Donations coming in!

After a long birth a few days ago, see picture, we are now concentrating on getting the MANOS ABIERTAS clinic going. We have so much support, I can´t actually believe it. Karin Reichensperger from the Message Program has been particularly helpful, see the picture from her warehouse at Familias de Esperanza!
We have about half of our medical equipment already at the clinic, not even talking about disposables...
and I just got an email from Dianne Thompson , from Antigua, who wants to donate our file cabinet! Thanks Dianne! (And thanks Terry, from the Revue magazine, who is publishing our ad for free which was how Dianne found out about us!!)
Yet another donor is Raul Minondo, somebody who has actually nothing whatsoever to do with our work, but who happens to have been a friend for years. Raul is giving us our beds and the fridge.

And , of course, thanks to the best friend of all, to John Mann. Are you ever done helping people?

The English Girls

Laura and Joanna from Oxford arrived the night before last...loaded with good things for both clinics and with even better intentions. The most important thing they brought though is their beautiful energy. They are enthusiastic and looking for how to help...meaning that though they already brought several suitcases full of teaching material and decorative posters, they now asked me for a list of the things most needed! Unfortunately they are still students and therefore just have access to certain things...but they are asking a friend they will be meeting up with to bring material!
By now I have several boxes waiting to go to Ciudad Vieja. Things are taking shape. Jill comes back the day after tomorrow! But we will have to find her at least a bed... so much to do!

progress...mostly

Time is flying and we are moving fast: the lease on the house is signed, it is being painted, Gabi is working on our logo, we had the first session with Griselda, the lawyer who is making our project legal. For all but one person we know who will be member of the association and the board. We might be able to get it in the works in time to open an account and receive the money... though we may not forget that we are in Guatemala and that things usually take more time than one thinks.
There has been a kind offer of a gynecological examination stretcher ( no idea how the thing is actually called), but it turns out it already belongs to someone else. But I trust what we need will show up.
Jill is still determined to help out, though she can not be paid by the project at this time, and Gabi and I are grateful, knowing that we will need help! A future intern has made contact with a distributor of medical equipment in Germany, who seems to be interested in donating some things. Everybody is being so helpful, this must be meant to be!

here's a baby!

finally...

There's a baby! It was long and hard but Angela made it...we are going to bed...

I just talked to the future grandmother, who has been up with her daughter all night. They speak Quiche, and she told me that in this idiom, one of the words for "midwife" is the equivalent fo "buyer, negotiator", since she is the person to negotiate the cost of the new life on earth. In the Mayan legends, "Iyom(?)" means grandmother, and also refers to the midwife, who has a big responsibility for the baby to be born.
No wonder the current politics on midwife education are not very successful... they do not take into account the standing of the midwife in the community and the respect she is owed traditionally.

Birth happening

...obviously not at the new center yet, but in Guate, at the Centro de Parto Natural. We have been up in turns during the night, Gabi and I, to look after Angela, an indigenous woman at 42 weeks of pregnancy. She came in at 11.30 pm and now, at 9.00 am, is pushing. The baby is an estimated 9 lbs and Angela is about 150 cms tall...this is still going to take awhile!

Yesterday we chose the colors for painting the future birthcenter&women's clinic in Ciudad Vieja. in the afternoon I had appointments here in the city, and told everybody about the new project...a client says her office is buying new desks and we can have the old ones!
And yesterday Terry from our local ad magazine donated three months worth of classifieds to ask for donations for the project.