Vessel Is Me Project

Vessel is Me was established out of a need in the healthcare system in Uganda to provide bereavement care to identify key actions and behaviors that can ensure that all bereaved families receive high quality care and support following the death of a baby.

The psychological and emotional impact on mothers, couples and their families and society in general is substantial, yet the care received by parents in Uganda is appalling. 

Our research tells us that grieving parents want maternity staff to demonstrate sensitivity and empathy, validate their emotions, provide clear information, and be aware that the timing of information given may be distressing. Parents also want support and guidance when making decisions about seeing and holding their baby. Sensitivity, respect, collaboration, and access to information is essential throughout the experience of miscarriage, stillbirth or newborn death. Research has shown that parents and their families do not receive quality care and support following the death of their baby.

We would want to set up 65 Vessel homes to support, equip and train medical staff and bereaved parents in Uganda.

Vessel Is Me is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving care for families who have experienced pregnancy loss, neonatal deaths and couples dealing with infertility. We offer peer counseling, professional grief and trauma coaching and perinatal bereavement training.

In January 2019, Vessel is Me was founded as a place for parents who have experienced the death of a baby to meet up and discuss their shared grief, the yearning for belonging underpins everything we do. Vessel is Me is the only provider of perinatal bereavement support services in Uganda, providing direct emotional support to over 300 bereaved families each year. Our model of peer-to-peer support places us in a strong and unique position to provide hope and understanding to bereaved parents and their families in Uganda.

GOALS & OBJECTIVES.

• Increase awareness & promote education on Pregnancy And Infant Loss (P.A.I.L) and male & female fertility challenges
• Strengthen research and advocacy of P.A.I.L & fertility challenges
• Offer emotional & spiritual support to grieving parents & couples dealing with fertility challenges

Each year in Uganda, there are approximately 40,000 stillbirths (>28weeks’ gestation) This number doesn’t include; miscarriages, medical termination (birth defects, ectopic pregnancies, moral pregnancies) because Uganda doesn’t issue death notifications for these deaths (<28weeks’ gestation) If all deaths were registered and each woman/couple received a death notification, we would have concrete numbers to show the vastness of this issue. This number would be catastrophic, meaning that miscarriage, stillbirth or newborn death will occur in 1 in 3 Ugandan women in their lifetime.

Vessel Is Me support services include support lines, men’s support line, email support service and live chat, the first online live support one- on- one chat for bereaved parents, face- to- face support groups are also delivered every second Saturday of the month for women and once every three months for men. Vessel is Me distributes key information via digital and print brochures, available through health services, Vessel Is Me offices and our website. `We train volunteers and trained staff deliver thousands of hours of training for health professionals both online and face-to-face to help develop their bereavement care skills.

Breaking the mould and the silence around reproductive trauma cuts across all cultural and religious boundaries. The toxic holds these systems have set for women and couples dealing with this trauma has pushed Vessel Is Me to be the voice of reason, enlightenment and awareness. This hasn’t been an easy journey because there’s a lot of deception and dishonesty rooted in this area of life. Many men won’t speak openly about male factor infertility and women, society doesn’t give them a platform to release or seek professional help. In regards to infertility, it’s always the woman’s fault, well as with pregnancy loss or infant loss mothers experience a lot of self-blame and guilt about the loss but again they are not given a platform to heal or to receive comfort. We are shading  light on issues pertaining to: Maternal Mental health, Perinatal Mental health, Pregnancy Loss, Baby loss. Male & female infertility

We inform society, women and couples going through this experience, by sharing educative pamphlets on reproductive health, rights and mental health and hosting UN-Masked episodes during key awareness weeks in our events program, attending TV and radio interviews to discuss the stigma around reproductive injustice.

Having first-hand experience as a team has helped us come up with a curriculum for any woman or couple's journey through this trauma from the medical centre to home setting to work place. It teaches: kindness, empathy, care and identifying key points of closure that will help greatly in the healing process e.g.  taking photos of the baby, allowing the mother and father to spend time with their baby either holding the baby or cleaning the baby depending on how old they are, etc. These all become points of closure because the parents get to internalise and acknowledge the death of their baby. 

For couples dealing with fertility, we offer grief coaching as well as peer talk theraphy. These are supposed to be provided by the health care system but we have since gathered that most of them are under staffed, over worked and under paid and the ones who do care are those who have gone through a reproductive loss themselves as thus empathise. This led us to train our own angel parents who would volunteer, some have come on board permanently to be situated in different hospitals we have partnered with in our journey thus far.