Volunteer Midwife Heads to Albania

Instead of going on a cruise for her 60th birthday, Simi Valley nurse Nancy Bulcha will be in Albania helping children of Kosovar refugees enter the world.

Bulcha said she knew she had to go to Albania after NATO bombing began and Kosovars began fleeing by the hundreds of thousands into neighboring nations.

“When I heard about the women giving birth in railroad stations and out in the field, I said to myself, ‘How come you’re not there helping them?’ ” she said.

Bulcha sought out an aid organization that would send her to Albania.

“That’s where the biggest need is,” she said.

Bulcha will fly to Albania on Thursday and return Aug. 4 after a six-week rotation with International Medical Corps.

She will be one of four volunteers from Los Angeles and Ventura counties heading to Albania under the auspices of the Los Angeles-based agency.

Bulcha will be working out of government clinics and a traveling mobile clinic that visits refugee camps in Albania’s capital and in Kukes on the tiny nation’s northern border. She will conduct medical assessments, facilitate the distribution of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies and help women give birth.

A certified nurse midwife with Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Panorama City, Bulcha has previously volunteered in disaster and famine relief, sometimes at great risk.

In 1984, one of her fellow aid workers was killed while she was working in Ethiopia. More than once during those days, members of her group had to take cover at the sound of gunfire, she said.

Her experience in Ethiopia was probably tamer than the situation in Kosovo, she speculated, although she thinks the organization is unlikely to send her to a war-torn region unless refugees begin returning to their homes in larger numbers.

Bulcha has attended the birth of 3,000 babies in the past 13 years. But the relatively advanced medical technology that aided her in those births will not be brought along.

Eventually, Albanian doctors and nurses will have to continue their work without the help of international aid organizations and their equipment, she said.

“Here, if you want to know the position of the baby, you run for the ultrasound machine,” she said. “There, we use our hands.”

For updates on the organization’s activities, visit the Web site at https://www.imc-la.org, or contact the organization at (800) 481-4462.