Arm in Arm: PPB’s Korie Conant and IBMP
Monday, July 14th, 2008
Imagine that this is your freezer. No room for ice cream or a bag of peas and good luck trying to fit a frozen pizza in there. No, instead your freezer is full of milk. Breast milk to be exact. Bottles and bottles of breast milk. This is the situation Petunia Pickle Bottom owner Korie Conant found herself in when her now 8-month-old son Beckett was born 2 month early.
Like all preemies, at just 33 weeks Beckett had not mastered the “suck, swallow, breathe” reflex and had to be fed droplets of milk through a tube. Encouraged by the doctors and nurses in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital to pump, pump, pump to keep her supply up, Korie was left with an incredible amount of milk that her newborn son would never use.
“Seeing all those sweet little babies in the NICU and hearing horror stories from some of the other mothers about how little milk they were able to produce started to make me feel pretty guilty,” described Korie. “Here I had this overabundance of milk and the mother next to me had almost nothing. I couldn’t just pour the bottles down the drain.” After poking around on the internet, Korie came across the International Breast Milk Project. “From my first visit to the site, I was completely touched,” Korie recalls. “I really connected with the founder’s story of how she started the organization and as tired as I was from the emotional roller coaster of our NICU experience and as daunting as the process seemed—I just felt like this was what I needed to do.”
The International Breast Milk Project is an worldwide organization that provides donated breast milk to the over 3 million infants orphaned by HIV/AIDS in developing countries as well as works to improve the health care, sanitation, education and employment opportunities in the local communities. In May of this year, IBMP sent over 43,000 ounces of tested and pasteurized breast milk to South Africa, including Korie’s - equal to 10,000 meals for infants in need. “I felt very connected to the mission of the Milk Project and excited to be a part of it. Though there was a small pang of fear when it was all packed up and ready to be shipped. It was completely irrational fear…like Oh my gosh, what if my milk dries up tomorrow and I have nothing to feed my son!”
Although initially donating the milk seemed overwhelming, “the whole process turned out to be very simple,” Korie explains. “The people within the organization simplified the process so very little burden was placed on donors. All correspondences were short and to the point. Every shipment contained simple instructions, pre-addressed and pre-paid envelopes. I simply filled out the online application to begin the process and everything else just sort of flowed like clockwork.” For Korie, the experience meant an empty freezer and relief knowing that her extra milk was going to good use. For the orphans in Africa who received Korie’s milk, it meant life.
If you or someone you know if interested in donating milk or money to the International Breast Milk Project, visit www.breastmilkproject.org for information.
Beckett Conant, 8 months
Tags: Arm in Arm, donation, Korie