Nursing students volunteer with alumnus-founded nonprofit Midwives for Haiti

In January 2015, Eastern Mennonite University nursing professor Ann Schaeffer volunteered with Midwives for Haiti. The nonprofit organization, founded by alumnus Nadene Brunk, trains Haitian women in midwifery. By the end of her transformative time there, Schaeffer was determined to bring her nursing students.

The May 2016 senior seminar brought six juniors and seniors — Lamar Kiser, Martha Bell, Juni Schirch-Sanchez, Lydia Tissue, Leona Good and Mariah Martin — for a 16-day immersive experience in Haiti. They dressed each morning in scrubs and spent their days helping to deliver babies, treat burns, insert IVs for hydration, and administer newborn exams.

Tissue had her first experience with the labor and delivery process.

“I stood beside a first-time mother and served as her labor support. Martha [another student on the trip] rubbed her belly, while I stood bent over her, arms around each other’s necks, cheeks pressed together. I hummed ‘Come Thou Fount’ into her ear as she labored through contractions, and when I stopped to take a break, she pulled me in closer, asking me without words to continue.”

When the baby was finally born, Tissue was “moved beyond words at the sacredness of my bond with this new mother.”

During their travels, the group spent time with Brunk, the 2010 winner of EMU’s Distinguished Service Award. A nurse midwife, Brunk visited Haiti for the first time in 2003 and was struck by the lack of resources available to pregnant women. Soon after, she began working to train local nurses in midwifery. By 2006, Midwives for Haiti was a fully functioning non-profit organization.

Hinche and Cabestor

The first stop of the trip was Hinche, about two hours north of the capital Port-au-Prince.  Schaeffer describes the city with about the population of Harrisonburg, “if Harrisonburg had dirt roads all the way through.” While staying at a guesthouse rented by MFH for volunteers, the students volunteered at a school and at the Azil Feeding Center, an organization run by the Sisters of Mercy that cares for malnourished children and adults.

In the evenings, Schaeffer worked shifts in the nearby hospital, and took a few students with her to provide labor and postpartum assessments, breast feeding training, and inventory of the hospital’s meager supply cabinet.

[Visit a blog on the Haiti trip or read about Mariah Martin’s experience in a blog post titled ‘Love is a Verb: Doing What You Can.’]

Next stop was Cabestor, the home of the newest free-standing birth center run by Midwives for Haiti. The clinic opened in January 2016, and Schaeffer and her students helped deliver the clinic’s first set of twins.

Haitian childbirth and pregnancy statistics are alarming; one in five children do not live past age five, and women still die during childbirth regularly. There is no guarantee that mothers and their children will survive the pregnancy and childbirth process, but Midwives for Haiti is working to reverse those numbers by training Haitian women to be certified nurses and midwives and placing them throughout the island nation.

And it’s working.

“[Delivering the twins] was awesome and a little terrifying. The second twin was a very difficult delivery. I ended up having to resuscitate the baby,” Schaeffer said. “It was a Haitian midwife, Nelta, that was doing most of that work. We were able to assist, and I was very grateful to have been a part of that, but they really know. They are very skilled.”

Organization trains midwives

Schaeffer emphasized that volunteers are not “swooping in” to help improve the current system: “Midwives for Haiti is doing just fine without us. They do not need us to save them. If volunteers never came to Midwives for Haiti again, the work of Midwives for Haiti would continue. Volunteers serve to spread the word, and to raise necessary funds until it’s self-sustaining.”

If anything, the trip left a lasting impact on the group from EMU, not the Haitian women they were assisting. For Schaeffer, the most memorable part of the trip was not in the clinic in Cabestor or the hospital in Hinche, but what their house manager in Cabestor, Mario, called a “walk” to attend church on the other side of a mountain.

On their third day in Cabestor, they left the birth center at 7:30 in the morning dressed in church clothes and sturdy walking shoes, carrying medical supplies for home visits on the way back, and of course, toting plenty of water. The journey was a steamy, two-hour hike through a mountain jungle.

“This is what women in Haiti do every day to get water, to get healthcare. They do it pregnant. They do it in flip flops. They do it every single day, and that was very humbling,” Schaeffer said.

On the way home, after stopping to do a newborn exam for the 11th member of a Haitian family, the students were low on water. Schaeffer was starting to get worried when a man came running up behind them with two big buckets filled with coconuts.

“He says through our translator, ‘I knew you were leaving from the church, and you had a long way to go and that you’d probably be tired, so I’ve been trying to catch up with you,’” Schaeffer said. “He took his machete and cut the tops off, and gave us all coconuts to drink the coconut water, and that was enough. We got to the top of the ridge, and we sang songs all the way down.”

Schaeffer describes the entire experience as a “profound window into what life was actually like in Haiti.”

“There’s a lot of times in nursing that you feel that you’re in a sacred moment or that you’re on holy ground, but I actually feel like that entire walk was on holy ground,” she said.

Nursing in the present

The trip also gave the students an experience in the field where they couldn’t come close to “fixing” everyone’s problems.

“Most of the things we encountered in Haiti would have been almost 100 percent treatable, curable in the United States,” Schaeffer said. “Here we were, entering into a space with other people, other human beings, trying to be of use and knowing that we weren’t going to be able to walk away from this feeling like it was all taken care of and we had made it all better.”

More than anything, Tissue has learned to be fully present with her patients no matter where she’s serving.

“In Haiti, I gained a new insight into my role as a nurse. Inspired by Ann, I have taken on the mantra of ‘I’ll be your person.’ I will hold your hand through the intimidating procedure, I’ll change the dressing on the burn that covers your whole arm, I’ll be your comfort, and I’ll be there when no one else is,” Tissue said.