A Carmel midwife found her calling among Senegalese women in underserved rural communities.

It’s a densely populated area that has around 70,000 people living in 19 Kafountine villages. The villages are located on the Senegalese coast – a rural part, isolated by another country that itself is surrounded by Senegal, a thin and tiny Gambia. How did Carmel High School graduate Jill Diallo, a midwife who attended births on the Monterey Peninsula for years, end up in such a remote place?

One may call it professional curiosity and the urge to help. After attending births and advocating for women’s health care rights all over the world, Diallo founded the Senegal Health Institute that accommodates local births and reproductive care.

In 2017, Diallo built a health and family planning clinic, and in 2021, she built a birth center. The institute also serves as an educational center, teaching pre-natal classes and human rights in an environment where contraceptives are difficult to find.

“The doors kept opening, and I realized it’s my calling,” she says about her decision to work in Senegal. “I saw the brutality of childbirth in Senegal and I started to think: Is there a better way for women?”

Diallo connected with the Weekly via Zoom, showing splendid Senegalese weather and tropical scenery. She can work in Kafountine thanks to funding from various partners, grants and a generous community of women from Monterey County. Thanks to them, the institute is opening an ultrasound unit – currently women have to travel 45 minutes to use one, and it’s costly. There are also plans to modernize the space and add much-needed cervical cancer screening services to their package. Diallo works alongside midwives from Senegalese universities and traditional midwives.

Weekly: Describe the work you do at the Senegal Health Institute, please.

Diallo: We see between 150-200 women a month coming in for all of our reproductive health services, depending on their needs – prenatal, postpartum and newborn exams, STD testing and treatment, contraceptive use and family planning counseling. No abortion; it’s illegal in Senegal, which means we treat several women each week who have had botched and dangerous abortions with infections, etc. We even treat women with fertility issues and women with malaria and other illnesses, which has actually turned us into a small hospital. We deliver around 25-30 babies a month and growing – and fortunately about 90 percent of those women choose to go contraceptive, because we educate them and they have access to modern contraceptives. Still, in this day and age, only 12 percent of rural women in Senegal have access to family planning.

How is the experience of childbirth in the area where you are?

Many women come to us very late in pregnancy and some only when they are in labor. This can create so many complications, as many of these women are very anemic, have gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, preeclampsia or a breech baby.

If we have complications in birth that are beyond the scope of our practice, the nearest hospital is two hours away. Often the regional ambulance is in use; sometimes we wait two hours for the ambulance to arrive for women needing C-sections. We are able to stop hemorrhaging but sometimes we have to transport women for blood transfusions. None of this is easy but we do an excellent job at paying close attention to what is happening with the mother and baby during labor. This is life here… .very different from our world.

In what ways did you find yourself different from the local women?

The sense of community runs so deep here. If you do not have a home someone takes you in. In the States everything is at our fingertips. In Senegal, everything takes work – even the simplest of things and things we take for granted such as water, food, electricity, washing clothes, indoor plumbing, access to quality medical care and medications.

Women here have so little opportunity. So many girls never complete their education in Senegal or have never been to school. Many marriages are still arranged and the legal marriage age is 16. Which continues the pattern of a woman destined to have lots of children starting at a very young age and living in the cycle of poverty. Women in Senegal who are educated can support their families and usually choose to have a smaller family and have a voice to stand up for themselves and other women.

The SENEGAL HEALTH INSTITUTE will hold a fundraiser in October at Hidden Valley Music Seminars in Carmel Valley. For more, visit senegalhealth.org