CMS finds a real Chummy

THE HUGELY successful BBC programme Call the Midwife inspired a Christian charity to track down a real 1950s midwife who was called to Sierra Leone to be a missionary following a character in the show making the move.

When Chummy, played by Miranda Hart, sent a letter to ‘The Church Missionary Society, Salisbury Square, London’, CMS’s address at the time, they decided to find the ‘real Chummy’.

The task was a daunting one though, with over 10,000 men and women having served through CMS’s history.

But from their Oxford offices they found Eve Vause, who was pedalling the streets of Southampton as a community midwife when she ‘got the call’ to Sierra Leone in 1958.

Eve says her experience of midwifery at the time was just like in the Call the Midwife shows.

Because of the difficult conditions, postings only lasted one year, but unlike Chummy in the programme, Eve went on to start nearly 25 years of mission in healthcare in Africa, in Nigeria, Uganda and Congo.

In Call the Midwife we’ve seen Chummy struggle with her calling, and Eve’s interview makes clear that following that calling was no easy ride. In Uganda she lived through the Obote and Amin years.

“One time I was certainly relying very consciously on God,” Eve says of her time in Uganda, “was when the army had been attacking our child health and maternity centres, and they had attacked and raped the midwives in one place.”

Penny Stradling, CMS’s vocational recruitment officer, says CMS is still recruiting healthcare professionals – including midwives – to share their skills and help train nationals who haven’t had access to the same levels of training.

“The chance of a mother dying in childbirth is up to 100 times greater in some parts of Africa than in the UK,” she says. “So there is still an urgent need. And church-run health centres and clinics often have the most effective grassroots network to deliver the healthcare communities need.”