Tinmouth native wins Fulbright to Bangladesh
Toolbox
By Gordon Dritschilo Staff Writer - Published: September 8, 2009
Between college and grad school, Melendy Krantz decided to spend a year talking to Bangladeshi midwives.
A Tinmouth native and recent graduate of Ithaca College, 23-year-old Krantz was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to work with a midwifery tutoring program in Bangladesh run by an organization called Building Resources Across Communities.
She departed Saturday and will return in late September 2010.
"I went to Bangladesh three years ago," she said Friday. "I'd always wanted to go to southern Asia and learn a southern Asian language."
Krantz said she found the country vibrant.
"The connection among women there is really solid," she said. "I wanted to learn more about that."
Krantz graduated from Mill River Union High School in 2004. She said she credits the work of an English teacher, Mr. Marsh, with helping her develop her writing skills in a way that made her take pride in her work and gave the confidence to pursue a Fulbright.
She graduated from Ithaca with a dual degree in anthropology and politics, and plans to seek a PhD in medical anthropology with a focus on maternal care.
In Bangladesh, she will interview midwives seeking training, finding out how the training program could be better-suited to their needs as caregivers.
"The training programs require a lot of women to spend time away from their families and it's a Western biomedical approach they're taught," she said. "It's taught in a way that doesn't seem accessible to them and a lot of the time it's taught in a condescending way."
Her research will be used in an effort to create training programs that are more conveniently timed as well as more culturally sensitive.
Krantz said 90 percent of Bangladeshi births take place at home because women feel mistreated in hospitals. For example, she said, cultural notions of modesty are disrespected in a hospital, whereas women can remain more covered if they wish at home.
A significant number of women and children die in childbirth, though Krantz said that is heavily linked to malnutrition. In turn, she said, malnutrition is linked to cultural ideas about how much women should eat.
"There's many, many layers of why women receive the kind of care they do," she said.
gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com
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