Tag Archives: Black Lion Hospital

How Kangaroo Care Can Save Newborn Lives In Ethiopia

How Kangaroo Care Can Save Newborn Lives In Ethiopia

This post ran last month through a special collaboration with BabyCenter’s Mission Motherhood™ and World Moms Blog to empower women everywhere to have safe and healthy pregnancies and babies. I traveled to Ethiopia in June of 2014 with the International Reporting Project on a New Media Fellowship to report on Newborn Health.

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One of the newborns I met in Ethiopia. Photo: Elizabeth Atalay

I was met by the sweet smell of warmed milk and wrapped in a blanket of an almost stifling heat as I stepped into the ante-chamber of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Photo: Elizabeth Atalay

Through the glass, I could see tiny babies swathed in cloth under the glowing lights of their incubators. Here, in the largest NICU in the country, these fragile lives were living in a fragile system. Frequent power cuts often threatened the stability of the incubators, and thus, the lives of the precious babies whose well-being depended on them.

Here, in Ethiopia, a realization dawned on me. All of the technological innovations in the world do not matter if there is no power to run them. Continue reading on BabyCenter’s Mission Motherhood™.

Photo Credit: Lindsay Mgbor/Department for International Development'. Creative Commons License

A mom practicing Kangaroo Care with her premature twins. Photo Credit: Lindsay Mgbor/Department for International Development’.

A Mosebo Village Healthcare worker demonstrated how to properly wrap a baby for kangaroo care. Photo: Elizabeth Atalay

A Mosebo Village Healthcare worker demonstrated how to properly wrap a baby for kangaroo care. Photo: Elizabeth Atalay

The Health Post at Mosebo Village

The Health Post at Mosebo Village