Safe Passage to Motherhood: Sending visual tools to Africa

Sharing knowledge

Safe Passage to Motherhood was heading back to Bware Kenya for the third time. On the first trip, they conducted an assessment of the community in relationship to maternal mortality. The second time, one midwife conducted a training in Home Based Life Saving Skills, a program designed by the American College of Nurse-Midwives for use in the developing world. The program teaches simple skills to the women in the community that save lives in childbirth.

Multiplying Effect

Maggie Alexander, a nurse-midwife from Oregon taught life saving skills to four lead trainers. Together they taught 12 more. That group taught 44 during the two weeks Maggie was in Kenya.

During the next months messages arrived from Kenya about training hundreds of people. Then thousands. Women from a rural village. Without transportation. With very limited resources.

Excited Skepticism

Each time a report would arrive in the US, there was excitement. The program was working. People were learning skills to identify when a birthing mother was having potentially life threatening symptoms.

Then there was skepticism. Were they really reaching all those people. What did training really mean? Were people actually learning?

Going Back to Assess

The only way to really know what was happening, was to go back to Kenya. This time there was one midwife, one physicians assistant, and their two teen-aged boys and one midwifery student.

One problem. How were they going to get people to tell them what was really going on? They didn’t want to hear the stories people thought they should tell them. Culturally, it was not considered polite to talk about problems. Especially to guests who were coming to offer help.

Using Visuals to Get to the Real Story

People struggle to tell the story that really matters. Instead we tell stories that we are comfortable with, or ones that tell a flattering version of our part. Or the story we think the listener wants to hear.

When visuals become part of the mix, something else happens. Other memories get triggered. Less conscious aspects surface. You can talk about things that are awkward or hard to talk about because you are now talking about a picture. Not another person. All sorts of different stories surface.

Would the Images Work in Africa?

We know the VisualsSpeak tools work in many places in the world. We know they work with different backgrounds. But would they work in rural Africa? We weren’t sure. But we were willing to try.