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Putting a dent in Angola's maternal death rate
After more than a decade of volunteer work in Angola's rural Matala district in the southern province of Huila, a Finnish doctor is seeing maternal mortality rates gradually come down in a country where about one in every 70 women dies in childbirth.
Since 1998 Birgitta Long has spent three months each year working as a volunteer in a run-down clinic handicapped by staff and skills shortages, and which battles to source emergency medicines, but she sees the growing queue of women coming for medical help as a step in the right direction.
