CHEER champion of the week: jasmyne cain!

Jasmyne with son, Carsen, receiving an "Exclusive Breastfeeding for 6 months" award from Tawanda Logan-Hurt, Director of the CHAMPS Delta Hills Baby Café

​Jasmyne Cain is a ROSE Community Transformer Peer Counselor and a Volunteer at the CHAMPS Delta Hills Baby Café in Greenville, Mississippi. She was nominated as CHEER Champion of the Week for the wonderful job she is doing as a volunteer and for her own success in breastfeeding her son, Carsen!
 
Jasmyne says before she was pregnant, she “never really thought about” breastfeeding. “You don’t really hear about it or see it where I come from,” she says.
 
Then, when she was 6 months pregnant, she met with a nutritionist at the Washington County Health Department and saw a note about breastfeeding on the wall. She decided she would try it. She asked the nutritionist about it, who told Jasmyne about the CHAMPS Delta Hills Baby Café. She also put Jasmyne in touch with Maggie Allen, IBCLC, the Lactation Consultant at the Baby Café. The very next day, Jasmyne went to the Café, and she has been going ever since. Maggie visited Jasmyne in the hospital when she delivered Carsen, and at first, breastfeeding was difficult. But once Jasmyne brought Carsen home, he latched right on and breastfeeding became a success. Jasmyne exclusively breastfed Carsen for 6 months when she started to give him some baby food. Carsen is now 10 months old, and Jasmyne’s goal is to breastfeed for a year.
 
“He’s the happiest baby,” Jasyme shares. “He has hardly been sick, and if he has caught a cold it has only lasted for 2 or 3 days.”
 
Once Jasmyne started breastfeeding and getting support at the Baby Café, she decided this is the kind of work she would like to do. She looked for opportunities to increase her knowledge and pursued training to become a Community Transformer Peer Counselor through ROSE (Reaching our Sisters Everywhere) in March 2017. Since then, she has been volunteering at the Baby Café and passing on her knowledge to other moms. She participates in group discussions and encourages other moms to breastfeed. Some moms also ask her questions through Facebook or over the phone.
 
“Other moms see me breastfeeding and say, ‘you make it look so easy,’” shares Jasmyne. “I love sharing my thoughts and knowledge because a lot of women don’t know the benefits of breastfeeding. It excites me and I enjoy giving them information. I tell them it’s the best thing ever.”
 
Jasmyne’s plan is to pursue more training to become a Baby Café Breastfeeding Counselor. She is also interested in opening either a new Baby Café or a similar kind of center that would be open more days out of the week. 
 
“I’d like for Baby Cafés and/or similar centers to be everywhere,” Jasmyne says. “Breastfeeding is not really normalized as much here. People don’t know much about it and for that reason, I want to encourage other mothers to breastfeed. This is what our bodies were made for, so why not do it.”
 
Congratulations, Jasmyne, and thank you for sharing your time and knowledge with other mothers! 

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