Preparing and Breathing

I am readying myself for another journey.
A year later and somehow no less complicated.
Last year in Uganda the goal was to work on a maternity ward at a government hospital serving mostly refugees of the war.
The trauma was deep (go back to the June 07 archives of this blog to read about the experience) and it manifested not only in the care that women received, but in the culture surrounding birth and intrinsically, death.

My partner and I worked in a hospital with no running water and unreliable electricity, and perhaps it was that our goals were not clear enough or that there really is a fine line between helping and hurting, or that we put ourselves in a traumatizing situation from which we had the privilege to walk away from, but ultimately we never managed to escape the dynamic of insider/outsider. I believe that both of us had radically different experiences of our time and of the ward itself.

I returned from that trip with post traumatic stress disorder. I began to have panic attacks and had to slowly peel back the layers of hurt and anger that I had pushed through in order to survive, in order to work, in order to be a healer to the best of my ability in that environment. Many things have come up in this process of reflection that have brought me to an innate trust that both personally and globally, change begins within. So how does a person, a group, an organization effect sustainable change in a space that so desperately needs help?

The Earth-Birth project has been a long time collaborative vision between myself and my co-midwife Olivia. Over the last year much has happened to turn vision into reality and without going into a long list, I will say that the turning point for me was when I realized I needed to stop pushing up against a system that isn't working. The question of why 'western' medicine is problematic in under-resourced areas is a subject of much fascination to me- and is the heartbeat of my work in academia, narrative medicine and midwifery. Right now it's all questions- but the main goal is to create sustainable birthing centers that allow women access to important maternal and child care while at the same time offering opportunities for emotional health, healing and empowerment.

So how do I enter into this?
Midwives say its all in how you breath.
Find the center of it, go deeper, allow it to fill all the little spaces and then release. Expansion and contraction.

I am feeling the contraction after expansion. Perhaps it is the necessary tightening before opening wider. I wonder how a person stays open despite the past.