A local medical partnership will bring West African culture and lifesaving healthcare education together this Saturday at a Northampton fundraiser aimed at reducing maternal mortality rates half a world away. Hosted by the Easthampton nonprofit Midwifery Exchange in Ghana (MEG), the benefit will take place at the First Churches of Northampton on Aug. 1 from 3 to 5 p.m. to fund critical continuing education for rural midwives.
“We know that midwives improve outcomes and have the ability to reduce health disparities. Midwives in Ghana are very skilled, but they lack adequate resources to take care of their community,” Carly Detterman of Monterey, a certified nurse-midwife and co-organizer of the event, said via text message. “Our work there brings recognition to their contributions to reducing poor health outcomes, and a little support in the form of resources has the ability to exponentially improve neonatal and maternal health.”
The event will have cultural line dancing led by India Anderson and food by Claudia Amedzro.
“A lot of people don’t think about [the importance of midwives],” said Anderson, who runs a nonprofit in Springfield. “They think, ‘Oh, everybody has great healthcare, and everybody has this, and everybody has that’ … but in some places, they need a lot of help.”
The fundraiser will also have an educational focus, with four tables offering information about the different issues and topics MEG addresses in Ghana — postpartum hemorrhage, breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings and the Helping Babies Breathe program, which helps ensure newborns can breathe in their first moments of life.
“We’re trying to make people feel welcomed so they want to learn something. We want it to feel like they’re part of something,” said Marie Meckel of Northampton, one of the co-organizers of the event.
Meckel, who is also a director of MEG, works at Baystate Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center in Springfield and is a physician assistant educator at Bay Path University. She has both a personal connection to Ghana — it’s where her husband is from — and a professional one. After years of bringing various Americans in the medical field to Ghana for public health projects, Meckel suggested to Anastasia Hallisey, one of her colleagues at Mason Square, that Hallisey should consider going to Ghana — specifically, to the town of Wa — to help with maternal health projects.
That town, Meckel said, has a very high rate of postpartum hemorrhage, a condition far more common in conflict zones like Sudan. Wa, however, is “completely peaceful, and the healthcare system’s intact.”
“I’m was like, ‘I think you should go to Wa because Wa has a huge need. You’d love it, it’s beautiful, and there’s so much work to be done,’” she said.
Over the years, Hallisey, Meckel and their colleagues led projects on the issues to help Ghanaian women improve their own health and their babies’ health. That said, Meckel emphasized that MEG is not meant to be Americans coming into Ghana with a “white savior” complex. “No one’s saving nobody. We’re all working together,” she said.
That ethos extends to her approach to teaching as well. “We’re all capable of learning stuff. … We don’t all have to be experts, but we have to learn how to learn better,” she said.
When working with the West African Association of Physician Assistants, “I’m constantly asking them, ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ … ‘What’s the difference between this and this? How do we differentiate from that?’”
“Through my years of teaching here, I realized you can do facilitated learning and more or less work with people to learn, versus [saying], ‘I’m the expert, sit down, listen and I’m gonna tell you everything’ — that’s useless. It never works,” she said.
At the fundraiser, “I’m looking forward to the new connections I’m gonna make … ‘What new projects are going out there? How can I work with them? How can they work with me?’” she said.
“We’ve been nervous about this for months,” she added. “But this feels better than we’ve ever been about bringing people together for a common goal.”
Admission to the event is a $25 suggested donation via Eventbrite and at the door. For more information about Midwifery Exchange in Ghana, visit midwiferyexchangeinghana.org.
