Helping Babies Breathe and other fun things.

Rainy season is among us and I for one am still as happy as a clam. It means the garden has taken a turn for the worse as it has not seen much sun for a few weeks and some of the things in the shade house developed a weird mold. I know this will pass as the sun will most certainly come out again soon and that means that everything will flourish once again. We have decided to rotate our crops and pull out all the old stuff in preparation. It was so nice to get out and do some serious work in the garden. I have not been out there enough and my goal from now on is to be out there at least one day per week working. I love working in the clinic five days per week but it just does not allow for enough time to do all the housekeeping things I need to do and allow me to work in the garden AND most importantly, to have a day to just lay around and read. So once it is just me in the clinic I will most likely work 3-4 days per week in the clinic, have one day for gardening here or out in the community and the (fingers crossed) have one day where the electricity is on so I  can complete all the emailing, form creating etc that I want to get done. Wish me luck!

The few remaining plants that made the cut

Time for some new crops!

Awesome teaching tools from Helping Babies Breathe

Today as I sit at the fancy schmancy hotel Roi Christophe, I am excited about a program I just finished participating in called Helping Babies Breathe. It was put on and funded by a hospital in Florida and was designed to teach neonatal resuscitation to the medical community using a specially designed infant model, ambu bag and suction bulb. It was only the second time this class was offered and I am thankful I was able to attend so I can now teach Marie and Santo these techniques and they can continue to teach others. The idea is to get as much of the community who is involved in births as possible to learn about resuscitation and provide them with the tools (i.e specialty ambu bag) so they can be prepared the event that the baby does not begin to breathe on its own.  The program was taught by Dr. Tom Lacy and I believe it will be easily recreated when I teach others here at the clinic. There are not too many steps, not too many facts and values to remember and not too many places for error throughout the process. This is of the utmost importance if you are training those in the community without medical training which is the category in which the majority of those doing homebirths fall into. We were sent home with the teaching kit, the doll and 8 suction and ambu bag kits-how cool!