Le Livesay Haiti Weblog

slow and steady (wins the race)

Islande taking blood-pressure on a Prenatal day at Heartline Maternity Center

Time flies and memories fade (especially if you are age 40+, like me) - that to say, maybe this is something that you've forgotten - I am here to remind you.

In late October a "Love Flash Mob" happened at the Momastery website. The Heartline Maternity Center was awarded a grant from the funds that came in during the love flash mob from the non-profit, Together Rising. The grant is specifically funding a second floor on our current Maternity Center as well as other renovations and improvements to the building. The new upper floor will allow us to move our classroom space upstairs and use our original downstairs classroom space as a new much more lovely and spacious postpartum room. These changes will also allow us the space to serve 65 pregnant women at one time.

The construction is at the four and a half month mark. We are getting antsy and anxious to be done with the dust and construction. It appears that we could be using the new upstairs space by May! The bathroom upstairs will have TWO stalls - which is going to change everyones life and make us all happy. There are too many pregnant bladders in the building to be sharing one bathroom on Thursdays.

(History - We began with 20 women in 2008, slowly have increased over the years but have had to cap our numbers at 45 due to lack of space.)

Because we have always always been about very slow growth, we have managed to keep our staff to client ratio at a level that allows us (the staff) to know each woman by name and have a relationship with her by the time she delivers her little one.

In September one more staff member will join us when she finishes her training to become a skilled birth attendant. By October we will be expecting about 10 babies per month rather than the current 6 to 7 that are born now. By October we will be a staff of three midwives, one skilled birth attendant, and three nurses with a ton of midwifery experience.

All of this is uber exciting. The hardest thing about growing a high touch, high quality, super relational program - is finding staff that will buy into the way we approach care at Heartline M.C.

I recently wrote about how important compassion is to what we do.

Any new staff member we hire must be a person of great compassion and integrity. The medical system of this country doesn't necessarily encourage that sort of care - but we do.

Today I want to introduce you to Islande. She is a new nurse on staff. It has been such a joy to get to know her for the past several weeks. Her skills are excellent. Better yet and even more important - she genuinely loves serving and caring for women. She is tender and kind and compassionate.

We welcome Islande to our staff and are excited to watch her learn more about midwifery which will only help round out her awesome nursing skills and loving bedside manner. She joins Wini and Nirva, on staff six and three years respectively.

Nursing Staff L to R - Nirva, Islande, Winifred - at a Birth Symposium this week

If you would like to join us in reducing orphans and strengthening families in Haiti, please visit our website and consider partnering with us at:

www.heartlineministries.org