Tanzanians: Saving One Life At A Time

By: Erica McCauley

With over half of the world's mothers that die from childbirth, Tanzanians are trying as hard as they can to save mothers and children. People who are not even doctors are performing births. Tanzania is known to be one of the poorest countries in the world due to their lack of health care. Their goals are almost too much for this countries to handle. In trying to build more clinics, hospitals, and emergency centers; and with trying to train more doctoral assistants and midwives, Tanzania still has an annual death rate of 13,000 people. Their efforts are trying to allow women in labor easy access to a maternity ward before her life becomes in danger as well as the baby's. Because hospitals are nearly 25 miles away from civilization, many women arrive with an already crowning baby, too late, or not at all. Many of these women arrive, and have already been trying to give birth for more than two days. Most of these women die along with their babies, and die young. Many children whom have their mother's die to save them, have been orphaned. With all this sadness, death, and tragedy, the W.H.O has finally taken some initiative to help these women and families. They have named a goal of reducing maternal deaths by 75% by 2015. This is the first real action in decades from a global institution. Compared to Ireland's birth death rate (1 to every 100,000 births), Tanzania comes in with one of the highest birth death rates: 950 to every 100,000 births. This problem was fixed nearly a century ago with developed countries. Where is the aid when it comes to developing countries? The government has made a promise to start building more health care centers; however, it cannot even properly staff the clinics it has now. Many Tanzanian hospitals try to compensate for their lack of trained doctors by depending on medical assistants. In addition to lack of medically trained doctors, women lack medically trained midwives and assistants. Hospitals are trying to push the government to build resting homes for the women to wait at when birth is near so they do not have to travel as far while in birth. Also, they are trying to convince the government to start covering the cost of all birth expenses for women. Another attempt to lower the maternity death rate is to send representatives into the villages, marketplaces, and to the village elders to try to convince women to use the hospitals. With the help of an Angelican Church Mission, concrete houses with the access to running water are being offered, a nurse school is being built, and the director of the church lobbied to raise current salaries. The ultimate goal for these hospitals: “Coming here to cure people is good, but what can we do to prevent this?” Mr. Mgego asked. “So that one day we can say, flying doctors, you can come, but we have only one patient, or nobody, around here.”