Returning to Guatemala
Every Mother Counts & The Next Generation of Maternal Health Advocates
Like most mothers I know, I’m eager to teach my children how to be compassionate citizens of the world. I’m fortunate that my career and family history have made those lessons natural for them. They’ve grown up watching Every Mother Counts develop as an organization that helps make pregnancy and childbirth safer for mothers globally.
When I set out on this journey of motherhood more than a dozen years ago, I hoped that sharing my birth story would raise awareness and educate others about childbirth complications that can lead to maternal mortality; a global tragedy that impacts millions of lives yet so few people know about. I set the intention to do all I could to make a difference so that by the time my daughter was ready to learn about her own reproductive and sexual health, we’d have solved the global problems that restrict women’s access to information and healthcare. I knew that unlike adolescent girls in other parts of the world, my daughter would receive this information long before she might consider motherhood for herself.
Today, at twelve years old, Grace is hardly ready to consider all of this for herself but she’s already beginning to ask the important questions. There are countless girls her age who live in other countries where motherhood at twelve may not be the norm, but it is not uncommon and even tolerated.
In fact, the World Health Organization reports that the proportion of births that occur to adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean is 18 percent. They also report that in Latin America, the risk of maternal death is four times higher among adolescents than among women in their twenties.
I recently returned from Guatemala where I traveled with a small group of women and our children. Grace accompanied me on this visit, which centered around an initiative that Every Mother Counts supports called, Asociacion Corazon del Agua, that is working to improve maternal healthcare access and quality by training indigenous students to become university-level midwives.
I traveled to Guatemala for the first time when I was a small child after visiting with my mother’s family in El Salvador, where she was born and raised until her family immigrated to Los Angeles. We came back frequently for family visits until the war started in 1980. And once the war was over, I’ve returned many times. I brought Grace for the first time when she was six years old to meet our extended family and to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday in her birth country. Every trip to this part of the world feels like coming home.
In fact, it was on one of those return trips to post war El Salvador, while visiting development programs, that I realized how one’s birthplace alters everything. I was pregnant with my son at the time and acutely aware of the risks pregnant women can face. I recognized that if I’d had the birth complication I’d endured with my daughter in an isolated rural community like those we were visiting I probably wouldn’t have survived.
I returned to Guatemala once again in 2009 to film No Woman, No Cry and to examine the country’s maternal mortality ratio. I learned a lot about the country’s history, population, diverse Mayan culture, rich traditions and their strong world view that deeply honors birth.
We met incredible people who were dedicated to serving marginalized populations and supporting their traditions. Giving birth in Guatemala is called dar a luz or “give light,” which conveys the sacredness of the act. It was on this trip that we met Linda Valencia, the obstetrician featured in No Woman, No Cry, along with childbirth educators, doctors and midwives, who are called comadronas.
After the documentary was completed and Every Mother Counts was formed, I returned to Guatemala again to share the film with people who were fighting for women’s rights and birth rights.
As I became more aware of the scope and magnitude of maternal mortality — hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths every year and millions more women left traumatized or disabled — I asked myself what more I could do. What started as me sharing my story of a beautiful birth that became suddenly complicated, turned into a film and then an organization that provides solutions for maternal mortality and morbidity so that more birth stories can have happy endings.
Last year, we commemorated Every Mother Counts’ 5th year anniversary by committing to invest in all of the countries featured in No Woman, No Cry and once again, we returned to Guatemala; this time, to find a grassroots organization that needed our support. It was Linda who led us to Corazon del Agua.
Corazon del Agua was founded in 2014 and is working with the University of Galileo in Guatemala City on the very first university accredited School of Professional Midwifery in Guatemala.
My recent trip to Guatemala with Grace was Every Mother Counts’ first “Mother & Child” trip. Our first stop was to visit the first class of 16 midwifery students who will graduate this November. After moving introductions from each girl and woman in the room, we toured the birth center and dorms where students live and study together as they become parteras, a professional midwife. These women come from some of the most remote parts of their country. When they graduate, they’ll return home to serve their communities and take on the traditional role of comadrona.
The students and children made immediate connections after hearing their testimonies about why they left their families to enter this program. Their need and potential were so clear that language presented no barrier, as it so often does for birthing women in Guatemala. We thought about their stories throughout the rest of our time in Guatemala and I suspect our children will never forget them.
Leaving Corazon del Agua, I waved goodbye knowing I’ll return often to visit these women and hear how they’re impacting lives in the years to come. They’ve already deeply impacted my life and my daughter’s by demonstrating how to be compassionate citizens of the world.
My wish for Grace, and all the children on this trip, is that by better understanding the challenges women face and the solutions we know help, they will better understand their own birth options and reproductive rights. With this early exposure and education, pregnancy and childbirth-related complications and deaths could become the rare events they should be in our lifetimes.
