. In its attempt to realize the intervention program to saving newborn babies with asphyxia, the Ministry of Health will initiate to train midwives in the village in order to that they know how to operate resuscitation equipment to save neonatal baby with asphyxia. The intervention program his dubbed successful if the mortality proportion due if asphyxia decreased to half as targeted. The survey was conducted in the rural area of Cirebon district. The sample was 200 neonatal death babies, calculated using the hypothesis test with different proportion; pl 0.3 (30% neonatal death cause of asphyxia, according household health survey 2001), p2 0.15, u 0.05, ß 0.2, (I-ß) 0.8. Neonatal dead cases happened within 12 months prior to the survey were identified by rural midwives out of their personal records. The death cases were followed up by interviewing the mother of the neonatal baby concerning its birth, illness or disorder histories before death. The diagnosis of the diseases were based on the International Classification of Diseases 10 and Wigglesworth classification, determined in union by NIHRD researchers and neonatologists. The neonatal mortality rate was 13 out of I , 000 live births. The major cause of early neonatal mortality was respiration disorder mainly caused by birth asphyxia (45%), of which 90 percent could be intervened by doing resuscitation for babies weighed more than 1.000 gram). The second and third order of the mortality causes was infection (22%) and congenital disorders (11%) respectively. The major cause of late neonatal mortality was infection (56%), followed by low birth weight and prematurely born, as well as neonatal jaundice (14 percent each), and congenital disorder comes in the third place. The option to handle asphyxia with the early neonatal babies is the right effort to decrease the neonatal mortality rate. And to achieve the utmost result, it is necessary that the rural midwives maintain their standard performance (in terms of quantity and quality) in their basic midwifery services, i.e. providing pregnancy health care and detecting as early as possible maternal diseases/complication. Besides, there must be continuous monitoring and adequate guidance from the counselor team from referral hospital.