ONLY ON AP Mothers-to-be struggle in Haiti

(10 Nov 2016) STORY Nathanaelle Bernard was two months short of the due date for her first child when Hurricane Matthew crashed through her town overlooking the Caribbean Sea along Haiti's southwestern coast. The storm, with its 145 mph winds, destroyed her small home of cinder blocks. Powerful waves carried away most of her belongings, including the clothing and blankets she had managed to collect for her baby. She's now anxiously awaiting the birth amid the ruins of her town, with even food and fresh water scarce. "I have lost a lot of things," the 19-year-old said on a recent morning, her face glowing with sweat as she cradled her swollen belly. After a pause, she added: "I think tomorrow we will have much more." She shares a makeshift hut with five members of her extended family and her precarious situation is emblematic of an alarming situation across Haiti's southwestern peninsula in the wake of the storm. Nearly 14,000 women are due to give birth in the coming weeks amid widespread shortages of food, water and housing and where poor sanitation has created ideal conditions for cholera and other diseases. Even in the best of times, pregnancy and childbirth is risky in Haiti, which has the highest maternal mortality ratio in the Western Hemisphere. Many rural women give birth at home, often with untrained midwives who administer care using leaves made into tea, smoke or steam. The Haitian government, with international assistance, has implemented programs that have helped reduce the maternal death rate by nearly half over the past decade. But, with 359 women dying for every 100,000 births due to complications, the country is on par with countries such as Ethiopia and Madagascar, according to the UN. Many experts fear the advances have been rolled back by Hurricane Matthew, which made landfall on the peninsula on October 4. The government says the storm killed 546 people and caused massive destruction of the crops and livestock that people like Bernard and her family depend on for survival. Throughout the disaster zone, health clinics and hospitals have been badly damaged and medicine is in short supply. At the general hospital in Les Cayes, southwest Haiti's largest city, about a dozen pregnant women sought care on a recent morning, some complaining about symptoms of high blood pressure. Expecting women in Haiti are disproportionately threatened by disorders such as eclampsia and pre-eclampsia, which bring high blood pressure and can cause seizures, heart failure and hemorrhaging. In Coteaux, Bernard occasionally gets shooting pains in her stomach, retreating to a bed in the shack her uncle built from scavenged materials after the family's home was destroyed. She curls up with her eyes shut tight, taking acetaminophen she got from a nurse. She tries her best to push out negative thoughts. But that's tough to do while undernourished and with little protection from any number of diseases stalking people here, including the mosquito-borne Zika virus that can cause serious birth defects if women are infected while pregnant. Romual Saint-Jean, the 27-year-old father of her unborn child, moved Bernard to her uncle's coastal village from Port-Au-Prince after she contracted typhoid in early 2016. They believed Coteaux's salt air and slow-paced life would do her good. Now, he desperately wants to move the family overseas but has no idea how that might happen. Saint-Jean, who lost his $300-per-month job in July as a Portuguese-Haitian Creole translator for Haiti's U.N. peacekeeping mission, is struggling to find work. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...