Saving Lives in Liberia
We believe in… going further
Network Members Tage and Ruth Swallie have been working for over ten years to save the lives of mothers and their babies in the remote rural communities of Liberia. Ruth decided to train as a midwife at an early age, working hard to gain experience and expertise that would stand her in good stead to face the challenges of the years to come. When fighting began to break out in the late 1980s, marking the beginnings of a civil war that would ravage Liberia for fourteen years, Ruth was running the maternity ward at a busy mission hospital. A increasing number of women began to travel from Guinea and Sierra Leone to have their babies delivered by Ruth.
When the war intensified in 1993, Tage and Ruth had to flee for their lives, finding themselves and their three young children in a refugee camp in Guinea. Ruth was soon employed as a midwife by Medicins sans Frontiers, and as she saved more lives and her reputation spread, more and more people flooded to her clinic to have their babies delivered.
When the college Tage had been studying in reopened, the family returned to Monrovia, where life was hard, and midwifery jobs non-existent. But inevitably, women began to seek Ruth out to deliver their babies, and she was at this time called upon by the government to train traditional birth attendants. With the country suffering from a severe lack of hospitals and clinics Tage and Ruth began to think about how to expand their service, and decided to build a clinic with bricks made by their own hands, on a plot of land owned by Tage’s brother. For nearly ten years, Ruth has led a small but dedicated team at the clinic, which charges patients an affordable amount for treatment in order to sustain its work.
Whether delivering a baby, teaching local people about infant nutrition and healthcare or training a young girl who longs to become a midwife, Ruth’s vision remains the same – to bring positive change to the lives of all local people. The team is small – but as part of Lifeline Network it is supported by many more, and we are proud to be part of its work. Last year one of our UK supporters, a midwife, was inspired to raise the start-up capital needed to establish a bigger, better equipped clinic that will provide healthcare for some of the poorest rural communities in the country.
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