Sobering Visits

The Kafwa meet life at its most desperate level. They invited members of our team to accompany them on home visits to 4 of their clients. We had just started walking through the village toward our first home visit when we came across a woman writhing and moaning in the open doorway to her little mud-brick home. The Kafwa immediately sprang into action, diagnosed the problem as a probable miscarriage and began arranging for a wheelbarrow to push her to the nearest clinic. Fortunately since we were in the area with a car, it was called into service to transport her to the clinic and later on to the hospital. Last we heard she was recovering well. For many other women, however, transportation and facilities are not available and the story has a very different ending. According to UNICEF’s 2009 State of the Worlds Children, 1500 women die every day while giving birth. That’s a staggering half a million women per year.