Sometimes it’s amazing how much you can help, through something so little…

In rural Papua New Guinea one in seven women die in childbirth! Yep, that’s right, 1 in 7 women die in childbirth! That’s a shocking statistic to say the least. To give birth to a child a mother has a 15% chance of dying, can you imagine?

A friend of mine, Adriel Booker, in Australia works with YWAM Ships, a ministry that is currently working on delivering medical help into Papua New Guinea. She is a Mom, blogger and fellow YWAMer who has a strong passion for helping other mothers in need. To help expectant mothers in Papua New Guinea she has started a program called Bloggers for Birth Kits to help reduce maternal mortality in rural Papua New Guinea.

The way to help is so simple that anyone can do it…

For as little as a $2.00 donation you can purchase a Birth Kit. The Birth Kit is very simple, but according to the Birthing Kit Foundation can greatly help to reduce the incidence of infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. The kit includes:

• 1 plastic sheet to provide a clean birthing surface
• 1 bar of soap for clean hands during the birthing process and to clean the umbilical stump
• 1 pair of plastic gloves for clean hands
• 1 sterile scalpel blade to cut the umbilical cord
• 3 cords / pieces of strong string to tie the umbilical chord
• 5 gauze squares to clean the baby and mother

The kit is simple, yet effective. Adriel made up her own (which you can watch on the video at the bottom of this post), but I think the most effective way for us to help is to donate.

If you do want to help with this great project, and for only $2.00 who wouldn’t want to help, you can read more about it at Bloggers for Birth Kits.

This post was originally posted on my personal blog at Help Prospective Mothers in Papua New Guinea – Bill Hutchison

We are expecting a new addition to our family, and no, we are not getting a pet!

My wife is now two months pregnant, and we are excited for the upcoming arrival of our next child. The baby is due around the end of April 2011 and we have lots to do to prepare for his or her arrival…

If you are a regular reader of this site you might be wondering why things have been so quiet lately. Well, they say a picture is worth a thousands words so here you go …

Yep, we finally finished most of the renovations, sold the house and moved.

Like our house renovations we don’t like to do things half way, so we didn’t do a small move, we actually moved to the other side of the world, Canada …

I still have literally dozens, if not hundreds of stories from our time renovating our house in Townsville, Australia. I’m hoping to somehow find the time to record them on this site before I forget them, but at the moment my family and my work with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) is taking up pretty much all of my time.

We purchased a house in Canada that we thought wouldn’t need much work, but of course that never works out quite as planned…

Tamara took this photo of the house back in November and I’ve been meaning to post it for a while as it’s a great photo of the front of the house with all the painting done and the window hoods on.

I love the perspective of the house from this photo. It turned out really good and it was a nice sunny day for it, we haven’t had many sunny days since then.

We have had 40 days and 40 nights of rain in a row here and there has been a lot of flooding around the region. It’s crazy, but I’m glad that we were at least spared getting hit by Tropical Cyclone Ellie a few days ago.

There is still a risk that the cyclone could reform as the tropical low crosses back over the ocean, but it’s a low risk.

Tropical Cyclone Ellie took a sharp right turn last night, weakened to a tropical low and crossed the coast near Mission Beach around mid-night. You can see the latest cyclone tracking map below. You can also see the predicted path of it from now on, but they are notoriously inaccurate.

There is still a severe weather warning for Townsville and the area between Innisfail and Mackay, so my shade cloth will be staying down for now and I’m expecting a lot more rain.

There is speculation that this could be a bad cyclone season for North Queensland, and this is the second one that we have seen up here so far this year. I remember being called a "pansy" for not wanting a cyclone to come through next year. Well, if that’s the case then please call me a pansy again this year, as I would rather avoid the cyclones…

Enjoy these videos of us singing some Australian Christmas Carols. You’ll recognize the tune, but probably not the words from this slightly modified Aussie version …

Jingle Bells – The Australian Version

The 12-Days of Christmas – The Australian Version

I hope that you all have a fantastic Christmas. Thank you for reading this site about our home renovations.

Sunday was Fathers Day here in Australia and I was lucky enough to have two exciting days / events to celebrate being a dad.

Thursday night Caleb and I headed out to a free Fathers Day event put on by Bunnings. They had four craft tables set-up for Caleb to build stuff and make some cards. He built and painted a timber CD Rack for me for Fathers Day and did a special card for me. You can see the CD Rack in the photo below.

In addition to the four craft tables they also had face painting, as you can see above. This was actually Caleb’s first time ever getting his face painted, and they did a fantastic job on it don’t you reckon?

We got to pet a snake, a lizard and a crocodile that were brought in from the Billabong Sanctuary. Caleb was quite brave and went up to pet each of the animals.

Bunnings also put on a free sausage sizzle for everyone there. We both love our sausages, so that was a great dinner for us, maybe not the healthiest, but certainly tasty.

Today we headed out to Reef HQ here in Townsville to have a look at the aquarium. It is a very impressive display and we were lucky enough to be there during the feeding of the predator tank. And of course we got to see Nemo (the clown fist) and Dori (Paracanthurus hepatus) along with hundreds of other fish and sea animals.

After that we watched the movie Ratatouille at home as a family and finished with a family dinner.

I reckon I’ve had a pretty good Fathers Day this year …

If I didn’t know better I reckon that this would be a book written by wife …

I’ve been following the simplemom blog for a few months now. It has been a great source of information and tips and I have been forwarding some of the articles to my wife.

There have been quite a few good articles lately about keeping your house clutter free (which is something my wife strives for, and I struggle with). SimpleMom has put together an ebook with these good ideas for spring cleaning, plus more in it and is selling the book online for only $7.

The book consists of two different sections:

• An essay about "stuff" and our consumer culture
• A 10-part guide to spring cleaning, including
  • room by room checklists
  • inventory templates for printing
  • Daily game plans
  • Natural household cleaner recipes
  • and more

It’s a 68-page book and complements some of the other free charts and checklist are are downloadable for free from Simple Mom.

Box air conditioners are everywhere here in North Queensland. Almost all of the old Queenslanders have been fitted out with them and box air conditioners are an inexpensive way to add air conditioning to your house.

One downside to box air conditioners is that they are ugly looking things, especially if you can see them from the road down the side of the house, or worse, on the front of the house.

On one side of our house the box air conditioners for the kids rooms are pretty well hidden by the trees. You actually have to try to see them, so I’m not too worried about them.

On the left side of our house though the box air conditioner sticks out like a sore thumb (as you can see above). This room will eventually be our office and because it is at the front of the house it is really quite obvious.

Even though split air conditioners are become more common box air conditioners are still being installed in a lot of new homes. One of these new homes that we saw had a box air conditioner visible right from the front of the house, so they built a simple slotted box and installed that around it (see the photo on the right).

Although it doesn’t actually conceal the air conditioner, it at least helps it to blend in a lot more with the rest of the house. I might do something like this with ours, or we might wait to see if the new window hoods we are putting on the house will help to hide it. I hope that this is the case, but we will see.

I put up my cheap and easy garage storage shelf a few weeks ago, with plans to finish the shelf off with a bit of timber along the front and side of the shelf. Here is a photo of the finished project …

As you can see, I added the timber trim around the outside of the garage shelf and painted the timber that I used to join the two shelves together. My original plan was to paint the timber trim white, but I like the raw timber look, so I reckon that I will leave it at that.

All up the project for a 3.6m long garage storage shelf cost me around $120.00, which is a lot cheaper then any of the ready made solutions I could find at Bunnings or Mitre 10.