Margaret "Migs" Muldrow

COVID-19’s multiple frontlines now include at least 46 countries across the African continent. Many, including Ethiopia, have frontline health care facilities battling without one of the most critical tools: adequate water and sanitation. In an email as truth-telling as it is disturbing, my colleague and friend, Shimeta, ordered his employees to work from home by the time his country was reporting 19 cases (the count is now ~44): “Medical facilities and structures are very weak to handle such pandemic diseases. In Africa and especially in Ethiopia, the death toll will be unheard of up until now. One of the small… Read More »Health Care Facilities Are Everyone’s Frontline

As Published on nbcnews.com $500. It was a small donation that has saved scores of starving women and children, and another chapter in my unexpected story: a family determined to do good in a troubled world, and an imam willing to open his heart. My dad had been a missionary and engineer with the Presbyterian Church in an Ethiopian village so remote, it was not on Google maps until two years ago. My strongest memory is from third grade when a woman arrived at the rural health clinic where he volunteered. She’d been in labor for 4-5 days and her… Read More »$500 That Traveled the World

I found myself in a packed labor and delivery ward. When a woman gave birth to an unexpected twin who was not breathing, we had no choice. With virtually no protective gear, two nurses I’d brought with me jumped in and saved the baby. We had no way to clean up, because this massive, overcrowded hospital in Ethiopia hadn’t had water in six weeks. We left covered with blood. The operating room, as well as the labor and delivery room, were cleaned with a single cup of water from one of the containers that had to be trucked in. We… Read More »What I’ve Learned as a Doctor in Ethiopia