News & Events
Celebrating 100,000 Lives Monday, June 29th, 2009 -- Hospital de la Familia and Hospital Santa Maria-SADEC Celebrate the Births of 100,000 Babies.
First there were two, then 100. Within a couple of years there were thousands, then 90,000. Thirty-five years later, FEMAP welcomed 100,000 lives to this world.
On June 29th, FEMAP celebrated the birth of its 100,000th baby, Alison Gonzalez Diaz, at the Hospital de la Familia in Cd. Juarez. Lucinda Rodríguez Montes gave birth to Alison, a healthy six-pound girl on Friday, May 15th. In her honor, Alison was presented a variety of gifts such as a stroller and bath tub. That’s not all – El Paso Community College generously awarded Alison with a college scholarship!
The two-hour long event featured Flutist and UTEP professor Melissa Colgin Abelyn who played for the crowd and poet Enrique Corbarer read a loving poem to celebrate Alison and all the other children that have been born in the last 35 years.
Artist Angela De la Vega spoke about her latest sculpture "Joy". The sculpture is of a little girl with her arms stretched out to the sky. "She is full of joy and hope," explains Angela. The sculpture welcomes patients and visitors at the entrance of the newly remodeled Hospital de la Familia.
Since 1973, FEMAP has worked to provide low income Juarenses access to health care and improve their quality of life by providing over 600,000 services per year at two fully-operating hospitals. FEMAP's enduring leadership and commitment to expanding quality health access to vulnerable communities started with the establishment of the Promotoras Program. Its impact was evident in a testimony by Promotora Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez's testimony. She remembered how the Promotoras a group of women were invited to help educate the women in their community about family planning and prenatal care invited to promote the health of women in colonias from door to door until we got to every house because we saw the need women had for help in planning their families. "Every pregnant woman was invited to our small clinic so she could get prenatal care," remembers Maria. "Mas y mas gente venia y como dicen los cholos, ya no no la acababamos," she adds in Spanish. "But that changed. Because of FEMAP, we've had access to many medical services in the last 35 years."
Monday's festivities not only celebrated the birth of Alison, but also the birth of a new juncture of collaboration between the FEMAP and Seguro Popular, Mexico's social insurance system. Oscar Villalobos, secretary of Community Development of the State of Chihuahua, and Guadalupe De la Vega, FEMAP Founder, signed an agreement so that SADEC's medical units provide medical care to 5,000 families (2.3 children per family) for a total of 17,000 people.
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