Midwifing for Jamaica

                          Midwifing for Jamaica
                                  Let It Get into You!
                                    July 11-15, 2016

Footprints Foundation has created an amazing partnership with the Minister of Health in Jamaica to help reduce maternal and infant mortality by providing skill enhancement trainings to Jamaican doctors, nurses, midwives working in primary obstetrical care in a hospital or clinic settings.   These trainings are conducted by volunteer healthcare professionals from around the world.

The training focuses on addressing the current direct and indirect causes of maternal deaths in Jamaica including cardiac diseases, eclampsia, gestational diabetes, sickle cell disease and HIV.

These five-day trainings are conducted in four locations: Kingston, Mandeville and Montego Bay and Ocho Rios.

Footprints Foundation has invited six Midwives; three each from the USA and three from England; all of African descent, to be the training facilitators team for the July 11-15 trip!

Midwives Jamarah Amani, Claudia Booker, and Shelia Simms Watson have been invited! Each volunteer is responsible for raising her own round trip air fare, travel expenses, and the $950.00 accommodations fee.   We need to raise $6,000.00 so that the three of us can take our skills, our hands and hearts to Jamaica.
 
Jamarah Amani, LM, CPM, is a mother, midwife and community organizer based in Florida. Jamarah has a particular affinity for in cultural exchange with birth workers of African descent from around the world and she has traveled to several African and Caribbean countries doing reproductive health justice work.  In 2010 she connected with midwives from the Jamaican Midwives Association and University of the West Indies in Kingston, JA and considers “returning to share the knowledge of midwifery and to build community to be a fantastic opportunity!”
                       
Claudia Booker, LM, CPM, is a home birth midwife and based in Washington DC. and has spent the last 12 years providing a full range of birth services for expectant  families and educational programs for the local birth community.   She has served as a midwife in Bali, Senegal, and the Philippines.  

Most recently she has become a Master Trainer for the American Academy of Pediatrics HHB Program (Helping Babies Breathe, Essential Care for Every Baby, and Helping Mother’s Survive Post Partum Hemorrhage); each program module is specifically designed to provide maternal and newborn care in low resource settings.


Sheila Simms Watson, LM, CPM, MPH, has had the opportunity to support mothers, babies and families with midwifery care for the last 20 years, currently as a Florida licensed midwife.  In 1990, Sheila traveled to Jamaica to train and work with the Midwives at Port Maria Hospital, Jamaica.

“It would be an honor for me to return to Jamaica to "give back" to the community. 

 ‘Be the Change you wish to see’...this trip to Jamaica will allow me to do just that!!!”


"I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me."  ~Wangari Maathai

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