Midwife's first-hand view of Africa led to birth of Care for Life nonprofit

The podcast Guiding Growth: Conversations with Community Leaders from the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, event and meeting venue Modern Moments and the Gilbert Independent/yourvalley.net explores the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. This partial transcript of the most recent podcast with Cindy Packard  has been edited for brevity and clarity.  

Cindy Packard and her husband, Blair, are the founders of Care for Life, an NGO in Africa that for the past 24 years has seen unprecedented success in alleviating suffering, promoting self-reliance and instilling hope for those families and villages living in extreme poverty.  

Packard helped research and create a unique program using local people to offer comprehensive training and mentoring in health and hygiene, sanitation, food security, home improvement, income generation, literacy, psycho-social well-being, and community participation.  

Since its beginning, Care for Life has helped more than 100,000 people, and according to Packard, it is just getting started to help the 1 billion people still living in desperate poverty. “We don’t give handouts or create dependency — we share knowledge and create sustainable self-reliance. And we have the data to prove it.”  

Packard has served 24 years on the Care for Life Board and is an adviser. She has been a licensed midwife in private practice in Arizona for 45 years. 

Take us back to the beginning of your journeys, maybe home, school, that kind of stuff back in the younger years. Grew up in Utah. My dad died when I just turned 13, and that was a big pivotal moment in my life. So my life changed a lot, but I was a happy kid. I was involved in lots of things, and I met my husband in the seventh grade in a band. But we didn't date until we got to college.  

Then how did you decide that you were more than friends? It was the Vietnam War. It was kind of a crazy time. And they had lottery numbers for when you went, you know, your number came up to go to the war. So it was kind of a factor in the fact that we thought, “Well, let's just get married.” My husband finished college and then we went off to graduate school, and that was in North Carolina. And then we came back and settled in Gilbert.  

You read a book that changed the course of your plans. Can you talk to us about that? Yes, my husband started teaching natural childbirth classes back in those days. Childbirth was really medicated, and women didn't have really a very good experience for the most part. And so he brought me home a book, and it was called “Immaculate Deception.” And it was about the beginning of midwifery in America basically. And that there's an alternative way to have a baby without going to do all the drugs and everything that had been common back at that time. 

I had a natural birth. I loved it so much. I started teaching childbirth classes and that led me to midwifery. I had done nursing. I didn't graduate from college because my husband left. I had two semesters left to go. So it was later that I finished my education when I came to Arizona and became a licensed midwife, and I practiced for 45 years here in Gilbert. 

It really was midwifery that led me to Africa and led me to start the nonprofit that we have now. I had a friend who had gone there, and she came back and said, do you realize the problem of maternal mortality in Africa? And I really hadn't paid a lot of attention to that at the time.  

When I started to look into it, I realized the statistics were horrible. One in seven women die of a pregnancy-related complication in Africa, and one in four children under the age of 5 died. This was in 1999 when I first looked at it. It's improved a little but not a lot. And so that's what led me to start Care for Life.  

So there had to be some sort of spark because friends mention something all the time, but something sat within you to actually start researching that. Well, at first, I really just dismissed the whole idea. But she asked me to pray about it, and I did, and I got a really strong feeling that I should go. We ended up going to Mozambique because there had been a huge hurricane that had come through and just devastated. The second day I was there, I made a contact on the street with a woman. And I said, “You know, I'm a midwife. I just came kind of to see if there's anything I could do.” And she said, “Oh, come to my house for dinner. My cousin is the minister of health,” and met him. He said, “Come to the office.” The next day, I sat around with the whole council at the Ministry of Health, and I said, “I could deliver babies in a displacement camp if you wanted.” 

And he said, “No, we want you to train the traditional birth attendants in our country.” 80% of babies were born outside of the hospital and with women that were not trained really. They were just illiterate women that were from the villages and doing the best they could. So that led to us going on a very long journey up through the really remote areas of Mozambique.  

And it was at that time that I really saw this level of poverty, extreme poverty, primitive poverty. Like, I could never even have imagined it. I'd seen poverty. We've been in South America, but this was a different kind of poverty. This was like, people had nothing, nothing. And they didn't even know the basics of what made them sick. I don't think that we have a clear understanding if we haven't seen it.  

Can you paint a picture? The thing that was most striking to me was the despair. I mean, there was no hope. People were just sitting. There was garbage. There was people sitting under trees. Everywhere I went, people when they saw that I was a white woman, they just come up and say, “Can you build me a school? Can you get us food? Can you build us a health clinic?” And, and I thought, “This is how they view us, as people who come and just give and give and give these kinds of things.” And I was really overwhelmed.  

Fast forward. I see this man under the tree and, and everyone's asking for things, and finally I just walked over to him, and he was an older man. You don't see a lot of older people. And I said, “You know, of all the things that you need, if you could just boil it down to one thing, what would it be? Because I'm just one woman.” He thought for a minute, and he said, “We need knowledge.” And that was a really big moment for me. I thought, “I don't have to bring all this stuff.”  

Those people really just had lost the ability to understand what made them sick or how to thrive or how to become self-reliant again. And so that was what we did. And people, well-meaning people, they want to buy dolls and they want to send clothes and all those things. But what has happened is it's created this culture of dependency, and it hasn't led to self-reliance of the people. We decided early on, we were going to do it differently. We weren't quite sure how, but I hung on to that idea of knowledge. 

So we went into the schools, and we started teaching that, and we did that for a couple of years, and it was really helpful. So after we did that a couple of times, we decided we needed to plant a flag. In fact, it was our Care for Life board that said, “We don't want you going all over like that, that might not be safe. You pick one area and let's go deep.” So we picked the poorest area that we had seen and that was in the central part of Mozambique. And that's where we established our nonprofit at that time.  

But there were these remote villages where the poverty was really extreme that no one was out there. And so we changed our approach and we decided to take our teachers to the villages. And at the time, there was an orphanage there in town. When we went there, it had about 90 babies, and they were just in cots just jammed in these rooms together and they had very few workers there.  

And when I got talking to the director, I said, “What happened to these families?” She goes, “Oh, a lot of these children have families. They, they could stay until they were 2. I think she said a lot of them have families, but they're so poor, they can't take care of them. So they bring them here so they don't die.” 

And at that point there were 11 million orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa, and it was projected to grow exponentially. Today, there are 55 million orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa. So the idea of helping one orphanage, you know, giving them some clothes for the kids or diapers or whatever, suddenly we're like, “mmm, no, that's not going to cut it.” So what we decided to do was go back to the family of origin in those remote villages before they fell apart and figure out how we could keep that family together. And so Facts for Life classes evolved into what we call the Family Preservation Program, and that's what we do now.  

We came up with a comprehensive program. There were eight areas of focus, and we came up with that program by sitting down with the local people and creating what they felt was important. And when I came home to do the research, one of the books that I found was a book called “People First.” And there was in it a little saying that became my motto. It was another one of those pivotal moments, and it said, “Go to the people, live with them, love them, learn from them, work with them, start with what they have, build on what they know. And in the end, the people will rejoice and say, ‘We have done it ourselves.’” So that's what we have always done.  

We do not go teach. We have local Mozambicans. We have a staff of 35 in Mozambique, and we go out into the villages and they, the staff, teaches the people in the villages to become the experts. And that's why we can leave. We're there for 2.5 years because it takes that long to do this cycle of self-reliance until they're able to do it on their own.  

If I could throw in a tip for the Giving Machines (in downtown Gilbert and Glendale), those are some of the things that you can purchase in the vending machine. For Light The World Campaign this year, you can do a latrine. You can do immunizations and health education. We have the gardening kit, we have home improvement. 

What's the future look like for this program? We decided rather than Care for Life going to another country, a much more effective use of this would be for us to train other nonprofits or other NGOs, non-government organizations, in these extreme poverty countries. And so that's what we're doing. Our goal is to share this with the world anywhere that extreme poverty exists, to share the program that's tried and true and can help people. We're just anxious to share it with the world.