Feb 9, 2005 5:30 pm US/Pacific
SF Woman Brings Prenatal Care to Homeless
By Kate Kelly
(CBS 5)
Working as a nurse in African gave Martha Ryan two things: a passion for helping people and the key to making her efforts a major success.
"I found myself stepping off an airplane in Mogadishu and I smelled the air and thought, 'This is exactly why I went to nursing school, so I could come back to work here,'" she says.
In Somalia, Uganda, and Sudan, Martha battled catastrophic epidemics of meningitis, cholera, hepatitis, and measles. She and her colleagues vaccinated tens of thousands of people. The only reason that they succeeded was help from the victims themselves.
"We were able to control all of those epidemics, not because of the western medicine, but because of the women we trained who were refugee women in the camps," she says.
Martha had no idea that system would become the foundation of her life's work, which she unexpectedly found in San Francisco's tough Tenderloin District. She was getting her master's degree in public health and volunteering at a homeless shelter, and she was disheartened to find the number of pregnant women on the streets getting no prenatal care.
"I would go out and say, 'This is a problem,' and people would say, 'Oh, that's terrible,' but nobody did anything," Martha says.
So Martha did it herself, founding the Homeless Prenatal Clinic in 1989. And that's when the lessons from Africa hit home.
"I took a third-world model that was incredibly successful and I brought it to one of the richest countries in the world," she says. "I realized who best to work with the homeless women I was wanting to serve and trying to reach, but women themselves who have been homeless?"
Anntoinette Fort used to use and sell drugs. She was abused by her boyfriend, and she was pregnant.
"Lord, without Homeless Prenatal I don't know really where I would be," she says.
The program got Anntoinette prenatal care, housing, and job training. Then it put her to work helping women just like her. Anntoinette now helps lead the support group she used to lean on herself.
Homeless Prenatal serves nearly 2400 families a year. It's work that gives Martha great joy.
"We see miracles and successes on a daily basis," she says. "It energizes me. It keeps me going because I know it works."
For guiding countless mothers-to-be from homelessness to self-reliance, this week's Bay Area Jefferson Award goes to Martha Ryan of San Francisco.
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