Midwife Monday: Robin Lim

Robin Lim, known as Mother Robin,  was the 2001 CNN hero of the year for her non-profit birth center in Bali, and her work with tsunami ravaged Aceh, which led to the construction of a second birth center in that location.  Mother Robin has trained many to facilitate safe labor and birth in areas ravaged by natural disaster like Haiti.

Over the past 13 years, Yayasan Bumi Sehat (Healthy Mother Earth Foundation) has helped thousands of mothers and babies to receive adequate care, saving many lives in a country where maternal mortality rates are 31 times higher than in the US, and infant mortality rates are 5 times the US average.  What this means is that of every 1000 babies born, 31 will die. And 373 women out of every 1000 will die due to childbirth related complications

Robin married William Hemmerle and together they raised 8 children.  She became a midwife after several personal tragedies, including her sister dying from preventable complications during pregnancy, igniting within her a passion for caring for mothers who "slip though the cracks" of modern women's health care.  Mother Robin and William left their home in Hawaii to move to Bali where she volunteered as home birth midwife.  When her services became more widely sought out, Robin obtained her CPM credential from the North American Registry of Midwives

Mother Robin is committed to bringing peace to the world by doing more than her part to ensure each child is born in peace.

"We live in times of trauma.  And yet I believe its the little ideas and solutions that we come up with ourselves, from our hearts and that we share with our communities that are going to make our world a safer place. Bhumi Sehat is a really small NGO, yet we have demonstrated a model of care that is effective, inexpensive, and sustainable.  We're really proud of it.  I believe that culturally appropriate woman to woman care, the midwifery model of care, is really going to address those issues of saving infants lives, and mothers lives. I believe that our solution, which is community based, is much more effective than projects that threw billions of dollars at childbirth technology. If you want to help mothers and babies to survive, support midwives.  They are the guardians of childbirth."

For more information, and to support the work of Robin Lim, and so many other at Yayasan Bumi Sehat, click Here