May 29th, 2009 :: Voyage au Mali
Last night the mango rains came. It started in the evening with lightening striking every once in a while as I walked back home from the internet café. At night, no one can see that I am a tubabo (white) and I can get really close before they realize this and the little kids begin yelling it after me. During the night it began to pour, louder that I have ever heard before, rain unlike any I have experienced before. If I had to guess what a monsoon feels like, this would be it. The sound was soothing, and yet astonishing. I got up and looked out the window at the yellow sky and the huge drops hitting the ground. It was very intense.
This morning, everything is muddy and it’s a bit cooler. Day one of the second stage has begun. Madame Berte has returned to Sikasso, a fact that I think will greatly influence the environment of this second group’s experience. Yesterday, when talking about breast feeding, she made some of the mothers sit on a chair at the front of the room and ‘demonstrate’. The little girl I had played with the previous day (and spent the afternoon with her strapped to my back—I will be doing this with my own children in the FAR future---it felt so natural and freed my hands to do whatever, while she was cool as a cucumber and happy to play my hair and smile) was turned this way and that as her mother and Madame berte tried to make her stay still in the correct position…it was a jovial room, everyone was laughing and asking questions—the best kind of active learning.
Dr. Coulibali is incredibly dynamic and a great facilitator- he gives great positive reinforcement and makes the women feel comfortable and keeps them engaged. It’s hilarious to me that all the photos in the slideshow presentations show white babies feeding on white breasts. I don’t think the matrones will be encountering many white bodies en brousse in the near future.
The women were asked to come up with topics they are hoping to learn in this stage. One woman said she wants to know what happens because the baby will be washed and fine and then she’ll return and it will be dead. This is astounding. This is their reality. I try to imagine such a scenario in the U.S…. the women WANT to know why this is happening, what they can do about it…mind you, this is not their matrone training. They have been practicing and doing their best with little resources, combating these occurrences with little understanding of the sources of these deaths. I say to myself, well I am happy that they get to have a forum to ask questions and learn here, and this must mean so much to them, but on the other hand, I think of the women who returned to their villages today. It seems so unfair to place so much responsibility on someone without fully preparing them. They are the best care most women in Mali can hope to get.
We had the women fill out a short questionnaire, and one question was, which part of being a matrone do you like most? A majority put down: I love everything about birth. For these women, it’s a calling to be a matrone; this is how they center their identity. In this sense, while overworked, underpaid and under prepared, these women truly love what they do, believe in its importance and continue to do it lovingly despite the conditions. For me, who finds pregnancy and birth fascinating, miraculous and so powerful, these narratives fill me with pleasure.
My next idea, get a VW van and put up a matrone-education traveling show. Hey, as one of the only white people around I am already a circus show, why not go all out?
