Meeting with Frontline Health Care Workers in The Indira Kalyan Camp
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India’s Frontline Health Care Workers: Working door to door to save lives

Author’s note: This is the second post documenting my visit on behalf of Mom Bloggers for Social Good to see Save the Children’s work at the Indira Kalyan slum in Delhi, India. To read the first post click here. 

India has made a tremendous amount of progress over the last two decades fighting to save the lives of mothers and children. A decade ago close to 75,000 women died during childbirth every year and this number has been reduced to 56,000 in 2010. Significant progress has also been made in newborn survival. Since 1990, India has reduced the rate of deaths of children under 5 by 46% or almost in half. Despite the major achievements, newborn and maternal dealths are still way too high given the tragic fact that many of these deaths are largely preventable. The situation is especially dire in India, the second most populous country in the world, with a hugely disproportionate percentage of maternal and newborn deaths.

The Indira Kalyan Camp Delhi

Inside The Indira Kalyan Camp, an unauthorized slum in Delhi

The Indira Kalyan Camp

Women inside the indira Kalyan Camp

Per Save the Children’s 2013 State of World’s Mother’s Report:

  • Nearly 1 in 5 deaths of children under age five are in India. (1.6 million children or 29% of the global total ).
  • 19% of these deaths take place on the day a child is born and 53% occur within the first month of birth.
  • Large scale inequities within India continue to persist today in terms of wealth disparities, rural-urban divide, education, age of mother, caste, which means that not all babies born in India have an equal change of survival.
Children within the Indira Kalyan Camp

Children within the Indira Kalyan Camp pose for a picture

Global Health Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises India Poverty SOCIAL GOOD TRAVEL BY REGION Women and Girls
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Save the Children: “Bringing healthcare to the Doorstep” in the slums of Delhi

India, the second most populous country in the world, is known for her rich, vibrant culture and civilization that has spanned thousands of years. Over the last two decades, India’s economy has grown at breakneck speed becoming the world’s 10th largest economy in 2011 and is projected to be among the fifth largest by 2050 (per a recent report by economic think-tank Centre for Economics and Business Research).  Yet despite the enormous economic success of the “Elephant“, as India has been sometimes called, tragically a large percentage of the Indian population have been left behind.

Millions of Indians live in dire poverty especially the people who have left the villages and have come to the urban centers searching for a better life. According to the World Bank, rural and urban poverty in India remains painfully high, holding the unfortunate record of having the largest concentration of poor people in the world: 240 million rural poor and 72 million urban poor.  With poverty, an immeasurable suffering has also taken hold. Hunger, malnutrition and a high level of preventable diseases and death have struck India’s poor and have unfairly impacted women and children.

Indian girls inside a Delhi slum

Smiling and hopeful Indian girls within a Delhi slum are sadly thin.

Child Labor, Marriage, Education and Survival Global Health Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises India Poverty SOCIAL GOOD TRAVEL BY REGION
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The Power of Music to Change the World

Music has been used for centuries to give people a voice to tell stories, entertain and inspire. Perhaps it is the emotional feelings one gets from listening to music that allows so many of us to connect with it. Music can bring us back years ago to an exact time and place within our hearts. Who can forget the words and rhythm of their first dance? Or the music you used to blast in your car during the summer with your windows rolled down? 

The power of music has also been brilliantly used as a voice to garner support of the masses and impact societal change. Protest songs decrying great human injustices such as slavery, apartheid, violence and war, have become powerful tools by musicians to push politicians and governments to making the world a better and more just place.

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ONE, a global advocacy organization created by Bono and backed by 3 million members worldwide to fit against global poverty and hunger, has launched a new music campaign called agit8, as a way to use music to push change. Agit8 will inspire people to take action and leaders to make big commitments on figthing chronic malnutrition during the upcoming G8 meeting in Northern Ireland June 17-18th. 

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Pratham India: Every child, learning well

Education is without doubt one of the key ways to lifting people out of poverty. In India, a country of over one billion people and an estimated 400 million living below the poverty line (World Bank 2010), education has become a matter of survival for the millions of children living in poverty in both rural and urban Indian.

Per the 2012 the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER): Learning levels have dipped to an all-time low. So, almost half the 6-7 year-olds (Class I) in India cannot read even one letter in any language, over 57% cannot read any English while almost 40% cannot recognize numbers between 1 and 9, the report said. Access to education is becoming a key problem and obstacle for many of India’s poor children.

Pratham is the largest NGO working in India to provide quality education to the country’s millions of underprivileged children. Pratham’s multi-pronged approach ensures the following four initiatives:

  1. Enrollment in schools increases.
  2. Learning in schools and communities increases.
  3. The education net reaches children who are unable to attend school.
  4. Models are replicated and scaled up to serve large numbers of children to achieve a large scale impact.

Source: Pratham

What is so great about Pratham is that they work with the government and view their programs as a supplement not a replacement for education to underprivileged kids. As resources become more and more stretched and more migrants are moving from their rural villages to the slums of urban India, there is a dire need for educational services and Pratham has worked hard at filling the gap. It is no surprise that Pratham’s model is “Every child in school and learning well”.

While we were in India, Jennifer James (Founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good) and I had a chance to visit one of Pratham’s many urban learning centers located in an East Delhi slum, where we witnessed firsthand the dire need of education and the techniques of learning that Pratham is applying to some of India’s poorest children.

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Inside the classroom children are learning basic English schools.

Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises India SOCIAL GOOD TRAVEL BY REGION
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India in Instagram

The last three days in Delhi have been a complete whirlwind. We have been on the move visiting our NGO partners for Social Good Moms to learn more about their work on the ground. Being in Delhi is like being at the forefront of humanity. The buzz of mass civilization frenzies around you and engulfs all your senses. There is so much going on at any one moment that it is hard not to blink your eyes in amazement. To make the experience of being here even more surreal, the temperature has been dizzyingly high averaging around 114 degrees F/46C. In a crowded city of over 20 million people, the heat just adds to the intensity of the place.

Our first day was spent resting and recovering after our long journey to India. It took us over 30 hours to finally arrive in Delhi and the time change (Delhi is 11.5 hours ahead of Minneapolis time) has been hard to adjust to. Day two was spent visiting a small Delhi-based NGO called Protsahan that provides a unique approach to education for street children in the urban slums by using the arts. Day three was spent visiting India-based NGO Pratham who also works in education for underpriviledged children in the urban slums of India. Both visits were amazing and we learned a lot about how these NGOs are working with these children to give them a future.

I will go into the specific details of each visit and what we learned in a future post. However, in the meantime I wanted to share a small selection of instagram photos I’ve taken over the past three days in India to give you a feel for our trip so far.

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India SOCIAL GOOD TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY
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Habitat for Humanity’s A Brush with Kindness

Last Friday I decided to test out one of the volunteer opportunities I’ve had the pleasure of writing about on my blog: Habitat for Humanity’s Women Build. After interviewing Lisa Marie Nickerson, Associate Director of Women Build (to read post, click here) I was inspired to see what this program and experience was all about. I signed up for a time slot and was able to help out for a few hours on Friday morning.

Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises Poverty SOCIAL GOOD
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The Birth of a Mother

In honor of today’s release of Save the Children’s annual State of World Mother’s report, I am sharing the emotional aspects of my birth story to help advocate for the one million newborns that die needlessly and helplessly within the first 24 hours of life. By sharing my birth story, I am joining moms from across the United States to help bring awareness and advocacy steps in making the first 24 hours of life count. The bottom of this post will have more information on the results of the report and how you can help spread the word. 

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Me and my son Max, right after his birth. 11/11/04.

I will be completely honest. I was never sure that I wanted to become a mother. At 32, I felt my life was already fulfilling enough, being happily married, working hard in my career and enjoying traveling to crazy places, running marathons and having all the freedom I could possibly want. Perhaps I was selfish but I was happy.

All this changed the day I was half way around the world, doing my very first dive in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, when I got the call. That terrible call that I will never forget. The call to tell me that my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew had unexpectedly died. I was in shock. It couldn’t be true. How could a healthy, beautiful happy child that I had seen only two weeks ago be gone just like a flick of a light. How could something so ungodly awful and tragic happen? I felt raw. Numb. And deeply distraught. Although I wasn’t a mother and I couldn’t possibly understand, I loved that little boy with the bright blue eyes and the dashing smile. It was that tragedy that made me realize how short and precious life truly is and how I couldn’t imagine not possibly being a mother myself.

Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises SOCIAL GOOD Women and Girls
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World Food Program’s Live Below the Line Challenge

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen in a conference call along with other social good bloggers to hear World Food Program USA Board Chair Hunter Biden and WFP USA President & CEO Rick Leach discuss the “Live Below the Line” Challenge to help solve global hunger.  The fact that 1 in 8 people in the world live in constant hunger – which means 925 million people will not get enough to eat this year (more than the populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union) is not only a tragedy but the world’s number one health risk.

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Food Security Global Health Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises SOCIAL GOOD
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Habitat for Humanity’s National Women Build Week

Screen Shot 2013-04-30 at 10.56.46 AMThe week before Mother’s Day, May 4-12th marks the 6th Annual Habitat for Humanity’s Women Build Week, a week to celebrate and empower women around the nation to help improve their communities by building homes for those in need.  Women Build is an opportunity for women from all walks of life to come together and address the severe housing crisis facing millions of women and children around the world.  According to the Census Bureau, more than 16 million children are living in poverty in the United States and nearly 48 percent of the children reside with women as head of the household. Women Build is a way for women to help other women and work together to build a stronger, more stable community.

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MIAMI, FLORIDA, USA (5/12/12)-Telemundo’s Vanessa Hauc volunteers on the last day of Women Build week. This annual event, sponsored by Lowe’s, encourages U.S. women to devote at least one day to the effort of eliminating poverty housing. © Habitat for Humanity International/Ezra Millstein

Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises SOCIAL GOOD
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Why I am advocating for newborn health

Earlier this month, I posted on the upcoming Newborn Health Summit in South Africa and shared some tragic facts about how many children are not getting a chance at life. The post is called “Crisis and Hope in Newborn Health“.

As part of the Global Team of 200, I have been working with the Gates Foundation this month to spread word and awareness about global newborn health in honor of The Global Newborn Health Conference being held on April 15th in South Africa. The conference is supported by Save the Children. MCHIP, Gates Foundation, USAID andUNICEF.

Today, my YouTube video was released on why I am advocating for newborn health. It made me cry. It is so beautiful that I had to share. It is a part of who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, and why I must advocate for all those voiceless moms around the world  who won’t have the joy of watching their children grow up.

I am so honored to be part of the Global Team of 200 and truly looking forward to my upcoming trip to India this May where I will go to advocate and learn more about maternal health.

Global Health SOCIAL GOOD
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“Race Me To The Pole” Expedition: One Man’s Journey to the North Pole for Charity

Sometimes you get one of those emails in your inbox that make you smile and burst with enthusiasm. Last week, I received just that kind of exciting email from a woman named Hannah who reads my blog, and asked if I would be interested in sharing her friend Gavin’s story. Without hesitation, I instantly agreed as Gavin’s adventure to the North Pole rates right up there with the kind of amazing travel and giving back philosophy that prompted me to start blogging in the first place.

I asked Hannah to put together a brief write-up and send me more details on Gavin’s trip which I edited below. I can already tell that this is going to be an amazing journey that I’m betting some of you will love to follow along. I know I will be!

Logo_MM_Race me to the pole (2)

Adventure Travel Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises SOCIAL GOOD Trekking/Hiking
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Crisis and Hope in Global Newborn Health

Having a baby is supposed to be the most joyous time of a women’s life. However, not always do things go as planned and far too often what is supposed to be the happiest time of a mother’s life ends in tragedy.
Despite advances in medical care, newborn mortality rates in some of the most impoverished countries in the world remain alarmingly high.
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Ashawa, Dohuk Governorate, Northern Iraq — UNICEF Officials visit Ahmedi Hospital to review the implementation of the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative. Photo credit: UN Photo/Bikem Ekberzade

How much do you really know when it comes to the unacceptable toll of newborn deaths, around the world?

Global Health Global Issues Global Non-Profit Organizations and Social Good Enterprises SOCIAL GOOD