Every Mother’s Day, most of us buy our mums either flowers, chocolates or gift vouchers with a doting card sharing our love and gratitude. But this year instead of the predictable pressies, how about giving mum a gift that could save millions of children's lives. How? Through life-saving vaccines. From one mother to another let’s make protection contagious, not disease.
 

Ami’s first child - a little boy - died after contracting tetanus. Like many women in her remote village in Senegal, she delivered her baby on the concrete floor outside her home. The only help she had was a traditional birth attendant.

“After a few days, we noticed he was trembling excessively,” Ami’s mother-in-law, Mame Touty, says.

“Unfortunately we didn’t think immediately of going to the medical centre. We used traditional ways to try and cure the disease. It took us a week after the birth before we decided to go and see a medical doctor and he was diagnosed with tetanus.”

We spent nine days in hospital, but he died on the tenth day,” Mame Touty says.
A few years later, Ami gave birth to another baby boy.

Tetanus is typically contracted through unhygienic childbirth practises. The disease is swift, cruel and lethal but it is also highly preventable. An affordable vaccine given to women of childbearing age can stop tetanus.

That’s why Christemene, four months pregnant, walked with her two young children across Haiti’s mountainous terrain for an hour to get her vital vaccinations from a mobile post.

“I came to the church to get my injections and to get two of my children vaccinated,” Christemene says.