Snapshots from the Field

“The woman lay there in the tiny room dying from her 13th pregnancy.  No birth assistant or traditional midwife could help her.  What is missing from this picture?  The key is family planning.  With family planning she never would have been there in the first place.”

Earlier this year our Timor-Leste Country Program Director, Melinda Mousaco and one of her Mobile Midwives, Fernanda Serra visited Australia.  With them, they bought some incredible stories of their achievements, being the only provider of sexual and reproductive healthcare in Timor-Leste, but they also brought some unimaginable stories such as this powerful one that tells us so much about a woman’s struggle to stay alive in a country with limited family planning and maternal healthcare services.

I have just returned from Papua New Guinea where for the past three weeks I have been assisting the Marie Stopes team in Port Moresby. The reason for my visit was to assist the program with its stock procurement and logistics. This is  vital for every country program and – in the most basic of terms – it means that our supplies of condoms, implants, IUDs and vital medical equipment will get from the warehouse to our centres and our doctors in Papua New Guinea and then ultimately into the hands of the women and their families who need our help.