BY TOM BELL
The Portland Press Herald
There are no heath clinics in Kit, a region of 22,000 people in South Sudan. There are no doctors or nurses. If a woman in labor runs into trouble, her only hope is to get to the main road and wait for a car traveling to Juba, the capital, more than 60 miles away.
“If no car passes by, you are history,” says Mary Otto, a Sudanese immigrant living in Portland. “You are dead.”
That’s what happened to her 23-year-old sister-in-law a few years ago, she says. She was 10 months pregnant and no one knew how to induce labor. She and her husband waited by the road for two days but no car came by. She died on the side of the road.
Such deaths have become commonplace in South Sudan. The United Nations Population Fund this year has rated the nation’s maternal mortality as 2,030 per l00,000 births, making it the worst in the world. The government estimates that more than 10,000 women die every year giving birth.
The country gained its independence from Sudan last summer. But after decades of civil war, most medical professionals have fled, leaving the nation of more than 10 million people with only five obstetricians, three pediatricians, and eight certified midwives, according to the United Nations Population Fund.
The vast majority of Sudanese immigrants living in Portland came from Kit, located between Juba and the Uganda border. Portland’s Sudanese community is raising money to send a Portland doctor there for a week to train 15 women in prenatal care and safe delivery techniques.
The doctor, Chuck Radis, a rheumatologist, will leave on May 21, along with his son-in-law, Dan Crothers, a pre-med student at the University of Southern Maine.
Both men, who live on Peaks Island, will bring medical kits with reusable supplies and pictorial medical guides to leave behind.
Radis took part in a training program developed by Massachusetts General Hospital, which over the past 18 months has trained 72 people, who in turn have trained more than 700 frontline health workers across South Sudan.
The hospital has developed an inexpensive tool to help women who start hemorrhaging after giving birth: a uterine balloon kit, which is a catheter with a condom attached to the end. The condom is inserted into the uterus and a syringe used to fill it with water, helping staunch the bleeding.
Radis and Crothers will be paying for their own flights. Aserela, a Portland-based nonprofit that has been raising money to build a school in Kit, is now raising $12,000 to pay for medical supplies and other costs of the trip.
Otto, who is president of the group, said members are selling raffle tickets to raise money.
In addition, the group plans to raise money on May 13 at its big annual fundraiser and community celebration event, the Feast for the Children dinner at the Guild Hall at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland.
Besides raising money for the medial training program, Aserela continues to raise money to build the school, which would be the first one in Kit.
Alfred Jacob, a Portland resident who is been spearheading the school construction project since 2009, expects nearly 1,000 students from kindergarten through seventh grade — 80 to 90 students per classroom — to attend the new school.
He said the group needs to raise $20,000 to $40,000 to complete the school.
More information about the Feast for the Children can be found at
www.aserala.org.
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