That time I saw a childbirth in Perú
I think childbirth is terrifying. Beautiful, incredible, even miraculous, but also terrifying and ever so physically uncomfortable. I’ll be twenty seven in a couple of weeks, but I’m not counting down and wondering how long till my baby clock stops ticking. It’s just not me. So, I’m not entirely sure why I decided I wanted to see the whole process of a birth, much less the birth of nameless child from an unknown mother in a developing country while I’m serving as a PC volunteer. I suppose simply because I could. It would make a good story. And, if we’re honest, it’s an experience that, although I’m not sure I personally want to have, I wanted to see how it really plays out. You know, get a little perspective.
After a few false starts with host families, I moved in with my current family just under a year ago. When I learned that my older host sister was an obstetrician at a local health center, I asked if it would be possible see a childbirth or a “parto” as they call it here. She agreed, but the idea just never really formulated. Until last week. I don’t even remember why the topic came up again, but it did, and the next thing I knew, we had scheduled to go to a different health center where her friend worked a few days later.
Like most of us, I’ve seen enough movies with images of screaming, sweating women to have a decent sense of what I was getting myself into, or at least I thought so. But in most of those movies, children are born in hospitals, in sterile rooms, with masked doctors ready and medicine and machinery of all kinds available in case of a complication. It’s a little different here.
I met my host sister at 7:30pm just as she was getting off work. Together, we rode in a collectivo, a shared taxi, to the next town over where her friends were on the overnight shift, in charge of any childbirths that arrived after the main hours of the health clinic. The clinic is a large one and women come from smaller, nearby towns that don’t offer an overnight clinic for unscheduled births. We arrived not long after it had gotten dark, crossing our fingers that we would see a birth quickly, and could head home by ten or eleven o’clock and still get some sleep. If only.
We arrived and the place was as quiet as could be. It was also incredibly hot. In the recovery room, two women lay on simple hospital beds as they made it through their first night with babies that had been born earlier in the day. They were alone together in a large room, no family, and not speaking even to each other, from the little I observed. My host sister and I made the rounds as she introduced me to nearly all the night staff, and then we looked at each other, and settled down to wait. She told everyone I was there because I was about to get married and wanted to be prepared, then would look at me and smirk and I would laugh, since nothing could be farther from the truth. She had already worked a full day, and I quickly said that we needn’t stay long; I could always try and come back another day now that I had met everyone, and didn’t want to keep her up. But we had already made it there, and within an hour or two, someone brought us a tupperware of rooster soup. After eating the soup, we could hardly up and leave, or, my host sister said smiling, it would look like we just came for a free meal. So we stayed, waiting in the entrance room, sitting in plastic chairs and listening to music from a mini speaker she had packed in her purse.
There was, of course, no wifi. The windows had screens on them, with was a rarity that I noticed and we talked about as time dragged on. We were both sweating, because despite the fact that it was ten, and then eleven at night, the temperature and humidity were, as we say here “insuportable.” Eventually we turned the light off in the waiting room and leaned back in our plastic chairs. Most of the staff went to sit outside hoping to escape the heat with the small breeze outdoors. Sometime after eleven, the staff offered up two extra hospital beds in a back office for us to try and sleep while we waited. I asked my host sister if we should just go, but no, she figured we had stayed this long we might as well wait it out. Someone was bound to have a baby eventually that night, she said. So we made our way to the back and fell asleep immediately, despite the heat and the fact the the sole fan was at the other end of the room where the only electricity outlets were located.
The next thing I knew we were being summoned. Groggy, we sat up and went to greet a very pregnant women who had just arrived. It was 12:23 in the morning. I watched as my host sister handled the situation. The women laid on a flat, immobile hospital bed, although it was more like a bench the size of a bed than an actual bed. There was no clean hospital paper covering it, just a bit piece of red plastic. There were no tools do an ultrasound. She took a small, hand held device and held it against the woman’s abdomen, and it picked up the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, just enough to satisfy everyone there that the baby was fine. But this woman was no where near giving birth. We sent her off to rest and went back to bed. I lay there, awake for a little while. I wasn’t sure what to think.
When I had asked to see a birth, I had presumed that I could simply come to the health center where my host sister worked and see one during her actual work hours. But as it turned out, that center doesn’t do childbirths anymore, except in cases of emergency. As I lay in the hot darkness, still wearing the jeans and t-shirt and converse I had put on earlier, I was amazed that my host sister cared so much about my off-hand interest in seeing a childbirth that she was here, staying up all night with me, just to pull it off. She still had to work the following day. I had packed my iPod and headphones, and nearly put them in, but stopped, falling asleep again to the sounds of the nighttime out the open window and the whir of the fan across the room.
At 3:50am, the staff called for us again. Another woman had arrived. We got up, shook the sleep out of our eyes, and tried to look lively as we walked into the exam room. The woman was there, waiting for us, lying on the exam bed, looking ready to burst her belly was so large. I watched from the sidelines as my host sister took the handheld device and listened for the baby’s heart, which echoed from the tinny speakers through the quiet room. It pounded rapidly. She put on a single glove on her right hand for the quick exam and determined that the woman was nearly at ten centimeters, which, in the last few hours, I had come to learn was the magic number for giving birth. The woman was in her thirties and this was her fourth child. While she looked uncomfortable, she was as calm as could be, clearly having done this many times before. My host sister told her the baby would come soon, and she asked the walk around to hurry it along. We led her to a long hallway, and she began her slow, waddling pace back and forth, back and forth, which lasted for the next several hours.
By about 6:30AM, she was getting pretty ready, and the staff took her into the delivery room. They wrote down a list of all the medicines and supplies she would need to give birth - paper towels, four pairs of hospital gloves, etc. I stood there in surprise as they asked me to give the list to the woman’s mother who was waiting outside, and send her to buy the required materials. The health center doesn’t provide even the most basic of materials, expecting the patients to come prepared. The delivery room was sparse. It had two flat, basic beds, a scale to weigh the baby, and a few other apparatus to keep the newborn warm and such. An IV was placed in the woman’s arm, and the bag of liquid hung on a rusty metal stand whose wheels stuck and didn’t spin properly when it was pushed across the floor. There was no clean white piece of paper on this hospital bed either, instead, a plastic trash bag lay on top of one end, and nothing covered the rest of it all. At the foot of the bed, just past the trash bag the woman lay on, a trash can was placed, and I slowly realized that this was the extent of hygiene and sanitation process.
The delivery room was sweltering. I had to leave once or twice to get air, afraid I might pass out from the sheer heat of the place. There were no open windows, and no fan, and just standing there you could feel the sweat dripping on your face. The woman’s labor continued, and the staff were called away to help someone else, that, and they just couldn’t stand the heat while they waited for the woman to be truly ready to give birth. I sat in the room awkwardly with her. I didn’t know whether to talk and distract her, or be silent. I’ve never had a baby, so how was I supposed to know what she would want? I tried to remember that I was a social worker, and had gone to graduate school studying how to help people and be supportive, hoping that would magically inspire me to say and do the right things. Mostly, I just sat there, though. She was all alone, sweating heavily, and I couldn’t bear to leave her, so I didn’t. I used a handheld, flip-open fan to try and keep her as cool as possible, although the effort was almost in vain, the heat was so intense. Eventually, she asked me to call the doctors, and as I walked to leave the room, she stopped and said, “Don’t leave me, I’ll go with you,”which was clearly not a good idea, so I just called loudly out the hallway for someone to come, and in a few minutes, they did.
When the baby was ready, the room that had been empty was swarming. There were up to about seven women in the room, plus the patient. While they prepared, putting on protective clothing and gloves, they talked about other childbirths, and complications and I wondered if it made the patient nervous to hear them talking about these things. I can’t imagine talking about another woman’s potential miscarriage in front of a women about to give birth, but they simply chatted nonchalantly like it was normal. I suppose the contractions probably kept the patient distracted enough perhaps she didn’t even hear them. It struck me, as I watched all these women there, supporting each other and about to bring a new life into the world, that this was something of a sacred sisterhood. In the midst of a machista culture where men are in charge of everything and where women are often relegated to the back seat and to the passive role of observer, here, these women were in charge, empowered to welcome new life into the world, and they supported each other without reserve. In that delivery room, for a least a few minutes, no man could snatch that power away from them. It was a world all their own.
As the contractions got more intense, the obstetrician, a pretty, young woman who don’t look much older than myself, gestured me to come beside her. “You wanted to see a childbirth, right?” she said, and I nodded as she pointed to the space next to her, where I could best observe the whole process from up close. I moved over next to her, and waited. The woman was quiet. She didn’t scream or shout, but she was breathing hard. It hit me just how primal the whole process is. As a human with self-awareness, sometimes I forget that in 99% of how we function, we are nearly the same as every other animal out there. And this, this whole process of carrying and creating a next generation inside, this process of pain, of release, of separating a growing fetus now live baby from the umbilical chord that fed it, the way in which the body on it’s own begins to cause contractions and push the child out of the mother, the whole thing is such a basic process of nature. Miraculously complex, but seen in species after species, across the globe. As I stood there, the baby appeared slowly. It needed some help, as it got a little stuck. The obstetrician grabbed the protruding head and twisted and pulled, and I was afraid she would break the infant’s neck. But she didn’t, and a few minutes later there he was, laying on his mother’s belly as they wiped him down and cleaned things up, and his cry pierced the air for the very first time.
I turned towards his mother and smiled, and asked if I could take his picture. She said yes, so I took a snapshot. And then we had to leave. But as I went to say goodbye, she smiled at me tiredly, and told me how grateful she was that I stayed with her all morning. I smiled back. And we left. And the mysterious, terrifying idea of childbirth found it’s place
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
jbbartram-illu