As a founding member of Lakeside Women’s Hospital in Oklahoma City, Dr. Susan Chambers brings babies into the world amid some of the finest technology health care has to offer.
But on mission trips to the other side of the globe, she’s witnessed the polar opposite: New mothers delivering on a rickety metal table in a concrete room with neither running water nor electricity.
And an oxytocin drip to speed the delivery along? Forget it.
“They pound your uterus with their fist to augment labor,” Chambers says.
For roughly a dozen years, Chambers has spent part of her off-hours involved with World Neighbors, an international development organization based in OKC, which aims to eliminate poverty and hunger via training and education. She’s spent nine years on its board of directors, and taken three trips to impoverished communities, with a fourth to follow in April to Nepal.
She first became involved when invited to a metro home where people from West Africa were visiting to discuss maternal and child health.
“I was just hooked,” she says.
The trips came next – to such locales as Ecuador, Guatemala and West Africa – keeping her away from family anywhere from a week to nearly a month. According to Chambers, World Neighbors’ goal is for volunteers to interact and communicate with villagers, teaching them the skills they need to survive, which could be as basic as washing one’s hands.
“These people aren’t stupid. They haven’t been told that makes a difference,” she says. “It wasn’t a shock in that, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re so poor.’ I was more impressed with what World Neighbors does with people who have nothing, and how it maintains their dignity and gives them hope.”
While in West Africa, Chambers witnessed the delivery from a woman who had walked nine miles just to get there.
“To get to some of these communities, there are no roads,” she says. “I don’t see how they get around: ‘Take a left at this tree, take a right at that tree.’”
Thirty minutes after birthing a baby in squalid conditions, the woman “hopped up and off they go, waddling out the door.”
Chambers says the woman was lucky all went well, because “if there’s a complication, it’s five hours by donkey cart to some place that could potentially give them blood or a C-section.”
After visiting these countries and seeing their conditions firsthand, Chambers says she shares the beliefs on which World Neighbors was founded in 1951 by two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee John Peters.
“He saw that … conflicts come because of the haves and have-nots,” she says. “We have to help the have-nots, because that actually brings peace to the world. He felt strongly that if we created a more healthy environment, they’ll be less dependent, less unhappy, sustain themselves — everybody wins from that.
“It’s true development: Help people help themselves, one village at a time.”