By Georgina Vass
When an American expat living in Bali comes to mind, one might conjure up several images but Robin Lim does not fit any stereotypes. Robin Lim, who is more widely known as Ibu Robin (Ibu being the word for mother), won the title of 2011 CNN Hero of the Year for helping thousands of Indonesian women to have a healthy pregnancy and birth.
In Indonesia a woman dies every hour from pregnancy, complications during delivery, late referral to hospital services and poor emergency obstetric care according to the United Nations Population Fund. Additionally, there have been some cases where Indonesian hospitals will hold newborn babies as collateral until the parents can pay for their medical treatment. According to the International Monetary Fund the average Indonesian family earns the equivalent of USD 8 a day but a baby delivery at a hospital will cost at least USD 70, rising to USD 700 in the event the mother needs a caesarean section. “Hospitals are businesses and they want to collect payment, this is how they do it”, says Lim.
Lim, a Filipino-American mother of eight, fell in love with Asia when she was a child living in the Philippines. She says, “Being half Asian may have had something to do with the resonance I feel with this part of the world and the commitment I have to lessening the suffering [here].” When her sister died from complications giving birth, a grieving Lim and her husband decided to sell their home in Hawaii and move to Bali, Indonesia.
In 1994 she began providing free health services for pregnant women and young children from her house near Ubud, a historic town in the foothills of Bali’s mountains. Over the next decade the demand for services grew and in 2011 alone she and her team had 33,000 patients visit the Yayasan Bumi Sehat clinics. Health services provided included births, prenatal checks ups, pediatric care, ambulance transport, vision tests, treatment of general illness or injuries and much more.
When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Lim and a team of other midwives responded by setting up a clinic in Cot, in the Aceh region of Sumatra, that still exists today. In addition to medical aid, she and her team also operate a Youth Education Center at the Nyuh Kuning clinic in Ubud which offers English classes, computer skills, and organic farming training to local children. They also offer sexuality education classes for local youth several times a year at the Youth center, and Lim is currently working on creating a sex-education comic book to appeal to the adolescents in her community.
When Lim is not using her midwifery skills, she is also attempting to lower the incidence of smoking in her local community. Indonesia is home to 57 million smokers and Lim and her team do what they can to encourage new fathers to quit smoking. “We midwives are often asked by the new fathers: ‘What can I do to repay the kindness you have given my wife and baby?’ This is when we ask them to stop smoking. Their hearts are wide open from the birth so it is an excellent time for them to let go of a bad habit”, says Lim.
Finding sufficient funds to keep providing these essential services is always a challenge. “Being popular means more and more patients. The current clinic is busting at the seams”, says Lim. Due to the cases of babies being held as collateral in hospitals, Lim believes small independent community health centers are more trusted by the local women and their families. “Maybe [local women] have no money to make a donation but when the mango tree in their yard bears fruit they remember the midwives and they share.” With the help of the CNN hero award money Lim and her team recently raised enough funds to purchase the land they need for a new clinic to replace the current clinic in Nyuh Kuning. In addition to building the new clinic and keeping the existing operations running, Lim intends to open a clinic in the Philippines, all of which requires ongoing financial support. “Healthcare may be a human right but it’s not free,” she says. “Thank Heaven for the donors.”
For more information on how to donate and help Yayasan Bumi Sehat, please visit here.