Help Indigenous Papua Women Access Safe Childbirth

Thanks to your donations the Papua project is fully funded!

The Papua clinic now has a physician on staff and a team of 8 midwives. Next month, the acupuncturist who works at the clinic will go full time, increasing the level of service to more patients.

The impact of having the clinic in the area and running a remote midwife checkup program is becoming evident. The numbers of babies being born in our Papua clinic jumped from 10 in July to 22 in August. Pre-natal checkups rose from 49 in July to 81 in August. 

The COVID-19 isolation birth room is finished, and just needs furnishings. This will allow our COVID-positive Moms to have their babies safely at our clinic, without needing to be transported to a hospital.

The isolation room has been a project that our Clinic Director, Rachel Monoach, has been passionate about from the start. She was pressured, against her wishes, into having a cesarean birth with her first child and felt traumatized by her experience. According to Rachel, many indigenous Papuan mothers are given Cesareans that they don't need and are so traumatized that they attempt to deliver subsequent babies at home alone, without skilled care, and often with tragic results. Rachel holds a Master's Degree in Psychology and wanted to find a way to turn her own pain into power. 

Rachel worked with Bumi Sehat Bali and donors to estabish the Angel Hiromi clinic in her native Papua. Just as the clinic opened, the pandemic struck and we lost head midwife, Farida Salman, to COVID-19. Rachel has also lost ten members of her extended family this past year. Despite her own grief and losses, Rachel has stayed determined that every mother have a chance to have a gentle birth, and not wind up in a hospital, even if she is positive for COVID-19.

The Department of Health Papua agreed that COVID-19 postive Moms could give birth at Angel Hiromi if an isolation room was built, which has now been completed.

Rachel set up a remote visiting midwife program, and Bumi Sehat midwives travel in canoes and motorboats to the far islands of Lake Sentani, bringing prenatal care, vitamins, baby clothes and health services to remote villages. For many of these mothers, this is the only maternal health care they will receive during their pregnancy. Our midwives will also travel to deliver a baby, meaning the mother doesn't have to try to reach Angel Hiromi while she is in labor.

Now a mother of five children, all but the first delivered by gentle, loving women-to-woman care, Rachel is truly heroic in her efforts to care for other Papuan mothers.

Our Papuan midwives are on the move with a new outreach program, Bumi Sehat Apung Papua.

Besides offering gentle birth services, pre and post-natal care at our Angel Hiromi Clinic in Papua, our midwives spend a lot of their time going on home visits, distributing prenatal vitamins provided by our generous donor, Blackmore's Vitamins, and giving pregnancy and ante-natal check-ups and breastfeeding support.

They go far afield to educate Papuan mothers about pregnancy, delivery and breastfeeding, and encourage them to travel to our clinic in the Sentani District before a birth. This way, local indigenous women can be attended by skilled, loving midwives who are drawn from their own cultural background and implicitly understand their needs.

Bumi Sehat midwives traveled to Hobong, Yoboi and Ifale villages in recent months. These towns are clustered on Sentani Lake. The villages are quite a distance from Angel Hiromi clinic, so our staff must take a speed boat and canoes to get there. Our outreach program is called Bumi Sehat Apung Papua and there are plans to visit more villages in the area. Recent flooding in the area has made it hard for patients to travel to the clinic.

Clinic Director Rachel Manoach de Fretes wants to build a small center on Sentani Lake so midwives can travel to one location to see patients, who don't have to travel to the Angel Hiromi clinic for check-ups.

Speaking of building, progress has been slow on Angel Hiromi Clinic's isolation room for COVID-positive Moms. This is due to COVID-19 cases being high amoung construction workers in Papua and recent floods, which both delayed work. However, the floor and walls are laid now and construction has resumed. 

So far this year -- from January to May 2021 -- our Papuan midwives have delivered 57 babies and given gentle, loving, lifesaving maternal health care to 297 women. 

The Angel Hiromi clinic in Papua serves indigenous and historically disenfranchised women of color who are at a greater risk for higher morbidity and mortality in pregnancy and childbirth. 

For the first months of the pandemic, PPE/hazmat suits were not available at all for the Papuan staff. To remain open, the team wore heavy plastic rain suits in the equatorial heat. Thanks to a grant from GlobalGiving, we’ve been able to send stock of PPE to the Hiromi Angel clinic.

In 2020, about 2-6 laboring moms per month were transported from Hiromi Angel to a public hospital for childbirth due to reactive COVID-19 rapid tests. These mothers suffered considerable trauma as a hospital birth was not their choice and they are at risk of not receiving culturally appropriate care in public hospitals. Our new isolation room will end this practice and provide a safe place for these women to give birth with our midwives and experience safe, loving, gentle care.

Due to the significant need in Papua, we will be building an ISOLATION BIRTH ROOM for women who are Covid-19 positive to safely deliver their babies. We will be breaking ground on this project in early 2021. Thanks to all our donors to the Papua project for helping to make this possible.

Four of our midwives in Papua contracted the virus, and sadly our most senior midwife, Farida Salman, died. Executive Director Rachel Monoach and her husband Ronald lost their uncles, Pastor Marcos and Pastor Erwan. Rachel’s mother and Auntie Ruth were still recovering from the virus when two more family members passed. During this time, Rachel and Ronald went above the call of duty and adopted a newborn baby abandoned at our clinic by a 13-year-old girl. They named their baby girl Rejoice Hiromi.

Despite their losses, our team in Papua has worked tirelessly and enthusiastically to serve patients and keep the clinic open 24/7. They have shown tremendous courage, perseverance and grace. To ensure patients there continue to receive the best care possible from Bumi Sehat, staff have created socially distant and safe environments for childbirth classes, prenatal yoga and acupuncture.

Construction has finished on new staff housing quarters and medical supply storage which are now complete.