Squat and Push

The rainy season has officially begun here in El Chaco, which means everything in our house is permanently moist. On the rainiest of days, like today, our water gets shut off, because it becomes super dirty from all the erosion.

My family left last week after a very moist visit. My mom, my sister Emily, my brother-in-law Chris and my cousin Matt came to Ecualand for 10 days and seemed to really enjoy the rain. In addition to doing touristy stuff the main focus of the visit was a course for indigenous midwives, which went surprisingly well. For some reason Matt and Chris weren’t interested in attending and went hiking instead, but Gregg R.N. really loved it.

When my parents came back in April, we went to a lodge in the jungle and met a super cool Ecuadorian named Miguel. He led us on a medicinal plant tour through the rain forest. My mom expressed interested in doing something “medical” down here. She is a family physician and my sister is in her second year of residency. After working with several medical brigades from the States I strongly discouraged just seeing patients and giving out free medicines. After my mom explained about how she teaches Advanced Life Support in Obstetrics, Miguel came up with the idea of doing a course for the midwives and 9 months later it happened.

Gregg and I worked with Miguel, another PCV Yvonne and an association of indigenous midwives to plan the course in Archidona, about 4 hours from El Chaco. Without getting into any crazy medical mumble jumble, the course was about what to do when there are problems during a birth. I talked to the family doctors about only teaching practical stuff that midwives can do without any fancy U.S. hospital medicine or equipment and they did just that.

I’ve really learned during this whole Peace Corps experience that it is important to make every “project” an exchange of ideas. I get so frustrated when other NGOs, Europeans, U.S. doctors come in and act like their way is the only way and that the Ecuadorians don’t do anything right. This course was a success, because we made it a true exchange of ideas and practices.

For example, Dr. Mom would talk about shoulder dystocia and how you can repositioned the mom and/or baby to get the baby out and then the midwives would talk about how they get the shoulder unstuck and get the baby out. I think both parties seemed to really enjoying learning about other practices and sharing their own.

The midwives all speak Kichwa, which is the second biggest language here in Ecuador and speak Spanish as their second language. Some of the oldest women in the group understood very little Spanish, so everything had to be translated from English to Spanish to Kichwa. Luckily Miguel dominates all three languages and helped us with the translation.

The course was four hours a day for three days. 20 midwives attended daily between the ages of 30 and 75. Some of the older women had assisted in more than 2000 births! They taught us a lot about their birthing rituals and the medicinal plants they use. Women give birth standing up, holding onto a rope and then squat and push out the baby.

On the last day, we had a closing ceremony and the women danced and sang to us. We presented them with Peace Corps certificates for completing the course and gave them some little gifts. I’m not sure if they were more excited about the certificates or the free t-shirts that my sister had donated to them through the March of Dimes. We were thrilled with the necklaces they gave us- especially the one made with a toucan’s beak.

Trip highlights:

-My sister Emily hates the word “moist.” Since it rained A LOT during their trip we got to be moist and talk about moisture a great deal.

-After picking the fam up in Quito, we made our way back to El Chaco and arrived about 2 a.m. I was giving them the grand tour of our house and we stepped down from our living room into the second part of the house. As I was showing them the kitchen, laundry room and bathroom, Chris wisely noted, “Wow. We’re outside.”