Winter Bulletin 2003 Vol. 19, No. 4

Introduction
Plenty Boardmembers Visit Belize
Solar-Powered Lights for San Jose School
Clean water for Chimachoy, Guatemala
Central American Food Security Initiative (CAFSI)
Making More Plenty
Dorothy Bates Memorial Endowment Fund

December 3, 2003

Dear Friends of Plenty,

Belize is a paradise of visual delights and biological riches, clean sea breezes, and expansive horizons. The people are poor, but they work hard, especially the people in the rural villages, the farming families, who live simply and survive by their tenacity, their wits and the fruits of their labors. They don’t use up a lot of the earth’s resources in their daily lives.

Some of their difficulties are the result of the contemporary circumstances of the society they inhabit. For instance, traditionally these villages had access to the “granny midwives” who have helped bring new lives into the world since the beginning of time. Now, the granny midwives are disappearing and not being replaced. Caught in the middle are the rural villages in countries like Belize where people live an hour or more by truck over very bad suspension-busting roads from the nearest hospital and no longer have the more convenient and practical option of the local midwife. In the view of Plenty, the trained midwife is an essential member of any sustainable development strategy. Lack of midwives contributes to a high rate of infant and maternal mortality in the Toledo District of Belize where Plenty Belize is working. The Punta Gorda hospital is poorly equipped to handle obstetrical or medial emergencies, and patients have to be flown to Belize City adding two more hours to their trip from village to big city hospital.

For the past three years Plenty midwives, with the collaboration of the local Ministry of Health, have been training women and several male community health workers from the villages in the time-honored art of delivering babies. Learning how to recognize danger signs in pregnancy and how to handle emergencies during deliveries is a critical part of the training. Lisa Wartinger, Director of Plenty’s midwife program, and I recently interviewed some of the 22 village midwives who have graduated from our program. All are delivering babies. Several have saved the lives of babies and mothers. All are thrilled and gratified to be able to do what they’re doing, and every one of them is incredibly inspiring to talk to. One of them, when I asked her why she wanted to be a midwife, told me she had wanted to be a midwife when she was a little girl, that she dreamed about delivering babies, that she loved babies and loved to hold them and, also, she just liked helping people. In my book, midwives already qualify for sainthood.

Next year Plenty turns 30, and the current thinking in Plenty is that we need to be a lot stronger. We need to be able to better support our partners, expand our projects and programs and extend our reach. We look around and we see endless opportunities where we could make real differences for people in very basic ways—improved health through better access to clean water and sanitation, improved nutrition through education, more healthful farming methods, improved quality of life through appropriate technologies like midwifery and solar energy. For thirty years we’ve tried to be faithful to our original commitment to help save the world. Saving the world—it’s a grand equal opportunity occupation. Everybody’s got their heart in it. Everybody’s got a prayer. When we pull together, we make waves.

With love,

Peter Schweitzer
Executive Director