Compassion

https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/video/video.php?v=10150159530731106&oid=195418685157&comments

If you watch the video on the link I posted, you'll hear and see (most unfortunately, see) me talking about why our family supports a Child Survival Program through Compassion International.

There is so much more I wish I could have said about the CSPs. In the video, I focused on the fact that they will provide prenatal, delivery, and post-delivery care for moms. The reason I chose to focus on those functions of the CSPs is that having access to those types of medical interventions - basic though they are in this country - has saved my life several times. The physical complications of having a stillborn baby, complications after a miscarriage, progesterone supplementation through two healthy pregnancies, complications after one of those healthy deliveries....at any of those times in my life, without the care that is accessible here, life would likely be a lot different for us.

Rather than sitting here, typing out a blog post on my laptop, I would at best be a divorced, shunned outcast of my community, shouldering the blame and the wrath for the losses we've experienced.

The CSPs provide so much more than what I had time to share in the video. They provide education - for women mainly, but that translates into the whole community - about why losses occur, how to prevent them, and what does not cause the loss of a baby (i.e., something innately bad about the mother). Women are taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills so that they can read the Bible which is being shared with them by the Compassion Int'l employees, so that they can sign their name to contracts of business, so that they can understand some of what their children will be learning when they hopefully are healthy enough to be enrolled in the Compassion Int'l sponsorship program to pursue their own formal educations.

For me, being born in a place where, in the lowest parts of my life, I have had the support of understanding friends, the support of several loving congregations, the necessary medical care means that I have a responsibility to those who were not born in such a place.

As I tuck my girls in at night, after helping them put away all their developmentally-appropriate toys, after reading to them from our virtual library of books, after feeding them their well-balanced bedtime snacks complete with fresh, clean water.....I want to know that I am doing what I can to help those mommies whose evenings looked so different from mine and to help those babies who face statistics like 72% mortality rates by age 5.

That treatise - THAT is why my husband had to hold me down to 1 minute and 21 seconds for a video.....I could talk all day....