2 Pinays bag golds – for breastfeeding

While Filipino athletes came home empty-handed from the Beijing Olympics, two Filipino women recently bagged gold medals in the Chinese capital for promoting breastfeeding.

In line with the celebration of Breastfeeding Week last Aug. 9, Elvira Henares-Esguerra, director of Children for Breastfeeding, and Nona Andaya-Castillo, director of Nurturers of the Earth, were cited by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) for their “outstanding work in breastfeeding advocacies.”

The two presented the gold medals to President Arroyo who was in Beijing at the time to attend the opening of the 2008 Olympics.

Esguerra and Castillo are both International Board Certified Lactation Consultants and head various moves to promote exclusive breastfeeding among infants during their first six months of life.

The WABA also awarded a gold medal to Chinese policewoman Jiang Xiaojuan, 30, who left her own six-month-old baby to the care of her parents to help in relief operations in the earthquake-stricken Sichuan province in western China last May.

Xiaojuan breastfed nine surviving infants whose mothers were either dead, missing or traumatized, leading the media to call her the “police mom.”

Esguerra and Castillo, on the other hand, received the accolade for their Breastfeeding Marathon Events that included the Beijing launch and 40 other events in the Philippines as build-up activities for the second Synchronized Breastfeeding Worldwide set on Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. Philippine time.

The two initiated the first Annual Synchronized Breastfeeding Worldwide in 2007 participated in by more than 10,000 mother-baby pairs from 16 countries.

Aside from their promotion of breast milk, Esguerra and Castillo have also been monitoring the violation of milk companies and medical professionals of the laws that protect the breastfeeding culture in the Philippines.

Before winning the gold medals in Beijing, the two advocates put the Philippines in the Guinness Book of World Records for simultaneous breastfeeding in a single site in Manila in 2006 and in multiple sites nationwide in 2007.