I hear you, Maya and Henya - the situation surrounding birth, breastfeeding and pathways to the IBCLC's exam is definitely the same since almost all Eastern European countries come form the same background and model.

After having had a successful peer councelling program for the past 5 years we are founding our own local breastfeeding organization too. So much is new, so much to consider, trying to first find a way and adapt it to our situation and then pave it for the others to come... founding an organization is not at all an easy task. Speaking of it, I was a bit surprised the Russian organization has the word consultants in their name, maybe because we gave it a very careful consideration and voted to leave it out of the official name (although we are called consultants in real life). Knowing about the controversy surrounding the term "lactation consultant" we discussed a lot and decided to not call ourselves consultants in our organization name at least, just to be able to make a distinction between volunteer and professional consultants. We hope that one day there will be enough IBCLCs here to form their own organization and have the privilege to be THE
 consultants. So our organization is called simply National Association "Breastfeeding Help" - a bit like Ammehjelpen.

I am so happy to hear ILCA materials are being translated into Russian. Most of the other peer councellors I am working with speak English fairly well and certainly enough to be able to read bf literature, but still we have a number of people who do not. But we have our country's relationships - past and present - with Russia and our languages are very close, so most of the people here (myself incl) have a decent understanding of Russian. Having materials and perhaps in the future - even a Russian bf journal - will be just great not only for the future Russian LC's! Keep up the good work!

Christina Yaneva, hopeful now
BF Peer councellor
Bulgaria




      

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