In just over a month, I will be delivering my baby in one of the best obstetric hospitals in my country. I will have the best doctors, a private room, and every comfort. If I wanted to, I could have a highly-trained midwife, and a doula, and have my home outfitted to accommodate a comfortable home birth. I have every reason to expect - even though I know that there are no guarantees - that I will have a safe and straightforward delivery. It is unlikely in the extreme that anything terrible will happen to either myself or my baby, assuming no complications with the pregnancy.

And once the baby is born, he - as his sister did before him - will receive the very best pediatric care.

I live in the West, in North America, and I expect this. If I were a Nepalese woman, I could not expect this. I could not expect anything close to this. And if I were a Nepalese woman living in the Rasuwa district of Nepal, I could probably expect the opposite. And if I were lucky enough to not lose my child - or my own life - I would face a long-term struggle to keep that child - and myself, and the rest of my family - healthy. The mother and child mortality rate in Rasuwa is two to three times higher than that of Nepal, which itself has among the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world. It's for this reason that the Karing For Kids Mother and Child Health Clinic is such an important project.

From the project webpage at Global Giving:

Prior to KFK’s Clinic it was difficult to find a mother who had not lost a child and impossible to find a household without a sick person. Child and Maternal Mortality rates of these communities have been almost two-to-three times higher than the national average. KFK's Mother and Child Health Clinic provides critical medical services to the 7,000 residents of Rasuwa district. In 2006 the Clinic provided over 1,200 patient visits, training sessions, and traveling health care services.

Karing For Kids established the clinic in 2000 to address the fact that Rasuwa's mortality rates were directly due to a lack of medical resources - the nearest hospital is over a day's walk away, and outreach programs were simply not reaching these rural areas. The clinic has now been providing services for almost eight years, and has saved countless lives.

The KFK Mother and Child Health Clinic in rural Nepal is one of the projects being supported by Global Giving, an online program that connects potential donors with community-based development projects. As Lisa Stone announced at the beginning of this week, BlogHer has teamed up with Global Giving in an effort to save as many women's lives as possible between now and Mother's Day. The Mother and Child Health Clinic is one such project, one that has already saved many lives and will save many more.

You can support the project in a number of ways. 1) DONATE: ten dollars will provide a year's worth of medical care to five women and children. (TEN DOLLARS. That's a grande latte and a low-fat blueberry scone.) 2) BLOG IT: write about the project on your blog. Post a button or widget linking to the project (get these here). Tell your friends, and tell them to tell friends. 3) DONATE and BLOG and SPREAD THE WORD: seriously. One post, and ten bucks, and a few e-mails. Just to help save some lives.

Priceless.