Virginia Women’s Center’s Nadene Brunk and Stephen Eads will make another week-long trip to Haiti, beginning Sunday November 1. Brunk is a certified nurse midwife and founder of Midwives For Haiti, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing maternal and neonatal death in this third-world country that’s just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Dr. Eads is an obstetrician/gynecologist. A medical team including other community volunteers involved in Midwives For Haiti will travel, too. 
   
Brunk and Eads don’t plan to deliver any babies on this trip. Though they do plan to meet the children whose schooling they support with a relatively small annual donation that provides a solid meal, school uniforms and education. Aside from that visit, they have work to do in continually setting the stage so that Midwives For Haiti can be recognized for its strides in teaching midwifery skills and providing prenatal care.                           The current labor and delivery bed situation in Hinche.
    
Among their appointments:
They will interview three midwives as teachers. Another Richmond volunteer and Midwives For Haiti board member with expertise in human resources, Terry Glass, has armed them with interview questions so they can be assured they are hiring people who will  help advance Midwives For Haiti.   
 
Along with the medical team, they will visit the places where they have graduate midwives working. During this portion of the trip they are working to find a way to incorporate two new beds into one of the clinics. Dr. Eads arranged shipping of the beds that Memorial Regional Medical Center was disposing of from the United States. The group is working to identify a means of shipping the beds to the hospitals in Haiti. The beds on which women deliver babies are about the size of a baby’s changing table.   
 
They will also meet with a lawyer and Dr. Raphael of the Ministry of Health to finalize the contract with Midwives For Haiti. The Ministry of Health has requested Midwives For Haiti train 22 new students.   
 
They will meet with a United Nations population representative to share the Midwives For Haiti story so that the U. N. can begin creating midwifery programs in other countries, such as Africa and Afghanistan.