Re the birth of the course for public health nurses that Mira mentioned the
other day. This course is based on the UNICEF courses and as a pilot course
will be adapted as we go along.. I can not decide if I am the IVF person or
the ob-gyn in this birth, this has been one of my babies for longer than I
want to remember - all of us who are involved are very excited.

The thing that I find most thrilling is that most of the teaching will be
done by IBCLC's. This, I hope, will validate the profession here and give
us a big push forward.

Public health nurses, who see babies from birth to 3 years, learn about the
varied topics they need for work in VERY short periods of time. The
lactation course will be around thirty hours- the longest amount of time on
any of the topics they deal with  This is a real achievement for us 'good
guys'.

The Min. of Health in Israel is calling 1999 the Year of Breastfeeding
Promotion. December has brought us a myriad of good things in the lactation
world. Two terrific courses in lactation management (our Dr. Mira teaching
in both) for HCPs, meetings in the Knesset (our seat of govt.), open
discussions and publicity on getting the ABM companies to conform to the CODE.

 We can tell things are moving ahead by the various anti- breastfeeding
articles in the media. I personally am waiting for the 'look what happened
to this baby who breastfed' article in the papers similar to what we have
been exposed to in the NY papers over the last year.

You know that you are making progress by scope of negative remarks being
made.

Now I want at least 1,000 of you to either get up and pat yourselves on the
back or give yourselves a schmooch in the mirror - a huge number of you are
involved with the IBCLC's in Israel either on a personal or cyberlevel.

One last word on the Holy Land, this country only has about six million
people and is the size of New Jersey. We just seem a lot larger.

Evi in Ashdod, Israel
looking at the Mediterranean from my porch window