Carol Catches Twins
My mother, Carol, was a ‘lay’ midwife (ie she never received any formal training as a midwife) but accidentally ‘fell’ into the catching of the babies on our farm Droëland. This is the story of the birth of the first set of twins she attended. They were undiagnosed twins (i.e unexpected): Willie and Sannie had been on Droëland for about a month when Sannie went into labour. They arrived one Sunday morning on foot with their two children, a boy and a girl, and settled into the labourer’s cottage next door to Dappie and Marie up at the Barracks (this was what the labourer’s cottages were unofficially called). Sannie was heavily pregnant at the time and my mother joked that Sannie was carrying a rugbyspan (a rugby team). Two weeks after Sannie and Willie’s arrival, the farm labourers were being driven into Ceres for their bi-weekly shopping trip on nat naweek. (Literal translation of ‘nat naweek’: ‘wet weekend.’ This refers to the weekends when the farm labourers were paid. They were paid every other Saturday. Unpaid weekends were referred to as ‘droë naweek’, ie. ‘dry weekend.’ ‘Nat naweek’ also refers to the fact that most of the farm labourer’s wages were spent on wine.) Two vehicles, the truck and the bakkie (pick up truck), drove the 60km dirt road in convoy into town. It was about eight in the morning on a beautiful spring day in October. At the turn at Witklippies (one of the neighbouring farms), the truck overtook the bakkie. Willie was sitting in the back of the bakkie and eager to get to the bottle store before anyone else, decided to jump from the bakkie on to the back of the truck. He missed and landed on his head. He was never quite the same again after that. Smell the freshness of the air. The farm only smells like this in spring. Fresh and warm. My mother was in the kitchen with my younger sister Gypsy. “Mami! Mami!” Jasmin (my younger sister)’s voice called from outside. Jasmin had been up at the Barracks and had heard Sannie screaming from the labourer’s cottage. Jasmin had nervously poked her head around the corner of Sannie’s bedroom and seen Sannie crouched on a thin sponge mattress on the cold cement floor in strong labour; the usually shy and quiet woman behaving like an enraged wild animal. Births on the farm had by now become routine for our mother. She now had a well stocked birthing kit. Our mother took her time in getting ready (much to the irritation of my two youngest sisters). She chopped some wood and washed the dishes and put some food on to cook on the wood burning cast iron Defy Dover stove, before heading up to the young woman in labour. Our mother walked up to the Barracks with Gypsy and Jasmin, who rushed ahead burning with curiosity. My sisters ran up and down, rushing our mother along but our mother refused to be rushed and ambled slowly up to the Barracks. Our mother was ushered into the bedroom by An’ Ragel and An’ Christine. Gypsy and Jasmin joined the other curious bystanders in the kitchen (mostly children). Jasmin had been instructed to boil a pot of water with some cotton yarn (to tie off the umbilical cord) and a pair of little scissors. Jasmin did this, feeling useful and proud at having been given this job. The labour went quickly and smoothly and soon a little boy slid out of his mother. Our mother wrapped him in a towel she had brought with her (there was absolutely nothing in the house for a baby). The new mother pressed her breast to the baby’s little face and he began to eagerly suckle it....
Read MoreMeeting a Traditional Midwife in Malawi
Marianne Littlejohn and I volunteer for Operation Smile by teaching the Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) programme. In June of 2014 we were flown to Malawi to teach at the Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe . Over five days we taught approximately 40 people each. Malawi is an amazing country. It is incredibly poor but we were really pleasantly surprised by the hospitality and kindness and receptiveness of everyone we met. What I love about the HBB programme is its focus on normal birth, its simplicity and its adaptability to whatever environment it is presented in. We have so far taught in high tech hospitals, to home birth midwives, low resourced settings, to doulas and mothers. Each course is different because it works with the experiences and environments the people being taught bring to the workshops. Kamuzu Central Hospital is a reasonably well equipped hospital with sensitive and compassionate midwives. Some of the people we taught were very experienced midwives, doctors and paediatric nurses with many years of experience with very compromised babies. There was interesting discussion and sharing of stories and knowledge – we definitely learned a lot from the people who attended these workshops. One of the women we taught, Violet, a highly experienced midwife, told us about the work she used to do providing training and education and equipment to Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) in her region. TBA is the term used to describe traditional or lay midwives who have no ‘officially’ recognised training. Usually they have learned their skills from other traditional midwives. It is a controversial title as it takes away the centuries old title of ‘midwife’ from those women who have always attended pregnant and labouring women and who often carry skills and knowledge passed down through generations. Violet told us about a TBA living in a village not far from Lilongwe and offered to take us to meet her if we could organise the transport. The following day we organised a car and a driver and were driven about 45 minutes outside of Lilongwe over dusty and bumpy clay coloured roads, past simple handmade clay brick homes and thorn trees and goats and women wearing colourful cloth skirts. Along the way, Violet told us that TBAs had been the backbone of maternal care for a very long time in Malawi. She told us that the Malawian government had trained many TBAs in basic midwifery skills to provide care for pregnant and labouring women. The government had also provided updates and further education every month to the TBAs to ensure their skills were kept up to date. The government had also provided the TBAs with equipment and medications. It had been Violet’s job to provide these updates and education to ensure that the TBAs were following best practice when caring for pregnant and labouring women. Violet’s duties had also been to ensure that the TBAs were stocked with the medicines and equipment they needed. She had enjoyed this work. She had enjoyed the travelling and admired the TBAs she was responsible for. Two years previously, in a drive to encourage women to seek care from hospitals, the Malawian government had banned TBAs. This had not really changed the birth statistics in the hospitals, Violet said, all it had done was driven the TBAs underground and yet most rural women still sought care from the TBAs they knew and had grown up with, and who had probably attended their mothers when they themselves were born. Lack of transport to the hospitals made it difficult for mothers to get to the hospitals even if they wanted to. The government...
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