Village Midwife

August 29, 1994 4:45 pm Essaouira training

It’s a new day and a not so new mood. I’ve been laying in bed for the past three hours playing hookie, dreading another hour of language class. Four hours a day, six days a week of language and I’m still unsuccessfully pronouncing these new sounds. They’re so foreign that I didn’t even know humans could make them. They come from the throat, and their r’s roll like rutters in every sentence.

 

We went to visit two traditional birth attendants (midwives) in two small villages outside of Essaouira. I’ve never met such a facsinating woman. We drove down a long dirt road with stone walls on either side. The landscape was much like West Texas with dry hills and small brush shrubs.

 

We pulled up to a mud house, got out, and started walking towards three women, one with a baby tied onto her back. We entered the courtyard, which had a mud oven off to the side, and into a room with no windows. Bamboo mats covered the floor, interwoven with colorful fabric. Blankets sat stacked against one wall, and huge bags of wheat lined the other. A buda gas stove sat in the corner with a tea kettle atop, and clay dishes used for kneading dough hung by nails in the wall.

There were five of us, all trainees, and a midwife from the Essaouira hospital. Women doctors in Morocco are rare. She was beautiful, probably around 35 or 40. She wore her hair in a bun and had perfect teeth behind her inviting smile.

 

There were a number of people in the room: two young girls and two men in their twenties, another 15, and a man in his fifties. In the middle of them, an old woman in her nineties, with no teeth, sat on the floor, looking up at us with her strong staring eyes and wrinkled face. She had hands worn and rough and a heart radiating positive energy and wisdom.

 

Within twenty seconds, the doctor’s legs were spread on the floor as she sat facing her, sitting on the old woman’s feet. She demonstrated how she delivers the babies, reaching her hands underneath the doctor. She has delivered over a thousand babies, including all of the family present in the room.

 

There is a tragedy here. In her ninety years she had not found someone to take her place. She tried once but didn’t like her. She knows she needs to find someone before she dies and asked us to come back. She’ll teach us everything she knows.

One of my jobs, once I get to my site, will be to identify these women in my village. I will try to encourage them to send at-risk mothers to the health center. I will help train them and change some of their practices, which may be as strange as putting cow shit on the ambilical cord.