Who would have thought that breastfeeding our baby would cause such a stir! Six years ago we joined Servants to Asia's Urban Poor and moved into a Cambodian slum. That first home in Victory Creek Bridge slum was surrounded on all four sides by other shacks. Our landlord completed the enclosure, living below with his boisterous family of at least 10 people. Beside our bed was a wall so thin we could hear our neighbour breathing in his own bed at night.
In Cambodia most people have been exposed to widespread advertising campaigns selling baby milk powder. As a result, almost everyone thinks milk powder is better than breast milk for their babies.
Not a huge problem really, unless you are poor. If you are poor like our neighbours you don’t have access to clean drinking water. So you mix up dirty water with milk powder and sooner or later your baby gets diarrhoea.
Again, not a huge problem unless you are poor. If you are poor like our neighbours, you may not know that a child with diarrhoea needs to be rehydrated. If you don’t know that, your baby has a good chance of dying of dehydration.
So when my wife Nay became pregnant, twice, what better opportunity to be a prophetic mother? Living out a vital message in the midst of our neighbours. Not that it was all one way of course. They taught us things too, and partially our child rearing approach today is based on what we learnt from our Cambodian friends and neighbours.
But in pregnancy and the early years of raising our kids we were offered a perfect opportunity to engage with our neighbours in a living experiment to see what we could discover together.
We decided to feed our daughter Micah nothing but breast milk for the first 6 months of her life: easier, cheaper and much safer.
Our neighbours could not believe that we would make this choice. Surely, we would be disadvantaging our children? And so Nay quickly ended up with a bunch of local women watching her progress on an almost daily basis. Since they could observe every aspect of our lives they knew full well that nothing passed Micah’s lips but breast milk.
After six months they were amazed at how healthy and chubby Micah was. And it was all on breast milk. Incredible. We realised that our presence had made a huge difference in their understanding of a life and death issue. A difference that could very well save lives.
Written by Craig Greenfield, International Coordinator, Servants to Asia's Urban Poor
