Why I Teach Birth First Aid
I was not trained first in emergency. I was raised first in trust. I grew up in the mountains of Ceres, about an hour down a dirt road from the nearest town. We cooked on fires. We had no electricity. If you called an ambulance, you would wait at least an hour. So we learned to take care of ourselves. My mother grew medicine in her herb garden. She dispensed remedies to the local people. We learned first aid simply because it was necessary. I remember sitting at twelve years old with tweezers, picking glass out of a man’s scalp. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just part of living far from everything. That was my first education in steadiness. My mother became a traditional midwife almost by accident. The first birth she attended was a breech. She turned the baby in labour and the baby was born well. After that, the local women called her when they were in labour… I have no memory of anything “going wrong” at those births. Birth happened in the middle of the night.And life went on. That imprint shaped me. So when I teach Birth First Aid, I need to be clear: The focus is not emergency.The focus is physiology. In most cases, birth unfolds beautifully when the mother feels safe and unobserved, when adrenaline is low, when the environment is right. But nature also teaches us that not every flower opens. Not every peach ripens. There is a small percentage of mothers and babies who require some help at birth. Over the years, and across roughly four hundred births, there have been rare moments when I needed to step in. And I have been deeply grateful for the muscle memory in my body when that happened. Not to control birth.Not to manage it.But to gently bring things back onto their path. Birth First Aid, for me, is about this middle path: Deep trust in physiology.Clear understanding of normal.And the steadiness to respond when something truly requires action. Using your head.Using your heart.Following your gut.And when needed — using your hands. That is why I teach this course. Not because birth is dangerous. But because birth is powerful. And power deserves steadiness. Join us for the next cycle of the Birth First Aid course:...
Read MoreBirth First Aid: Roots, Trust, and Preparedness
We are three weeks away from starting the next cycle of the Birth First Aid for Mother and Baby and I find myself wanting to speak to where this course actually comes from. Not in terms of curriculum or structure, but in terms of roots. From the age of 8, I was raised in a rural, mountainous part of South Africa, far from towns, hospitals, and easy access to help. We lived without electricity or hot water, and “making a plan” was simply part of daily life. My mother, a farmer and a self-taught rural traditional midwife, was my first teacher. Part of her work revolved around growing herbs, preparing natural medicines, and offering care to the local community. Birth happened quietly, often in the background of everyday life. Sometimes in the middle of the night, and then life simply went on. To be honest, it wasn’t something we, as children, paid close attention to. It was simply part of the landscape we grew up in. Women trusted my mother to sit with them while they birthed their babies, and this trust felt natural and unremarkable at the time. Birth wasn’t feared. It was accepted as a normal part of life. My mother had a still, calm, and deeply accepting presence. The women she supported often spoke of her quiet nature and her healing hands. And although much of this was absorbed unconsciously, it shaped something fundamental in me: a sense that birth, when held with trust and respect, usually unfolds as it should. Later, as a birth attendant myself, I experienced those rare situations where a baby struggled to breathe, a mother lost more blood than expected, or a birth asked something extra of those present. These moments taught me that preparedness does not need to mean fear, and that calm, grounded response is very different from panic. This understanding was later deepened through my work teaching Helping Babies Breathe and Helping Mothers Survive in African hospital settings. These experiences reinforced that even in moments of urgency, calm presence and simple, well-understood responses matter more than fear-driven reaction. This is the soil from which the Birth First Aid course that I now offer grew. The course is not about anticipating disaster or turning birth into a clinical event. It is about cultivating steadiness, discernment, and confidence. Knowing when to trust the process, and knowing how to respond when gentle, respectful support is needed. Birth isn’t about fear. It’s about trust. And when we hold birth with trust, and pair it with simple, well-understood first aid skills, we create safer, more held spaces for mothers and babies, without unnecessary intervention. If this way of approaching birth speaks to you, you’re warmly invited to read more about the course and its upcoming cycle...
Read MoreI am Woman, Hear me Roar!
Thank you Mom for teaching me to Roar! For knowing deep down in your bones That inside you Was embedded A freedom That needed to be let loose And allowed to dance in the wind Thank you Mom For climbing the mountain And standing at its peak And roaring Roaring Roaring into the wind Letting the wind hear your anguish and your sadness and your pain Whilst we children giggled and tumbled and played in the bushes and amongst the rocks And felt bashful about our weird mom roaring at the wind Thank for you for teaching me to roar It is embedded in my spirit And I will never forget The image of you, my mother, roaring into the wind And seeing how the wind received you And roared back (written 09/08/2024 – Woman’s Day, South...
Read MoreThe Little Green Statue
As a midwife and a mother, I cannot help but contemplate my own birth when the Earth circumnavigates the sun and reaches the 22nd of July each year. The little green statue is a little object which has always been a part of my life and has always stood either next to my mother’s bed, or balanced on her bed’s headboard, or stood on her dressing table, or was hidden in her cupboard. No matter where we lived, the little green bust of the African woman made of Verdite, was there, watching over our family. Ever present and always there. When I was 15, I travelled to Switzerland, the land of my birth, as an exchange student. As a parting gift, my mother pressed the little green statue into my hands. She told me that it had been presented to her by a woman she had counselled in the late 70s. My mother was volunteering as a rape counsellor in Cape Town at the time and the woman showed her gratitude by presenting my mother with this gift. My mother also told me that when she was pregnant with me in July of 1980 in Switzerland and was due to give birth, she took the little green statue with her as her birth companion. She was a single mother and had been booked for an induction at the fancy private hospital at Stefanshorn. In essence, the little green statue was her doula. My mother had wanted and planned a home birth. She had been born at home, as had her mother and her grandmother before her. But the man of the house where she was renting a room banged his fist on the dining room table and made it quite clear that there was absolutely no way this African girl was going to squat down and give birth in his house. The nearest birth centre was in the next Kanton and so a compromise was reached that she would birth at the private hospital at Stefanshorn. ‘My’ due date was the 29th of July but the doctor was going away on holiday during that time and so my mother was booked in a week earlier to be induced. Coincidentally, she was booked in on my father’s wife’s birthday, something his wife insisted was done on purpose to upset her (It wasn’t. Long story. Read here if you want more background info on this). She was driven to the hospital by the sister of a friend and induced in the early hours of the following morning. She laboured on her own, a monitor strapped to her, using the breathing techniques she had learned and practised from her natural birthing books. My father snuck calls from his family home in the UK, shouting breathing instructions at her. He probably considered himself to be a bit of an expert, being the father of three children already. (Fucking mansplaining childbirth to a woman in labour! No wonder she hung up on him!) In the end, my mother huffed and puffed and sweated and heaved whilst clutching the cool stone statue in her hands. She held it against her burning cheeks and sweaty forehead and it reminded her of home. She said that in that cold and sterile hospital, the little green statue was her connection back to South Africa. My mother birthed me fairly easily it seems. She never made a fuss of it when she told me about it. I do know that she did not tear and that I weighed 5kg (11lbs). I was loved and breastfed and carried on her...
Read MoreI’ve Come Home
Today is my mother’s birthday and on her birthday, I usually like to share this story of her first catch as an accidental midwife. I thought of sharing her birth story, as I know she was born at home, in Athlone, as was the case with most Cape Coloured births at the time. I know that when she was born, the house across the road burnt to the ground and that a woman was trapped inside it and died. Birth and death in the same road on the same day. Recently I held a ceremony of healing for myself , a circle of strong women who held me emotionally and spiritually while I let go of old shit and allowed the new to be birthed. And there I read this story to everyone. It is a story about my mother, a story she told me a long time ago. It is the story of when she, after twenty years of living in Switzerland, living a very Swiss and white existence, was led by a friend on an inner guide meditation which hauntingly reminded her of where she had come from. Her roots. A story which very much altered and shaped our lives. As births do. So today, on this day when she would have been 66, I share the story of her rebirth. “Close your eyes, Carol,” Matthias said. Matthias was a tall skeletal gay man. A Buddhist psychologist friend who worked with Carol at the psychiatric hospital in Bern on floor D2. Carol was lying on her back in Matthias’s sitting room. She lay, surrounded by a pile of Indian silk cushions, one under her head. The sun streamed in through the window and onto her, making her feel comfortable and sleepy. Her children were with their father, he was down from London on one of visits. Single parenting was hard, but it was also what she had chosen. She was enjoying this much needed and uninterrupted break. “Relax, just breathe. Let everything go. Forget about everything. Just be…” She felt the air move in and out of her nostrils. She felt her body relax and she felt her breath becoming more regular and prolonged. I could stay like this forever, she thought, her tired body tingling. And with each out breath, she felt the weight of her body sink into the floor. Aaaah… “Now, imagine yourself in a landscape…” She saw herself standing in a grassy meadow. She was high up, high above sea level, with the most marvellous view, rolling hills and snow-capped mountains. Blue skies. Blooming flowers. Bright green, dotted with buttercup yellows and pinks and whites. The air felt warm and she wanted to lie in the grass. She listened; the air was busy with the work of insects. A stereotypical Swiss summer scene. How positively blissful, she thought. She felt herself drift off. “Imagine an animal walking towards you from a distance. It is heading straight for you. Looking very determined.” She found this disconcerting. There was no animal and she felt that the presence of one would be irritating. How dare Matthias bring up something so silly and disconcerting? Then unexpectedly, a great big elephant’s head arose from behind a hill and its body crashed through the tranquil scene she had created in her consciousness. She panicked and wanted to run but her legs wouldn’t move. Where the fuck did that come from? It headed straight for her and yet seemed oblivious of her presence. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck! Just as she thought she was going to be trampled, it...
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