LDS Church helps fight measles in Mozambique

An African mother walks along a dirt road, the dust flying up around a bundle she carries in her arms. She is headed for a vaccination clinic inside the nearby village and looks tired. When an American visitor asks to see her baby, she displays the child proudly.

The infant is only a day old.

Yet the child's mother — without the help of modern hospital delivery teams, sterile sutures or a post-delivery recovery room — is walking miles to the clinic, determined not to let her baby become yet another death statistic on a continent whose vastness is dwarfed only by its poverty.

Bonnie Parkin prays that such heroic efforts will be rewarded. As general president of the LDS Church's Relief Society, she encountered that woman on a road in Mozambique this week, there to observe administration of life-saving measles and polio vaccines, along with vitamin A, to thousands of children. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has partnered with the American Red Cross and other organizations, donating $3 million toward the measles vaccination effort.

Sister Parkin is seeing the campaign unfold firsthand, working as a volunteer, visiting clinics and orphanages. She was originally scheduled to go with American Red Cross president and CEO Marsha Evans, but Evans had to scrap her travel plans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

While Sister Parkin's travels will not evoke America's collective conscience or make national headlines like the hurricane's devastation has, she's seeing the determination to stem the tide of a silent tsunami that kills more people each year than Katrina and the Asian tsunami combined.

More than 700,000 children have died annually in recent years from measles around the world. Nearly half of them live in Africa. At less than $1 per child to vaccinate, the disease remains the world's leading vaccine-preventable childhood killer.

The Measles Initiative partnership — encompassing the United Nations Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United Nations Children's Fund, World Health Organization and Pan American Health Organization in addition to the Red Cross and LDS Church — is designed to immunize 200 million children and prevent 1.2 million deaths from measles over the next five years.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday, Sister Parkin told the Deseret Morning News of seeing mothers with babies strapped to their backs and leading a child in each hand in the long lines outside each clinic, including the mother with the newborn. Emotion filled her voice.

"It was unbelievable, her commitment to make sure her children were vaccinated. . ." she said, her voice trailing off for a moment.