A mother for refugee children: Infant-feeding specialist helps new mums in Greece

Grace Bauer and her six-month-old daughter returned to their home in Abu Dhabi last week after spending 10 days in a makeshift camp in Idomeni, on the border of Greece and Macedonia.

Brooke Bauer, 36, an infant-feeding specialist, spent 10 days at a migrant camp in Greece. While she took her youngest daughter, six-month-old Fiadh, with her, her other children, from left, August, 4Show more

Brooke Bauer put her career on hold to focus on raising her children. But her inner activist led her to take up a new role – helping women in crisis situations to breastfeed.

ABU DHABI // Infant-feeding specialist Brooke Bauer has four children under the age of five and is breastfeeding her youngest daughter, six-month-old ­Fiadh.

So when she answered the call to go help new mothers feeding their babies in a migrant camp in Greece, she did not want to leave Fiadh at home in Abu Dhabi. So she took her with her.

Ms Bauer, 36, who is from Chicago, and Fiadh returned to their home last week after spending 10 days in a makeshift camp in Idomeni, on the border between Greece and Macedonia.

She said she found the lack of privacy there was a barrier to breastfeeding for many of the mothers she met.

“There are no blankets, no grass,” she says.

“Some mums struggle to breastfeed at night because it’s cold and they’re on the pavement and on the dirt.

“They’re automatically given C-sections at the overcrowded local hospital, then discharged straight away. There’s little food, and no place to wash hands.”

Ms Bauer and the other volunteers stayed in a warm flat with a shower and healthy meals provided. But the other breastfeeding mothers and their babies at the camp were sleeping in a tent with seven other families.

“The privilege of my passport was not lost on me,” she says.

She believes it is a misconception that the stress of living under such conditions would inhibit the mother’s milk supply.

“Malnutrition doesn’t ­affect the quality of the milk ­either. When you don’t relax, the milk doesn’t just go away, it just makes it slower to release. So to help release the milk, we have the mothers picture the babies when they grow older, laughing and playing in a new safe place.”

Ms Bauer is no stranger to helping out those in need in times of crisis. For 10 years she worked on public-health projects including health campaigns in Bolivia, mental-health projects in the UK, and maternal-heath projects in Kenya.

After the birth of her first child five years ago, Ms Bauer and her family moved to Al Ain and she put her career on hold to focus on raising her children. She then trained as a childbirth educator and breastfeeding consultant through the breastfeeding support group La Leche League so she could support mothers as a volunteer.

The Bauers moved to Abu Dhabi shortly after Fiadh was born. A few weeks later, a midwife friend asked Ms Bauer to go to Greece as her infant feeding specialist.

“Before I left, I decided to try to recruit a team to join me out there, and things just took off,” she says.

Within a week, she had set up the Nurture Project International organisation, which specialises in infant feeding in emergencies.

She has now recruited a site coordinator, a nutritionist, an ­Arabic translator, two volunteers, a mental health trauma ­expert, a lactation consultant and two midwives.

Ms Bauer says that using milk formula to feed babies posed ­extra risks in the camps.

“Bottle feeding in a refugee camp is very different to bottle feeding in Abu Dhabi”, she says. “In the camps, there’s a lack of clean water, equipment to heat the water and sterilisation equipment, which makes the bottles very unsafe. Teats are also hard to clean.”

Ms Bauer says having Fiadh with her did not impede her work.

When the baby needed a feed, Ms Bauer sat down with the camp mothers to breastfeed. The camp’s older children would ­often try to cuddle Fiadh. Gastric bugs, scabies and head lice were rampant, even among the volunteers – but thankfully Fiadh did not get so much as a sniffle.

“The kids there were so loving. But the parents would say ‘don’t kiss her on the face’, because they are aware they’re living in a situation where most people are unwell. That was what touched me the most. I felt that would have been so hard, if I was a mother in that situation.”

Anyone wishing to contact Nurture Project International should email [e-mail] or visit the website at nurtureprojectinternational.org