Anta Ba is a 26-year-old woman living in Guédiawaye, a poor urban area of Senegal’s capital, Dakar. In a new CSIS video, Anta explains why she decided to access family planning, despite her husband’s opposition, and why these services matter for her own life and for women’s health and empowerment in Senegal.
Hope Through Healing Hands is proud to create and lead the Faith-Based Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children Worldwide. We launched the coalition with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to shine a light on the disparity of maternal & child health in developing nations. Moreover, we hope to educate and activate faith leaders and all people of faith to consider the critical importance of healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies as a life-saving mechanism for both moms and their children.
One evening in 2011, after a day of plowing her family’s fields with a neighbor’s bull, Vivian Okoth* was leading the animal back to its owners. On the way, the bull charged her from behind, caught her with his horns, and threw her into the air. Vivian says all she remembers was waking on the rocky ground and sensing the bull rush at her again. As she was gored a second and third time, she screamed and the neighbors came to her rescue, somehow managing to distract the bull and pull him away.
I recall a story of a young teen girl we will call Sari. She sat perched quietly on a chair. The sun was setting outside the brothel in a small town on Thailand’s border with Malaysia. Sari’s long hair hung forward, shielding her face from view. The eldest of four children, with two disabled parents, she was from a small, poor hill-tribe area in Laos.
Last week, the Christian Alliance for Orphans held their annual gathering in Hendersonville, TN at Long Hollow Baptist Church. Some 2,500 participants who work with orphans and vulnerable children gathered to hear excellent speakers and artists. They also attended workshops to enhance their work within their nonprofit or their family, as parents or siblings.
Emergent trauma surgery in Kenya is different. A 22-year-old male came to the operating theater area after having a tire explode in front of him as he was working on it. This is certainly not a safe practice, but it’s hard to argue with a young man doing what he can to make an honest living for himself and his family.
This Tuesday, Hope Through Healing Hands had the honor of welcoming the former Prime Minister of Haiti, Laurent Lamothe, to Nashville, Tennessee. Mr. Lamothe traveled to Nashville to speak at a LiveBeyond Fundraiser and to meet notable influentials in the music, faith, and nonprofit community who care deeply about the future of Haiti.
By Senator Bill Frist, MD and Jenny Eaton Dyer, PhD
We believe that if we can help keep moms and children healthy worldwide, we can get at the nexus of many sustainable development goals. Moms can go back to work to combat extreme poverty; girls can stay in school to finish secondary school and potentially a university degree; we can promote gender equality, improve maternal and child health, and prevent mother to child transmission of HIV, to name a few outcomes.
Hope Through Healing Hands was delighted to co-host a book launch in the Coral Gables’ Books & Books store owned by Mitchell Kaplan. The store is a treasure for the community, and we couldn’t have been more thrilled to celebrate the book in such magical place.
Last week, Senator Bill Frist, MD offered a keynote address at Florida International University. HTHH cohosted a Global Health Forum with the university in an effort to promote awareness and advocacy around maternal, newborn, and child health in South Florida.