Day 3

September 7, 2010

Hello! So far, today has been so exciting. I went with two other people from Project HOPE to do interviews about maternal mortality. We were driven there in a Project HOPE truck and that was quite interesting. I am still so scared to be in a car here. The traffic/driving style is crazy! The first house we went to was the house of a young lady who died during childbirth. This neighborhood was a poor neighborhood and it was not very clean. Unfortunately, the family had moved away but we were directed to another house where we could find a phone number for the family. Since we weren’t able to do that interview we went to the clinic to interview recent mothers about their experiences with prenatal and postnatal (I am not sure if that is the word to use because the interview was in Spanish and I do not know how to translate that word) care. I got a tour of the clinic while we waited for a recent mother to come in to the clinic. The clinic is very nice and well organized. It is clean and inviting and a place that both mothers and children would want to go to for care.

We interviewed two recent mothers and our findings were quite interesting. They both had two totally different experiences with their births. The first lady told us she went to a public hospital and had to share a bed with two other women after the birth of her baby. She stated that there were mosquitoes and cockroaches and that they didn’t provide clean water. The other lady, well I will say girl because she was only 16 years old, had a much better experience. She went to a private hospital and was treated much better. She said that it was clean and everyone treated her pretty well there. It was a little hard for me to understand some things the interviewees were saying but after the interviews one of the other HOPE employees helped me fill in the gaps. It was also easier to understand the second person we interviewed because I was more familiar with the questions and possible responses. Did I mention that the babies were so cute and tiny and I wanted to take one home? One of the babies was only 7 days old!

I am still at the office because Teresa takes time in the middle of the day to pick up her kids from school and then she has a late lunch. My internet doesn’t work on my computer yet because I have Windows 7 and the mobile internet contraption that you plug in to the USB does not work on my computer. Annoying.

Another thing that stinks (literally) is that the water keeps failing!

I may post more tonight or tomorrow if I have time or internet. Actually it depends on internet, not on time. The picture I am posting was from the interviews at the clinic. It is a posed picture because I wasn’t actually asking the questions; I was only listening and writing the responses haha. Teresa thinks it looks natural so we can pretend it was.