CNN Hero includes Philippines in 2012 plans

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Midwife and health advocate Robin Lim has gone home to Indonesia and has resumed work helping new mothers give birth, shortly after landing the 2011 CNN Hero of the Year title this week in Los Angeles.

With a $300,000-cash prize in tow, Lim also started planning an improved maternal health care advocacy for 2012, which now includes the Philippines where her mother and her grandmother were born.

Lim, a Filipino-American, operates a clinic called Yayasan Bumi Sehat (Healthy Mother Earth Foundation) in a small village in Nyuh Kuning in Bali, Indonesia. Her successful practice drew her the most number of online and telephone votes to win the CNN accolade.

In an e-mailed letter last week, Lim wrote: “The Philippines and Indonesia really voted so much, millions of people believed in me … There are so many layers of support … Japan voted, Russia voted … but most wonderful was to know that in the Philippines, people really care.”

However, Lim said she had observed arguments among online bloggers as to whether she represented the Filipinos or the Indonesians.

“My mother is Filipino, thus my heart is truly Filipino. My grandchildren are Indonesian. Some of my children are married here [in Bali],” she said.

Born to an American father and a Filipino mother, Lim, 54, is the granddaughter of the late Vicenta Munar Lim, a midwife who served in Baguio during World War II and who inspired her to pursue the same career.

Lim’s relatives from Baguio helped draw many of her CNN votes. She said she spent part of her youth in the city from 1966 to 1968. As a child, Lim said she remembered Vicenta take care of her when she suffered a mild kidney ailment.

She also lived with cousins in the summer capital in 1998.

She said she planned to “organize Safe Motherhood and Child Survival projects in the Philippines.”

Child survival and safe motherhood initiatives have been undertaken in many countries since the 1990s to help reduce maternal and infant deaths through the popularization of prenatal and postnatal health care protocols.

“There are so many powerful women I know there, who are willing and ready [to take up these initiatives],” Lim said.

She said she also looked forward to visiting Baguio so she could pursue her plan of establishing a natural birth clinic here. “[But] if God could give me one wish, it would be to have another ‘self’ [who could] live in Baguio and serve the Philippines, full-time,” she said.

The CNN Hero title included a $250,000-cash prize and another $50,000, to which Lim was entitled for becoming one of the year’s 10 nominees.

However, the amount has been allocated for a new Bumi Sehat clinic, Lim said.

“[The cash prize] is not enough to build a proper clinic that will be earthquake-safe and [which will] serve the many thousands of people we help, but it is enough to make a start. I believe everything we need will come to us … This is a great year and 2012 is going to be even better!” she said.

“One thing I will do as soon as I can is launch a very lovely website called ‘Wisdom Birth,’ a place anyone can [enter to] find the truth, some comfort and [a venue to] share,” she said.

She added: “With 981 mothers dying [each day] on earth from complications of pregnancy and childbirth … there is a lot of work I must do. I don’t expect to rest.”