Angels of Tibet: Salt Lake group helps cut death rate of infants

The little medical kit is deceptively, heartbreakingly simple: a sterile razor blade, three baby blankets, some pills, a fingernail brush, a tiny hat. It's not much — but it's helping reduce the mother and infant death rate in Tibet, thanks to a Salt Lake nurse and the nonprofit organization she started several years ago.

When Arlene Samen first went to Tibet in the late 1990s as part of a team that did cleft-palate surgery on children, she discovered that in remote areas of the country women were delivering babies in medieval conditions.

Typically, says Samen, a rural Tibetan woman about to give birth goes out to the barn, where she lies down in hay covered with yak dung and stoically waits. Because Tibetans believe that the blood of childbirth is polluted, the woman will generally go through labor alone, although sometimes the father or mother-in-law will be on hand to cut the umbilical cord with a dirty knife. The barn is often cold and wet; in the winter, newborns are often simply laid on the frozen ground.

No wonder one out of 10 newborns in rural Tibet die, usually from causes that easily could have been treated or prevented. The majority of women have lost one or more babies in their lifetime; and most villagers know at least one woman who has died from hemorrhage following childbirth.

Samen started One H.E.A.R.T. (a punctuation-laden name that stands for Health, Education And Research in Tibet) in 1998. Originally associated with the University of Utah's Department of Obstetrics, where Samen was a high-risk OB nurse, the nonprofit is now an independent charitable organization. Offices are in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and in a converted old church on 300 West in Salt Lake City.

The U.S. health professionals who travel to Tibet to educate mothers and doctors come face to face not only with yak dung but also childbirthing superstitions. A woman in prolonged labor will often put on a piece of her husband's clothing, tying it in front instead of in the back, because it's believed that will speed up delivery. Or she'll jump over a rabbit's head 100 times. Often a woman will go for months without knowing she's pregnant, or at least without acknowledging it, in the hopes of warding off the envy of other women, thus preventing a miscarriage.

So, the little medical kits are a tangible start to improve conditions, but by themselves are not enough. One H.E.A.R.T. doctors, nurses and midwives also teach expectant mothers about nutrition and train local doctors in safe childbirthing practices.