done!”