Room At The Inn

Bhyllis Ponvert is a peace activist who has worked with Peace Brigades International in Guatemala, several Ann Arbor Juigalpa sister city delegations and the Pledge of Resistance. Ponvert also runs Cat's Pajamas, a local small business that makes hand-painted cotton baby and children's clothing. In the middle of her fourth stay in Nicaragua, an eight-month stint as a volunteer in a Matagalpa maternity house, she is back in Ann Arbor for a brief visit. What follows is taken from an interview with AGENDA.

AGENDA: Tell us about the maternity house.

PONVERT: It' s a private Nicaraguan project called the Mary Ann Jackman Casa Materna, which means "mother's house." The Casa opened in November 1991 as a place for women who have complicated pregnancies to stay for a short time before and after giving birth.

All of the women who come to the Casa are from the countryside and have been told by a midwife or health worker that they need to give birth in a hospital instead of at home. Some of the possible risk factors these women face which complicate their pregnancies and delivery are needing a Caesarean section, having toxemia, diabetes, having already had many children, or being past prime child-bearing age. Also, women from rural areas without nearby clinics often die of untreated postpartum infections or hemorrhages.

So women travel from as far away as eight hours to the regional hospital in Matagalpa. Before the Casa opened, many women would travel to the city only to find that the hospital would not admit them unless they were actually in labor. The hospital would tell them to go home but the women, often with her husband or her compañero, instead would knock on people' s doors asking if they could stay.

Now, a couple arrives at the Casa, and we tell them about the house and what we do. They can stay with us a short time before they have their baby, and we take them to the hospital when they begin labor. Then they can come back to the Casa with the baby for a few days until they are strong enough to go home.

We don't ask them to pay anything, but we do ask that they contribute food to share with everyone. And it's a really nice response. These people are really poor. They have very little and yet they are more than willing and happy to contribute. They bring rice, beans, live chickens, cheese, whatever they can bring. And a lot of the times it's the food that they grow themselves, and can probably ill afford to spare, but they're very generous with that.

They're very pleased to know that a place like this exists, because it means that the families know that the women are safe, that they're being taken care of, that they're in good health, and being fed well. The minute they go into labor we drive them to the hospital, which is about ten minutes away, in our ambulance.

The house itself is wonderfully set up, with five large bedrooms, each with a bathroom and five beds, so we can have a capacity of 25 women at any one time. We usually have between six and ten women in the house, and since we opened about 70 women have come through the Casa.

The house had previously belonged to the Cuban consulate in Matagalpa. The Cuban govemment sold the house for about half of what they could have gotten if they had sold it to a private family. So in a sense it was a gift from the Cuban govemment. It was paid for by the Women's Institute in Madrid, Spain. The Tacoma, Washington Casa Group and the sister city of Gainesville, Florida also give money. And NMAP - Nicaragua Medical Aid Project - here in Ann Arbor has taken on the Casa as a beneficiary.

There is a paid staff of four Nicaraguans. Two North Americans, Kitty Madden from Adrian, Michigan and I, work as volunteers. There are also several nurses and mid-wives, and a doctor, all part-time.

We have just started a program of ongoing discussions about nutrition, breast feeding and family planning. Part of our work is to make sure that women leave with information about - and access to - birth control. It is not unusual for a woman to come to the Casa pregnant with her tenth or twelfth child.

The Casa is a safe haven for mothers and babies for a little while, but the health situation in Nicaragua is really bad. Often two women share a hospital bed, with no sheets and no medicine in the hospital pharmacy. They go home to deplorable living conditions.

Working here means refocusing my priorities and energy, giving less to politics and more to people and the hands-on, day-today work of the Casa. Being around women and babies is terrifïcally energizing and positive.

AGENDA: What struck you most about the current conditions in Nicaragua?

PONVERT: Before I went to Matagalpa I spent a month in Managua living with an interesting family. They are long-time Sandinista supporters. The woman's first husbanU was killed by Somoza' s National Guard. She moved from the country to Managua when that happened. In the early ' 80s she heard that land was being given out by the Sandinistas, so she moved to the lot where she is now, and built her house out of cardboard. Over the last ten years the family has rebuilt the house with cement blocks.

They have a good sense of what the Sandinistas did and didn't do, and don' t have a romantic view of it, but still believe in the gains that were made.

They are now suffering the effects of two years of UNO government. The man in the family makes $60 a month, but prices of food, water and electricity are higher because subsidies have been eliminated. Sugar, rice and beans are up to 40 cents a pound, while electricity is $7 a month and water is $6. One daughter went to the hospital for free treatment, but her prescription had to be filled at a private pharmacy and the family couldn't pay for the medicine. Despite government claims of free education, there are monthly fees for the other daughter' schooling, which are collected by threats of withholding her grades.

Currently, there is an effort by the Chamorro-led UNO government to undermine much of what the revolution tried to do, by privatizing industry, health, and education, and to take back land that people were given by the Sandinistas. A lot of this is due to pressure by the U.S., which puts political conditions on its aid.

Unemployment is tremendous, about 57%. I see many more kids in the street, more people selling things. There' s no padding, no room for anything. Life is really fragile there now, much more than when I went down there during the revolution. People were poor, people were struggling, but I never saw that people didn't have enough to eat, or that people couldn't get free health care. Now people are on the edge. The difference between surviving and not surviving is some little child selling bits of candy in the street. The family I lived with never spends money on ice cream, never has sweets, and still can't afford to buy medicine for their sick child.

And at the same time, the streets of Managua and Matagalpa are jammed with new cars, trucks, 4 x 4s - all being brought in by Nicaraguans because there's no tax on them.

AGENDA: Who is buying the cars?

PONVERT: Some are Nicaraguans who lived in the U.S. during the Revolution and have come back. and there always was a percentage of well-off Nicaraguans. Even under the Sandinistas, 60% of agriculture was privately owned. There are lots more private stores, filled with clothes and appliances. There are lots of private pharmacies but only a few can afford them.. T

o help the Casa Materna, send aid or contributions through Ann Arbor Nicaragua Medical Aid Project, 668-6220. A delegation will visit Matagalpa and Ann Arbor's sister city, Juigalpa, for two weeks in early April. For more information about the trip, call 663-0655.