Bosom Buddies has evolved greatly in the eight
years since its conception. My good friend and mentor, Melanie Novitzkas
founded BB in 2006 while she was training to be a doula. During her practicals
at our local hospital, she realised that many mothers go to hospital to give
birth without having the necessary essentials for themselves and their babies.
Melanie fervently started collecting and making bags for new moms. She grew
Bosom Buddies and got integrated into the Thembalitsha Foundation; when I took
over as manager in 2010 the BB volunteers visited 2 hospitals and produced 400
bags per month with three full time employees. Such tremendous growth speaks
volume of this determined and lovingly generous founder. Melanie treasured the time she spent with the
mothers, focusing on the spiritual and praying life and love over each mother
and baby. With boundless compassion and empathy, Melanie grew Bosom Buddies to
a well-known and much loved organisation in our area.
I was excited and inspired to continue this project with the
simple aim of loving mothers. My passion as a teacher and campaigner for women’s
rights led me to investigate why we experience so many stillbirths here. And
why is the infant mortality rate so high in SA, but more importantly, here in
our area? I loathe the fact that the poorest of the poor, women who have given
birth six hours previously, have to walk 3km down a steep hill, through one of
the most affluent areas in SA, to get into a taxi that will take her home to an
RDP house or shack, possibly without running water or electricity. I did not
understand why the women give birth alone, why they are so unempowered as to
not know their rights to ask questions, but simply to ‘allow’ or accept things
to happen to them or be done to them. Now, 4 years later, I have even more
questions, but I also have a lot more understanding of the life of the average
South African woman. She has many faces, but my heart is with the one who lives
in the township or our poorer urban communities. I understand her struggles to
raise her children in the gang-driven and drugs-prone Cape landscape. I
understand (yet will never ever accept) why so many families have absent
fathers, why we fall victim to too many teenage pregnancies, why the HIV rates
are so high here, and how women constantly search for love and acceptance, for
something beautiful amidst a life that is particularly hard.
As the supporters of Bosom Buddies know, we have expanded our
services and now offer breastfeeding education and support at most clinics that
feed into our hospital, Helderberg Hospital.
The benefits of exclusive breastfeeding are too vast to explain
in this post, and I will explain in more detail in a next newsletter. Appropriate
antenatal education is vital and a focus of our new direction.
So why change our name? I wanted a name in line with the
Thembalitsha Foundation, something with ‘hope’ or ‘themba’ in the title. I love
our foundation and that I don’t feel isolated in my work and am extremely proud
of all our projects. I wanted a name that displays who we work with – mothers, and
that is also not yet taken. Hence, the birth of MAMA THEMBA.
Proudly and excitedly looking to the future of changing lives
and developing people to a point of self-reliance.
#doulafran
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