One night in late March, about 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Sulekha Lohar woke feeling ill. Sharing a bed with her husband and two young sons, she felt her chest pounding and her legs swell. She began convulsing. After about an hour, her husband, not knowing what to do, decided to seek help from his parents.
The Huffington Post has featured Hanna Ingber Win's blog post on maternal mortality in India titled, "India: Three Wives, 10 Kids Is Enough."
The air crackles as a team of medical staff and crew walk across a peanut field, lugging a big generator from their boat into a village of 850 people. Near a collection of thatchroof homes, the crew sets up a projector on the dirt floor of a small bamboo structure that also serves as the community’s schoolhouse.
Kate Mitchell of the the Maternal Health task force mentions Hanna Ingber's "India Casts a Light on Mothers Long in the Dark" and Samuel Loewenberg's "The struggle for health in Chiapas" in her blog
Pulitzer Center Launches Two New Reporting Projects on Maternal Mortality, India and Mexico
After a couple hours of cruising down the Brahmaputra River, the boat clinic arrives at a desolate mud bank. A fisherman nearby dips his pole into the water and pulls up a large net. Two community workers emerge from the boat and set off with a box of medical supplies towards the thatch-roof homes in the distance.
We load up in an SUV and make our way through the streets of Guwahati. It is raining, and much of this major city in northeastern India is flooded. Cars, men pedaling rickshaws and our SUV slowly edge their way through the water-filled streets. The water looks orange, stained from the clay that has eroded from the surrounding hills and clogged Guwahati’s drains. We are headed to meet a boat that will take a group of medical staff and us to visit a remote island on the Brahmaputra River.
Among dozens of other brightly dressed women, Eugenia Urbina has been waiting on the stairs of the main hospital in this central Chiapas town for nearly two hours. Nine months pregnant with her third child, the 24-year-old seeks prenatal care. The long wait makes her worry that when the time comes to give birth, the hospital will not have room for her.
"It happens a lot," Urbina said, and if it does, she'll have to pay more than she can afford to drive around in a taxi for up to an hour to find a clinic that can take her.
Samuel Loewenberg, for the Pulitzer Center
Los Chorros, Chiapas
I first meet Maria Francisca Mendoza on the roof deck of a woman's organization known colloquially as Casa de la Mujer, where along with five other young women she is putting the finishing touches on a vagina made out of clay. They are now starting in on a set of brightly colored Fallopian Tubes.
I have only been in Oaxaca a few days when the protests start. In this, Mexico's second poorest state, political upheaval and fights over social justice go hand in hand with languid tourism, a vibrant art scene, and some of Mexico's best cooking. The central plaza, known as the Zocalo, is usually a giant tourist attraction and town meeting place, filled with overpriced restaurants, hawkers selling curios, old women pushing textiles, and children selling cigarettes and candy.
MAIANBESSA, Ethiopia — I get into a UN Land Cruiser with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) staff coordinating my visit to Ethiopia and an official from the ministry of health to visit a rural health post. We leave the northern Ethiopian city of Mekelle, and its Obama Cafe and Obama Pool House, and drive about 25 kilometers along winding roads into the countryside. We pass donkeys with packages strapped to their backs and young boys using foot-long sticks to herd their families' cattle.
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