Tales from the field: Sanur
Below is an email I recently received from my friend, midwife Ibu Robin Lim, in Indonesia. When I visited Bali last fall, Robin took me to a slum where many of the women and children she cares for reside. Below is a recap of a night she recenly spent there helping a mother following the delivery of her twins. This is just one glimpse into her life but you can easily get a sense of the extraordinary woman Robin is and all she is doing to ensure women and children get the care they deserve.
— Christy
Last night a Sumbanese child arrived in the place we took you to visit in Bali.
My Husband Wil got up to drive me to Sanur at 1 am, as a young Sumbanese woman in the slum had given birth to her second baby, on the cement floor, and no one was there to help her.
We flew to Sanur, normally a 1 to 1.5 hour trip, but at that hour with no traffic we made it in 22 minutes. We ran the traffic lights, as we were concerned for the mother and baby’s condition. There we found 24 year Rani in a pool of her own blood. Baby shivering on a wet rag, on the floor, all of the people around, and there were dozens, behaving like chickens with their heads cut off. The men were smoking.
Rani’s first Baby, a tiny girl I had delivered only 11 months earlier, was asleep on a wooden palate. It was a scene out of “Dickens goes to Asia.”
I stopped the hemorrhage, warmed up the baby (skin to skin with his mother), cleaned Rani up and stabilized her. Helped Rani and her Baby sort out self-attachment breastfeeding. Waited until Rani needed to pee and helped her, so she would not bleed out again. And then, just before dawn I burned the umbilical cord, and tried to make the Mother-Baby space sacred and clean.
This morning, I am tired, but full of gratitude that Rani and her Baby are alive and well. I left some hard cooked eggs for her, and drinking water. Later today I will return, wade through the rainy season’s mud and deep puddles, to reach Rani and check on her and the Baby.
This is the Family clan that gave us our adopted daughter, EllyAnna. Bumi Sehat has helped 16 year old girls from this clan, deliver second babies, with no man to claim his offspring. This is the 6th time they have called me to a birth in this slum, and four of these times they called after the Baby was born, and when the mother was hemorrhaging. I have explained the risks. Have told them again and again and again, that we don’t mind coming out as soon as the first contractions begin, to avoid this risks of losing a mother or baby or both. However, somehow, this scenario plays like a rerun. Mother has pain, no one calls me, until it is too late, and they are in a panic.
Though nearly a dozen other babies from this clan have been born at Bumi Sehat, free, and with hugs and prayers and happy SAFE results, whenever a woman goes into labor after dark, no one can be bothered to contact us, until there is chaos and hemorrhaging. I have observed that if a man from the clan has so much as a cough, everyone will bend over backwards to bring him to the clinic.
Had EllyAnna not somehow ended up our adopted daughter, this is the kind of life experience she could expect. When I reflect on that possibility, I give up mourning the fact that her birth family felt it wise to adopt her away. We are trying to give her a joyful healthy life, full of love. We can’t give her her Sumbanese culture, language or the power to weave cloth from fiber and indigo and songs. When she has her babies, it will be under very different circumstances. And I am not sure I should share these stories with her someday…. My own mother is so ashamed of the poverty that she came from. This is why she abhors my novel, Butterfly People.
Today I am full of gratitude, for ALL the generous help we have from all over the world, that make it possible for us to respond quickly to such childbirth emergencies. Thank YOU for being on our side, for making motherhood safer, Day and Night, in so many countries on Earth.
Love, Ibu Robin
