Reproductive Health

Hanna Ingber Win explains her reporting project in this photo montage.

Freelance journalist Hanna Ingber Win's photos, from the tea gardens of Assam, India. Assam has India's highest maternal mortality rate. Hanna went there to interview families who'd lost their mothers, and health care workers who try to help pregnant mothers get the medical help they need.

If Sulekha Lohar had only had access to an ambulance instead of that handcart.

If the clinic just had a doctor, instead of just empty shelves.

If the hospital only had a bloodbank, as we hear from American journalist Hanna Ingber Win, Sulekha's children might still have their Mother.

Also, a troubling closeup on reproductive health in one small part of the developing world there from Hanna, who specialises in maternal mortality reporting.

I had written about child marriage before. When I went to Ethiopia, I visited a program for girls who had fled early marriage in their villages and ended up in the capital Addis Ababa. I met a classroom full of such young girls. With their schoolbooks in hand, they looked like kids, not brides. I talked to some of the girls in depth about how their desire to continue their schooling had pushed them to leave their families and traditions behind and flee to what they hoped would be a better life. These girls had dreams, and the courage to pursue them.

Growing up in a small village in northeastern India, Hasina Khatun spent her days helping her aunt around the house and playing with her siblings. She did not drop out of school; she never started. Hasina began menstruating at the age of 13 and soon after her aunt, who raised her after her mother died, told her it was time to get married. Hasina did not understand what her aunt meant, or that her life was about to change dramatically.

Efforts to control tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant forms of the disease face extra hurdles in Mexico's poorer states. Samuel Loewenberg reports from Chiapas, southern Mexico. The village of Los Chorros lies in a lush valley reached by a dirt track at the end of a mountain road that winds past brick and wooden huts with thatched roofs, and terraced agricultural fields (see webvideo). At the top of a small hill is a yellow concrete building with a corrugated metal roof.

Dawn Sinclair Shapiro sheds light on the challenges Nigeria faces in its effort to reduce material mortality.

View accompanying slideshow

Indigenous women in Mexico's poorest states face health challenges on many fronts because of abject poverty, poor education, and a dire shortage of medical staff. Samuel Loewenberg reports.

Growing up in the mountain village of San Juan Quiahije, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, Maricela Zurita Cruz saw from an early age the special health burdens that affect women there. The women face many obstacles: they are Indigenous, and so confront special problems of language and racism; they have little education and must deal with strong macho attitudes in their own communities; and they are poor people who face difficulty accessing the state's already stretched health-care system.

In the U.S. 1 in 4,800 women die in childbirth. In Nigeria it is 1 in 18. In the one-hour documentary, The Edge of Joy, filmmaker Dawn Sinclair Shapiro closely follows an ensemble cast of Nigerian doctors, nurses, midwives and religious leaders as they battle the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world. The Edge of Joy is a character driven, cinematic expedition ranging from deep within Nigeria's semi-arid lands of the isolated Islamic north to the lush-savannahs of the volatile Christian south.

Hanna Ingber Win, for the Pulitzer Center
Dibrugarh, India

Dr. Sumi Baruah sees patients at the Panitola Primary Health Center in Dibrugarh district in upper Assam.

The Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research is featuring Hanna Ingber Win's reporting on maternal mortality in India. Below is an excerpt from C-NES website: