Sewickley woman helps late sister's midwife house dream come true

Ivy Case was probably best known for helping those in need, but her sisters Susan Buerklin and JoAnne Swift describe her as an artist, midwife, humanitarian and an old hippie.

Even after her death in May 2021 at age 67, Case’s life’s work of helping others continues. It’s a legacy that her sisters both feel honored to carry on.

“I always thought it took a country or a corporation to make a change,” Buerklin said. “This has shaken my life up. It just takes a few dedicated people with a purpose to make a change. It’s amazing the differences you can make in this world.”

In honor of their sister, Buerklin, of Sewickley, and Swift of Hobe Sound, Fla., helped complete the first Ivy House, a birthing center and mother’s waiting house in Tanzania. Completed in February, the midwifery house includes toilets, showers, education spaces, birthing rooms, a 30,000-liter rainwater catchment tank and an external kitchen. It is the first of many houses the two sisters, along with the nonprofit organization Humanity for Children, plan to help build in Eastern Africa.

The idea to build a birthing center came from Case’s lifelong work as a midwife in Missouri, where she helped deliver more than 1,000 babies and even played a pivotal part in passing legislation supporting midwives.

“She was well respected,” Buerklin said. “She worked on changing the laws in Missouri. She would bake apple pies and take them to the legislators and tell them that ‘home birth is as American as apple pie.’”

When she retired from being a midwife in 2012, the Mt. Lebanon High School graduate focused on her art.

“She was an outlier artist,” Swift said. “She never had any schooling in that, but she was very active in the Missouri art community.”

During her retirement, Case also started volunteering at Humanity for Children, an all-volunteer group dedicated to improving the quality of life for children in remote areas of East Africa. She wanted to continue to help mothers through the birthing process, a cause that Case was very passionate about, Buerklin said.

“She believed in helping people, she really thought she had a purpose in this life, that she had some gifts and she needed to use them to help other people,” Buerklin said. “She believed that.”

Case was in charge of training the midwives in more modern and safer birthing practices, according to the president of the board of directors for Humanity for Children, Dr. Bob Hansen.

“[Case] started training the families in basic things,” Hansen said. “She provided safe birthing kits, which provided basic supplies for them. For instance, she issued new razors to cut the umbilical cord. She provided areas to give birth so they weren’t giving birth on a dirt floor. She also taught other midwives to wear gloves to protect themselves from the spread of HIV.”

Eastern Africa, according to the National Institute of Health, ranks among the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world.

It was during one of her five visits to Tanzania that Case started planning a home for mothers.

“Her dream was to create a place for women to come, not only to give birth but to come ahead of time,” Hansen said.

Case died before seeing the birthing house come to fruition. However, Buerklin and Swift were determined to help continue their sister’s philanthropic dream.

“We were aware of her involvement in Africa and how much she loves humanity for children and respected them,” Swift said. “This was going to be her legacy.”

With no fundraising experience, the sisters were able to help raise more than $110,000 in just under two years. They sold recreations of Case’s art and provided safari trips to Africa, taking 28 Americans, including five Sewickley residents, to see the building site and meet the residents.

“We were very very lucky,” Buerklin said. “Humanity for Children already had the infrastructure; they had been there already for 10 years and built relationships. All we had to do was raise the money, which was the easy part.”

Ivy’s House was completed in February, and now helps up to 20 mothers at a time with the birthing process, Hansen said.

“It’s a pretty remarkable place,” Hansen said. “We call it a birthing center and a mother’s waiting house where they can come ahead of time, before any problems occur in labor, live there for a week or two and give safe birth there under the care of both professional health care providers and traditional midwives.”

The work is far from finished. Buerklin and Swift are planning to open a second house in an even more remote part of Eastern Africa in the village of Kimotorok.

“Going to Africa changed my life,” Buerklin said. “I was concerned when I went there I would have culture shock, but the culture shock I had came when I returned and I could turn on hot water out of my faucet. The things that we have that they don’t — the things we take for granted — it just really affects you.”

The sisters are now raising funds by selling Case’s artwork and handcrafts made by the local Maasai women.

“We are very fortunate that Ivy was an artist,” Swift said. “So we have recreated a lot of her artwork such as note cards, bookmarks and illustrations from her book about being a grandmother.”

Case’s work, along with the Maasai Women’s handcrafted work, will be on sale at this year’s Holiday Market at Sweetwater Center for the Arts from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Proceeds from those sales will be used to build the Kimotorok birth center.