Jennifer Stevens, recruited by Dr. Becky and Pat, is a doctor of public health, midwife, and nurse who has worked globally focusing on maternal health and midwifery education. Most recently she has been living in Bangladesh, working with the United Nations – WHO and UNFPA – while she finished her doctorate. She is a very well qualified addition and brings new skills and ideas to our team.
We had a very ambitious agenda—continuing Dr. Bob’s matrone training program which started out training five traditional birth attendants in 2012. This trip, having expanded in 2018 to Iferouane from our original site at Tamesna was particularly challenging because we have not been able to go for three years because of Covid. We needed to check on the success of the trainings in our absence. We had to refresh the training 60 women including 18 women who had only been trained in our absence.We could not have done it without the new team members
Jen’s goal, in addition to bringing her considerable experience to help refresh the training of the matrones, was to interview both older trainees and those trained only in our absence to evaluate and compare their skill level and comprehension.
Jen interviewing Dinadu, a matron who started her training with Dr. Bob Skankey.
While Becky and Pat were working with Rabi and Assalama to refresh and refine the matrones’ skills, Jen was interviewing selected matrones with the help of our interpreters:
Jamilla, a student in Niamey specializing in English served as interpreter at Tamesna. She was amazing–shifting between three languages without missing a beat.
Ilias is a school principal in Iferouane. After overcoming initial embarrassment at the subject matter. He recognized the value of the training and jumped in to calm down the very busy baby of Aminata one of the new matrones from Tizerzak.
At the end of the program we met with the regional director of National Health in Agadez to make him aware of our work. He was so pleased with our program that he presented the team with a spectacular Tuareg bag. We all voted to give it to Jen. She looks quite at home in Niger.
Bonjour cette formation est très importante si les matrones ont des suites d hygiène et savent écrire pour relever les différents problèmes au cours de l accouchement.
Merci pour votre intérêt. Savoir écrire n’est pas du tout nécessaire. Nous avons un système de rapportage que les matrones comprennent à travers des illustrations. S’ils ont un problème – une mortalité, une hémorragie post-partem, une infection, le paludisme, hypertension artérielle, etc. nous avons toutes leurs statistiques. Pour le hygiene c’est le premier de choses dont on parle et elles reçoivent les gants aussi.