Guest Blog – Maternal Health – A Father’s Perspective – By Joey Shapiro

Last Year Joey Shapiro lead a group of Faiths Act Fellows to Ifakara in Tanzania. We spent a lot of time at the St Francis Hospital meeting patients and hearing their stories.

Joey has just recently become a father – he writes on Maternal health in the USA and in Africa and reflects on his faith as a Jew on being thankful to what we have. This blog can also be found on the MADE in Europe website

My son Simon came early. Over a month, in fact. Born on the 21st of August 2010, we had not finished preparing for his arrival, emotionally or logistically.

He came on a Friday night, quite unexpectedly. My wife woke me at 1.30am and knew something wasn’t right. In the back of our heads, we knew Simon was on his way, but a month early? It was frightening. Though I did not say it out loud, I knew a premature birth could be a recipe for disaster and needed to steady myself for whatever potential pitfalls lay ahead for all of us.

St Francis Hospital Ifakara

The birth was easy (as easy as a natural birth can be…easy is not the right word; ask any labouring mother and she will assure you that labour is beyond difficult). My amazing wife laboured for less than seven hours, and out he came, beautiful and bellowing to announce to the world his arrival.

But he was early and he was small and the doctors didn’t want to take any chances. So he was put in the intensive care unit, just to make certain he was fully developed. Precautionary, they told us, but still. I was frightened the first time we entered the intensive care unit to see him. I had expected a morbid place, with the chill of parents expecting the worst for their underdeveloped neonates hooked up to blinking and beeping machines, tubes everywhere.

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More Than Just Malaria…

Staring at Malaria right in the face

We came to Africa with a goal and that goal was to speak to the communities out here, to hear their stories and to learn about the effects of Malaria. Being here for a week now we understand that the goal is much bigger then what we first anticipated and that malaria is just a smaller part of the bigger picture.

You see the Faiths Act Fellows program and what we are doing here is very unique and pioneering in many ways and if successful I whole heartedly believe that we truly change the world for the better.

Think about the impacts faith based NGOs have both on a grass root level in fundraising, capacity building and raising awareness and then in the field by understanding the cultures and religious observances of the community. From my experiences in working with Muslim faith based NGOs in disaster response situations in Muslim lands such as the Pakistan earthquake and Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh it was these organizations that were the most effective. It is the faith of these organizations that really infuses the value of giving and compassion from people to the people.

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