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.
We had a rather eventful weekend, some joyous news and an unfortunate accident. I’ll be writing the exciting news soon, the photo on the left is a bit of a teaser…
The accident involved my son head butting the concrete retaining wall in our backyard. This is the second time he’s done it, but this time was far worse than the last and involved a trip in an ambulance to the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
The first time he did it he was playing tug-of-war with his sister and hit the back of his head, this time he fell off the play equipment and hit the front of his head on the concrete retaining wall.
We had thought of moving the play equipment, but given that the first accident had nothing to do with the swing set moving the structure would only be a partial fix. To be honest I’m still not sure how he fell all the way off the equipment to the concrete retaining wall since when we put in the equipment we put it what we thought would be a safe distance away.
Removing the concrete retaining wall isn’t an option as our yard is over 1 metre higher than our neighbours backyard.
So I’m requesting some advice from anyone reading this post. How would you recommend we child proof our concrete retaining wall?
After much deliberation we did eventually decide on a design for our basement renovation. It’s the easiest design option in as much as we don’t have to change any of the existing walls and all we have to do is add three walls and box in the ceiling. It should also meet all of what we feel we want out of the basement renovation.
The three walls are the short stubby wall just inside the door, the wall with the door leading into the storage / furnace room and then the short 45 degree wall at the end. The 45 degree wall leaves us with a near perfect nook to put a wardrobe or cabinet for storage.
Where we plan to put shelves, photos and bookcases we’ll be putting blocking behind the dry wall. That’ll save having to use those annoying drywall plugs that never seem to be as secure as I would like.
We will also be adding as much soundproofing as possible to the walls and ceiling of the room as the sound environment in the room is very important for the recording of the YWAM Podcast, and other future recording projects. I’ll write more about that later, but we think we’ve come up with a pretty good solution.
I was browsing around Ikea Hackers looking for ideas for a narrow desk for our kids and came across this great idea for a fold up workbench for the garage…
The design is built off of the Ikea BEKVÄM Kitchen Cart, which sells for $59.99 from Ikea in Canada. I figure that if I can find off-cuts like I did when I built my Garage Workbench then the rest of the needed parts would probably only cost around $20.
Although I’m not needing a fold up workbench at the moment, it’s something that I might make use out of in the future, if time ever allows me to work on all those projects that are still only ideas…
You can see the full article, including more photos, over at the Ikea Hacker article.
Sometimes it’s amazing how much you can help, through something so little…
