![]() Maine-trained midwife Jahan Zuberi, who works alongside Mankani, does the same. Through social worker Moomal Mallah, who translates from Sindhi, the local language, Mankani chats with her new clients while checking for fetal heartbeats. A volunteer calls in one woman at a time from the noisy crowd outside. She gives the boy nutritional supplements that she pulls out of a stack of boxes heaped in a corner.Ī rhythm emerges. The boy needs a doctor, not a midwife, but Mankani's all they've got. There's an added complication: He's got cerebral palsy and has been having seizures. The boy's mother explains he's not getting enough food. Mankani turns her attention to the crying toddler. She's dizzy, and Mankani rummages through her boxes to give her oral rehydration salts and iron pills. The baby's fine, but the woman needs support. ![]() She presses her Doppler – a fetal heart monitor – against the woman's swollen belly. Mankani asks her to lie down, raises her colorful, thin cotton shirt. As she works, other women waiting to be seen cluster around the makeshift clinic's fly-screen windows.Ī pregnant woman walks in, holding a wailing toddler. "One at a time!" she calls.ĭiaa Hadid/NPR Mankani the midwife checks the fetal heartbeat of a pregnant woman. In one corner, volunteers have placed a charpoy, a daybed made from wood and rope, to examine patients. "Oh! I didn't expect so many people!" she exclaims and rushes in. There's already a crowd of women and children waiting outside. "It's going to be a pull to get people to come to my clinic," she explains.Ī few minutes after she speaks to the women, she returns to her makeshift clinic, which her team has set up in an empty blue tent at the encampment's entrance. It's a special treat in rural areas where even in ordinary times, health care is ramshackle. So she's bought along a lure: She tells women crammed in a line for drinking water that pregnant women can have an ultrasound if they visit her clinic. One of Mankani's challenges is convincing women in conservative areas that she can be trusted to see and touch their swollen bellies. They've given birth in tents," says Mankani, referring to displaced women who are sheltering in public schools and others who rely on boats for transport because their villages are surrounded by floodwater. "Some people have given birth in schools. Menon says the ministry has dispatched ambulances to encampments, so they can ferry out women who need to give birth, but the need is enormous. "The most urgent problem we have is malnutrition," says Farhana Menon, a senior official in Sindh's provincial health ministry, where she oversees the needs of pregnant women in particular. Outside, dozens of women wait with their children for infant formula and reassurances that their unborn babies are doing well. estimated that more than a fifth of all people in the province were facing high levels of acute food insecurity and were in need of urgent action to shore up their food consumption.ĭiaa Hadid/NPR The midwife Neha Mankani peeks out from a tent flap of her pop-up clinic. In the southern province of Sindh, one of the worst affected by the floods, the U.N. Even before the floods, Pakistan had one of Asia's highest maternal mortality rates. ![]() Among those affected, says the U.N.'s Population Fund, are nearly 130,000 pregnant women in need of urgent health services. Several hundred thousand of them, at least, are living in encampments and by roadsides across southern Pakistan. Officials estimate more than 7 million people were made homeless. The needs are unimaginably vast in areas where Pakistan was pummeled by torrential monsoon rains for weeks. The small charity has been running pop-up clinics for pregnant women in flood-affected areas, like this encampment established by a Canadian aid group, the Al-Qaim Charity Foundation. "I'm looking for pregnant women, and I'm trying to mobilize them so they can come to my makeshift clinic," says Mankani, a midwife who leads the Karachi-based Mama Baby Fund. They flap in a hot wind that whips up dust that grits the eyes and coats the tattered clothes of the men, women and children who've been living here since they were made homeless by Pakistan's devastating floods this summer. Neha Mankani peeks into tarpaulin tents pitched in rows between cotton fields near the southern Pakistani village of Sheikh Daro.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |