She fought to become a midwife. Now she’s fighting to save mothers and their babies in South Sudan

Associated Press

BENTIU, South Sudan (AP) — Elizabeth Nyachiew was 16 when she watched her neighbor bleed to death during childbirth. She vowed to become a midwife to spare others from the same fate in South Sudan, a country with one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. Now 36, in her office at a hospital run by the aid group Doctors Without Borders, she says she has weathered civil war, hunger and displacement to make it this far. She is one of 3,000 midwives in South Sudan. It’s a number that the health ministry calls insufficient to serve a population of 11 million people.