A Million Mothers.org

As I get ready to leave for Haiti in 5 days, my heart is filled with immense gratitude for the support, love & words of encouragement, which have been offered to the Haitian families through your words, action and donations.

This morning I was interviewed on Vermont Public Radio by Mitch Wertleib.  I invite you to listen on their website if you have not yet heard it and ask that you post it on Facebook to help get the word out before I leave.

There is so much more to say and I will write before I go.  But here’s a reminder about upcoming fundraiser:

LANGDON STREET CAFÉ GATHERING TONIGHT FOR ALL!
STARTS AT 5PM,  MUSIC, DANCING, FOOD, DRINK.

Let’s celebrate!

If you miss the broadcast, you can find it on:  http://www.vpr.net

Please help Bumi Sehat Haiti by posting this information on your social network sites.  VPR will have donation information posted on the website.

Thank you for the last push before I leave. Don’t forget:

Langdon Street Cafe Fundraiser
Montpelier, VT
Friday night beginning at 5 pm.

LET’S CELEBRATE!

Love,
Katherine

In times of tragedy and despair it is often the women and children that suffer the greatest hardships. Bringing hope and healing to the people of Haiti, local midwife Katherine Bramhall CPM of Gentle Landing Midwifery in Montpelier is participating with international efforts to aid the country’s most vulnerable survivors.

To help raise funds for the relief effort the Langdon Street Cafe will host a benefit concert Friday, February 19th beginning at 5:00 p.m. Featured musicians include Miriam Bernardo, the Friday Night Happy Hour Band, Mark Legrand and the Lovesick Band, and the Gordon Stone Band at 9:00 p.m.. In addition to 100% of the $10 admission charge and the cafe will be donating 10% of sales to the cause.

Over the past month Bramhall has worked tirelessly with Yayasan Bumi Sehat, the Healthy Mother Earth Foundation, to bring much needed support to Haitian mothers and families. No stranger to serving in difficult circumstances, Bramhall regularly volunteers her skills as a midwife in a community health clinic run by Yayasan Bumi Sehat in Bali each year. The devastation in Haiti has touched her deeply, however, and she is committed to helping bring relief to the region.

“It has been the most breathless time in my life,” Bramhall said. “I am on the phone daily to Haiti and am carrying stories in me that will never be able to leave my body. All of us that do this work are changed forever.”

Working quickly in the earthquake’s aftermath the team brought together their skills and resources to open the Bumi Sehat Mother & Child Clinic in Jacmel, Haiti. In its first thirteen days the clinic delivered seven babies and provided pre and postnatal care, breastfeeding support, and emergency medical services to almost 300 children and 200 adults.

The team has also helped distribute much needed food, drinking water, and other supplies to the people of Jacmel and the local St. Helen Parish Orphanage. Almost a thousand individuals including many young children and babies are currently camping on the clinic’s grounds.

“As I was talking to Robin (midwife Robin Lim of Yayasan Bumi Sehat) last night, a procession of 200 people filed by with candles, on the way to the school next door which collapsed and killed 290 students,” Bramhall said. “She just held the phone away from her ear so we could listen together. Then we just cried.”

On February 21 Bramhall will join Team Two of the Bumi Sehat effort in Haiti to help the people of Jacmel and create a permanent clinic to serve the region’s women and children. Large shipments of supplies and medical equipment have been arranged but with $5000 still to be raised there is an urgent need for monetary donations. Thanks to recently passed tax regulations any donation made to help Haiti between January 12 and March 1, 2010 can be claimed as a deduction on 2009 taxes.

For more information and donations please visit Gentle Landing Midwifery at www.gentlelanding.com and Yayasan Bumi Sehat at www.bumisehatbali.org.

For more information on the benefit concert at the Langdon Street Cafe visit www.langdonstreetcafe.com.

Greetings all,

It has been the most breathless time in my life…getting ready for Team Two to arrive on the ground the last week of February.

I don’t know how it would be possible without the overwhelming help from so many of you and so many others, all over the world.  I wish I could thank each of you personally, but hold every single act of kindness…

Every kiss from every child on a donated blanket (this is a real story).  Every single email sent on our behalf, the soup dropped off at my house…

EVERY BIT OF LOVE…

In the center of my heart.

I am on the phone daily to Haiti and am carrying stories in me that will never be able to leave my body.

Those of us…ALL OF US…you included…who do this work…are changed forever.

I keep saying, and it is true…

I have run out of ways to say thank you.  It is now just a hum in my heart that I hope you can feel and hear.

I am attaching the first Haiti field report, just out last night on the 1 month anniversary of the earthquake.  There were processions all day long, with singing.  As I was talking to Robin last night, a procession of 200 people filed by with candles, on the way to the school next door, which collapsed and killed 290 students.  She just held the phone away from her ear so we could listen together.  Then we just cried.

Bless every one of you who have helped.  Please send this email to everyone.

The Olympics will keep people from remembering the Haitian people.  Please help us keep the work remembered.

I love you all,

Katherine

***See www.bumisehatbali.org for field reports from Haiti

Beloved Friends,

I arrived home last Thursday afternoon after nearly a month at Bumi Sehat’s Bali clinic.  In the time I was away, Robin and I made the decision Bumi Sehat would go to Haiti to set up a permanent clinic in Jacmel, north of Port-au-Prince, in response to the massive earthquake which devastated the country.

This decision to establish a permanent maternal/child gentle birth clinic was encouraged along by our partners Direct Relief International, our donors and a small amazing team of midwives and medics, determined to go make a difference.

In the 2 weeks since Robin and Kelly left on Team One, the earth has moved again…not in violence and destruction, but gently and steadily…ever so slowly… towards peace and health…one tiny grain of sand at a time.  Our permanent clinic is quickly becoming a reality.

It has seemed impossible at times, confusing, chaotic, always overwhelming…as the conditions on the ground in Haiti are bound to be right now.  Patient care is the best that can be affected for right now and so much less than what any health care provider would ever want to consider ok enough.

Sometime in the next 3 weeks I will be leaving for Haiti to join Team Two in Jacmel, north of Port-au-Prince, site of Bumi Sehat’s new permanent Haiti clinic.

Between now and the end of February I need to raise $5000 to aid the immediate relief effort in our Bumi Sehat Haiti clinic.

Much is needed and in a short time.

This Sunday I am hosting a gathering at The Loft at Gentle Landing Midwifery at 2:30 (only small, nursing babies please…no children). Please see the attached poster about the event.  I hope you will join me and bring all of your friends.

I invite you from the bottom of my heart to pass this email along to all you know.  Then please consider coming on Sunday for moral support, updates, stories of hope…and ways you may be able to help the maternal/child effort toward safe and gentle birth in Haiti.  Haiti represents a disaster of Tsunami proportions in our Western Hemisphere.  The pain is so close to us.  The love and hope of healing for Haiti is ours to remember.

I am attaching the freshest field report sent yesterday from Robin about the first few days on the ground.  In 2 days we will have delivery of our 44 foot solid dome structure, the new home of our permanent clinic.

Yesterday we were granted a license to operate from the Haitian government.  A license to care for pregnant and birthing women whose entire lives have been shattered.

The NYT did a very accurate article on birth in Haiti after the disaster:

http://www.facebook.com/l/7698f;www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/world/americas/30birth.html?hp

18 months ago, the A Million Mothers campaign email made it across the world two times, raising $20,000 for Bumi Sehat and gentle, affordable Birth Care for women in Bali and Aceh, Indonesia.  One mother at a time. One dollar at a time.   www.amillionmothers.org

At 3:00 today Robin came in to my house and sat down without saying anything as she was arriving.  That is not usual and customary for her.

She pulled up a chair and sat right in front of me and simply said, “I need spiritual advice.”

I immediately knew what she would ask me and I knew she already knew the answer.  And I knew I would answer her question with one simple question.

“Am I supposed to go to Haiti?  I have had a plane ticket booked for January 21 for 5 months to the US which I always thought I would postpone and re-book out as far as I could.  Now everyone is asking me to go to Haiti and I just don’t know.  Am I supposed to get on that plane tomorrow?”

My only response was, “How will you feel on January 22 if you don’t go? Listen for the truth of that and you will find your answer.”

It was a calm and sober, simple exchange.  We had both had to make a decision like that on more than one occasion when disastrous trouble happened in the world.

I finally tucked her in to bed at midnight, having concentratedly collected the medical supplies she would need on the ground in Haiti, finishing things that needed finishing at the clinic, arranging family… endless details.

We had been working for 5 days with aid agencies, donors, Direct Relief and a team of field workers  getting ready to go to Haiti under the Bumi Sehat banner, always with the question of, “would we go?”

My answer came clear a few days ago, that I would wait a couple of months.  Robin was adament that she would not…could not go.

I finished work at 3 a.m. this morning, January 21.  As far as I could tell, the entire village was asleep, the frogs in the rice fields and night birds were the only noises.  Even the Bali dogs were quiet.

I couldn’t sleep, wanting to make the lists of things that would have to be remembered in the next week before I leave…a list now much longer than it was yesterday morning prior to the Decision to go to Haiti.

Above the noise of the List, my heart claimed a space for some time…wanting to write these words:

For each one of us in the last week, the call of raw human suffering has, once again, awakened us in such a deep place, that to ignore the very best of whatever it is each of us has to offer, is to ignore the essence of
humanity…compassion, caring and love.

Please let yourself stay awake.  Please give whatever you have to give with abundance and true love. Give to whomever you are to give to.  Please give something every day.  Please step every step in love and give with sincerity and with the awareness of human suffering. You will be given the truest reward of that love and generosity. It will reverberate through your entire life and then the life of those around you.

Every kindness…every awareness…all your giving…will spread like a gentle, penetrating wind, cooling the fire of human devastation.

Never stop praying. In every breath, pray.

Know that every little act of bravery and kindness for another person–every small sacrifice–every generosity–feeds hopelessness in someone which will change something in them forever and ever.  And ever.

I have seen this transformation in the eyes of suffering men and women and babies and children in Iran and Russia, 9/11 NYC, Germany, Mexico, post-Katrina Louisiana, Aceh, Bali…and on the streets of Boston’s homeless men and women and children. And my own town.

This transformation…this moment of peace…is the memory that haunts the haunted…changing the nightmare of trauma and loss in a human disaster into the possibility of hope.  Even for one moment.

Please don’t let yourselves forget the suffering.  It’s a  hard, determined, daily, open-hearted commitment to remember to keep remembering every day, and then to choose share love. To choose to make one sacrifice.  To open to the possibility that your actions-every day-WILL be a cooling breeze for someone whose spirit is burning up from hurt.

I beg you to stay awake.  In 30 days we will no longer hear of Haiti.

I will be hearing of Haiti for years from my co-workers in the field.

Love,

Katherine

________________________________________________________________

Robin leaves tonight for the US and will be in Haiti on the 25th, joining together with a team supported by Direct Relief International, a Christian organization and members of Team One Aceh…seasoned first-responders to set up a field clinic offering ongoing, long-term maternal/child health care and birth assistance, as well as general health triage.

I will stay put at Bumi Sehat Bali, helping to settle things here as a result of a very speedy decision and departure by Robin.  She will be away 3 weeks and we will receive regular updates from her.

You can log onto the website:  www.bumisehatbali.org to get updates.  We are currently setting it up so updates can be posted.

Additionally, you will be able to make contributions to the Haiti field work from the Bumi website, through Sakthi Foundation.  Every dime contributed to Haiti goes directly to the relief effort for Haiti.  We have a vast team of volunteers who are keeping the logistics going…a valuable and necessary contribution of its own.

Katherine Bramhall
802.279.3158
katherine@gentlelanding.com
www.gentlelanding.com

Katherine’s posts from her travels in 2007 (Jan-Feb,  Sept) and 2008 (Feb-Mar) are now available in the archives.

There are two ways you can find these posts:

1 — Click on the individual category links on the right and scroll down for earlier posts.
2 — Click on the link to the previous month underneath the calendar on the right.  Keep clicking on previous months to find more posts!

I was advised by the good man who oversees my blog and the A Million Mothers website…Mike…that I should title my blogs. It’s challenging to me. I come up with some really crazy ones before I realize that this is actually going to be read. I can’t seem to find one at the beginning of this post, so will see if it comes in the process.

Mike has been kind in his advising of me…tolerant. And so generous in putting up the new website, taking calls from Indonesia at all times about my crashing computer, what’s my login…silly, silly things. But things that keep me able to just stay focused.

One more of the examples of the many, many, many that illustrate in my heart that I could not do this without an army of loving hearts with me. Each of those hearts doing its part to keep the system beating at its strongest.

It’s my morning here. Was at the clinic until 12:30 last night doing import paperwork. I was happy to crawl into bed by 1.

Woke up with a crazy headache, so I’m grateful for the rain that’s here. It’s a unique sound to me, as it falls on the water-filled rice fields. The tiniest, tiniest frogs are littering the terrace. I love how they choose to walk instead of hop. I wonder what the distinction is for them…

Gotta go, dear…I’m just going to walk over to the edge of the terrace and hop on down…” Maybe some frogs are natural hoppers but others are born to walk…the frogs you would see lazily meandering in the park. Maybe the hoppers are on the way to work

I also wonder how I’m going to get breakfast if it’s raining. I can’t believe I forgot my Christopher Robin-yellow rain slicker. It looks just like his and I love it. I believe-in my head-that I look adorable in it. Not because of me, but because…who wouldn’t? A bright yellow rain slicker that has a hood with a bill! It’s one hood that I love putting up over my head because of the little bill. If Red Sox hats were made like that maybe I’d be a fan and wear the hat.

This is only the second day I’ve ever spent in Bali that it’s rained. It rained in Aceh, but not here, but once.

I think I just found the title to this post. My sleepy, just-awake wandering thoughts.

And we’ve just had a cup of instant Nescafe 3 in 1 together.