Monday July 27, 2009 9:57pm
It’s quieter tonight. After the heavy rains, it got noisier at night –some kind of frog came out of hibernation, or went into heat, or god knows what, decided to thank the froggy gods for so much rain I guess. For whatever reason, every night for a few nights, after the heaviest of the rains, the choking sound of their croaks was layered over the top of the already considerable Balinese wildlife caucophony and it was harder to sleep. It hasn’t really rained in a few days now, and tonight we’re back to the locusts and the regular frogs and the crickets and the geckos and whatever else.
My comforter has disappeared. Which is ironic, because I’ve always thought the thick comforter on my bed was kind of odd given how humid it is here. I’d often wrestled with it in the night, trying to find the balance between the comfort of it’s weight (hence “comforter”) over me, and kicking enough leg or arm out of it’s cover to make it cool enough to sleep. But now that it is gone, I miss it. The day after Austin left, the housekeeper changed my sheets. I was sort of sad about that because I lost his smell on the pillows, and grateful for it as well. I took it as a sign of compassion from the housekeeper, like she understood the psychic implications of sleeping alone in a bed you had shared with someone you love but who is gone. It seemed better that she changed the sheets after he went home, so I could reclaim my bed for myself, not sleep every night in the ghost of his presence. I realize this is probably NOT why she chose to change the sheets when she did, but was grateful for it anyway. But she took my comforter to wash it as well. It needed a good wash, because it had spots of blood all over it from my leg wound. But it hasn’t returned. I asked about it yesterday and they told me that it has been too rainy, so nothing will dry in the humidity. While I understand that, really there isn’t another comforter I can use? Anywhere?
So tonight, we will improvise. We! Kira is here! I picked her up from the airport today and have spent the afternoon with her showing her around Ubud, catching up, talking about best friend stuff. She’s currently showering and getting ready for bed, which makes another reason why its great that the sheets were changed, because who wants to sleep in the bedding of a couple? But doubly inconvenient that the comforter has absconded, because who wants to sleep on a bed with no covers, especially on your first night in a strange place with strange sounds, sharing a bed with someone who is not your husband?
Tomorrow is the cremation ceremony everyone has been preparing for all month. One of the villagers died recently, and so they have a big cremation ceremony to burn an effigy of the body (they bury the real body nowadays). We will attend, in ceremonial dress, which I am excited about. This is a very big deal, everyone will be there, and it’s a pretty neat opportunity to witness real Balinese culture in action. Beyond that, the day is unplanned. Kira is feeling like a trip to the spa would be nice and what kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t oblige her? My guest is ready for bed. More soon.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Tea For The Tillerman
Friday July 24, 2009 11:37pm
I spent a long day at the clinic today attending the birth of a first time mom with a very asynclitic baby –a child neither committed to being transverse OR straight posterior, but in a funny place in between. The mother was complete at 11:30 this morning, and began to push and continued to push until she finally had her baby, with 13 people in the room, most of them midwives, at 5:15 this evening. That is a loooong time to push out a baby, even for a first timer, and not something midwives normally do at home. Kate, who was primary for this birth, caught the stubborn stinker and managed through either luck or skill, to help keep a very tight perineum intact. Well done, Kate. All through the first hour or so of pushing, my spidey sense was tingling. There was something not right about this second stage and while my heart continued to chime in that the baby would come, I was uncomfortable with it. In the end, the baby did come. And I was also right that there was something unusual about what I was seeing. But I definitely had moments, like the 2 hours of visible head, the hour of crowning, when I thought maybe the baby wouldn’t come on its own. Today was a good lesson in patience and a reminder to trust this process. That even after 6 hours of pushing and seemingly impossible positions and fits, babies do tend to come.
This baby came, I need to acknowledge, after Sue arrived. A reminder of my revolving door of characters: Sue is a homebirth midwife from Austrailia, has been for 30 years, was traine by an old timey doc who still did homebirths and who was eventually stripped of his medical license for training homebirth midwives. She knows great luminaries of midwifery and woman centered care like Ina May Gaskin and Sarah Buckley. She’s amazing and I’ve been learning a lot from her since being here. She’s also the mother of Tessa, the Australian doctor that I’ve become friends with here as well. They are a great team to have here. Sue’s energy was fresh when she walked into the birthroom about 30 minutes before the baby came. Everyone was tired, but the energy picked up as soon as she arrived. I cannot overstate the help and importance of having someone fresh to revive flagging energies at a long hard birth. Whenever I observe a particularly difficult birth, it is easy to sort of deflect it like, well, this won’t ever happen to me. But that’s not true. I have to pay attention ESPECIALLY at the hard long ones because, like it or not, there will be hard births where I will be exhausted and out of ideas and feeling like maybe the baby won’t ever come. And it is at that point that I will need help, a second pair of hands, a fresh set of eyes, some new perspective. This is why I love the idea of working in partnership instead of alone, of having a community that is supportive of you, so you have other midwives you can call on when its been 24 hours and you haven’t eaten or slept and you can smell yourself and you’re starting to hate the family you’re working with, and thinking about just walking out of the house and out of your job. Because there will be days when I will need to be able to say “Oh my god! This is taking forever!” and someone I trust to say to me, “Yeah, and? The baby is coming.” At any rate, the baby came. Probably would have come even without Sue’s energy, but I probably wouldn’t have wanted to stay for the end.
I was thinking about this a few hours after the birth when Sue called me over to “meet” her husband on Skype’s video chat. Her husband and I exchanged pleasantries and he asked if I was a “budding midwife” and Sue piped up, “She’s a midwife already. She’s getting ready to sit her final exams. She’s very skilled and a straight shooter and has a wicked sense of humor and I’m trying to convince her to move near us to set up a group homebirth practice with me.” As I burned with pride and embarrassment at such glowing remarks from someone I respected so well, her husband informed me that it was quite a compliment coming from her. I totally got that.
It is true that Sue has mentioned a few times recently, in a breezy mostly-teasing sort of way, that I should move to Australia and come to births with her. Of course it has my interest piqued. I don’t know what the next step in my life is. I feel like I’m ordering the rest of my life over the phone from a menu written only in a language I don’t speak, pressing buttons and hoping whatever is delivered is something I’ll like. I am feeling anxious about getting to a place in my skills where I feel more confident, worrying that I won’t have the kind of support I feel like I’ll need to practice where I live now. Would it be so outlandish to move across the globe to work with someone I respect immensely, who has more than my lifetime’s worth of experience, and not be her apprentice, but actually work with her?
I was exhausted when I got home from the clinic tonight, but my brain was still busy so I decided I would walk into town and get some quiet time alone. I happily used the headlamp that Austin brought for me on the dark walk through the Monkey Forest, finally not afraid of cobras in the shadows, or falling into unseen holes. The rain finally stopped this morning and everything is soggy and the humidity was intense today. In town, I stopped at one of the bootlegged DVD stores and got 2 movies for $1.50 each. Then I went to my favorite restaurant here and had yummy chicken soup and iced tea. I geeked out on some early Cat Stevens while I ate, and I missed Austin. Walking home, it was especially late and the Balinese aren’t used to white women walking alone in the dark at night. I was probably stopped 10 times by guys on motorbikes wanting to know if I needed a ride to my hotel (“Free?” one of them offered as I waved him off). Since Austin and therefore the scooter has gone and I’m back to walking everywhere, I noticed that I’m developing quite a phobia of the sidewalks in Ubud because of my fall. I am seeing every foot of walkway ahead of me as having the potential to crumble beneath my feet and send me back into the grimy, watery depths of the Bainese gutter. So I’ve been walking on the curb, or even in the street. I’m less afraid of being hit by a car or a motorbike than I am of falling through the sidewalk or not seeing a hole where the sidewalk used to be. Every time I feel one of the walk tiles shift under my feet, my heart jumps up into my throat and my pulse quickens. It is making walking around here unpleasant.
As I alternated between gingerly stepping on the wobbly sidewalk and playing chicken with the oncoming traffic in the street, I wondered if taking one of these “helpful” gentlemen up on their offer of a ride wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. Which, of course, got me thinking about men in general and sort of fondly acknowledging that guys the world over are basically the same. Most of the guys pulling over to offer me a ride were hoping to get paid to ride me down the hill a few blocks, but I think there was also a secondary motivation of a young woman walking alone at night and the potential that I might “like” them. That’s basically how guys work, right? While Austin was here, we came to the decision to stop denying that we are in a relationship. Both of us were wanting to take it “slow,” to test the waters for a while, not pressure ourselves with a label, to give me some time to heal from my previous relationship (that only ended two months ago!). But we both had to admit that we were not really taking it slow, that we’d spent all our time together since we met up until I left, and then he flew halfway around the world and at great expense to surprise me here. Did either one of us want to see other people still? No. We were falling in love. It was time to just call a spade a spade. I can’t predict what is on the road ahead for us, but I adore him. He showed up so completely while he was here, participating in the clinic, making real connections with my friends here, adopting this temporary home of mine as his too. It was exactly what I would have wanted. Its so early still and I know the love drugs are running strong in our systems right now, but I’m really happy.
With all the happiness comes some insecurity, because I DON’T know what comes next. It echoes the thread that is running through my life at the moment. What am I doing? Where am I going? What do I want? EVERYTHING feels young and tender right now. There isn’t anything that feels established or old news. It’s a strange time in my life, to be sure. Embarking on what feels like a totally new chapter in my life, everything still in its cellophane to be unwrapped, explored, hoping it won’t get spoiled, and knowing it is the nature of things to change. I keep thinking of Cat Stevens songs (yes, I’m obsessing on him a little bit right now), “Miles from nowhere/ guess I’ll take my/ time to reach there.” and “You’re still young/ that’s your fault/ there’s so much you have to go through.” I am so acutely aware of my age right now, feeling SO young and immature, recognizing that most of what I’m going through will only go away with more time and experience. I feel like I’m re-living that awkward geeky stage of ages 14 and 15, when I was all lumpy and too big for myself and my teeth didn’t fit in my mouth well and my boobs made me uncomfortable. I am feeling that way spiritually right now. Just uncomfortable in my skin, self-aware enough to mostly laugh about it, and generally just looking forward to it being over, not feeling like the ugly duckling anymore. I’m ready to be the swan.
I spent a long day at the clinic today attending the birth of a first time mom with a very asynclitic baby –a child neither committed to being transverse OR straight posterior, but in a funny place in between. The mother was complete at 11:30 this morning, and began to push and continued to push until she finally had her baby, with 13 people in the room, most of them midwives, at 5:15 this evening. That is a loooong time to push out a baby, even for a first timer, and not something midwives normally do at home. Kate, who was primary for this birth, caught the stubborn stinker and managed through either luck or skill, to help keep a very tight perineum intact. Well done, Kate. All through the first hour or so of pushing, my spidey sense was tingling. There was something not right about this second stage and while my heart continued to chime in that the baby would come, I was uncomfortable with it. In the end, the baby did come. And I was also right that there was something unusual about what I was seeing. But I definitely had moments, like the 2 hours of visible head, the hour of crowning, when I thought maybe the baby wouldn’t come on its own. Today was a good lesson in patience and a reminder to trust this process. That even after 6 hours of pushing and seemingly impossible positions and fits, babies do tend to come.
This baby came, I need to acknowledge, after Sue arrived. A reminder of my revolving door of characters: Sue is a homebirth midwife from Austrailia, has been for 30 years, was traine by an old timey doc who still did homebirths and who was eventually stripped of his medical license for training homebirth midwives. She knows great luminaries of midwifery and woman centered care like Ina May Gaskin and Sarah Buckley. She’s amazing and I’ve been learning a lot from her since being here. She’s also the mother of Tessa, the Australian doctor that I’ve become friends with here as well. They are a great team to have here. Sue’s energy was fresh when she walked into the birthroom about 30 minutes before the baby came. Everyone was tired, but the energy picked up as soon as she arrived. I cannot overstate the help and importance of having someone fresh to revive flagging energies at a long hard birth. Whenever I observe a particularly difficult birth, it is easy to sort of deflect it like, well, this won’t ever happen to me. But that’s not true. I have to pay attention ESPECIALLY at the hard long ones because, like it or not, there will be hard births where I will be exhausted and out of ideas and feeling like maybe the baby won’t ever come. And it is at that point that I will need help, a second pair of hands, a fresh set of eyes, some new perspective. This is why I love the idea of working in partnership instead of alone, of having a community that is supportive of you, so you have other midwives you can call on when its been 24 hours and you haven’t eaten or slept and you can smell yourself and you’re starting to hate the family you’re working with, and thinking about just walking out of the house and out of your job. Because there will be days when I will need to be able to say “Oh my god! This is taking forever!” and someone I trust to say to me, “Yeah, and? The baby is coming.” At any rate, the baby came. Probably would have come even without Sue’s energy, but I probably wouldn’t have wanted to stay for the end.
I was thinking about this a few hours after the birth when Sue called me over to “meet” her husband on Skype’s video chat. Her husband and I exchanged pleasantries and he asked if I was a “budding midwife” and Sue piped up, “She’s a midwife already. She’s getting ready to sit her final exams. She’s very skilled and a straight shooter and has a wicked sense of humor and I’m trying to convince her to move near us to set up a group homebirth practice with me.” As I burned with pride and embarrassment at such glowing remarks from someone I respected so well, her husband informed me that it was quite a compliment coming from her. I totally got that.
It is true that Sue has mentioned a few times recently, in a breezy mostly-teasing sort of way, that I should move to Australia and come to births with her. Of course it has my interest piqued. I don’t know what the next step in my life is. I feel like I’m ordering the rest of my life over the phone from a menu written only in a language I don’t speak, pressing buttons and hoping whatever is delivered is something I’ll like. I am feeling anxious about getting to a place in my skills where I feel more confident, worrying that I won’t have the kind of support I feel like I’ll need to practice where I live now. Would it be so outlandish to move across the globe to work with someone I respect immensely, who has more than my lifetime’s worth of experience, and not be her apprentice, but actually work with her?
I was exhausted when I got home from the clinic tonight, but my brain was still busy so I decided I would walk into town and get some quiet time alone. I happily used the headlamp that Austin brought for me on the dark walk through the Monkey Forest, finally not afraid of cobras in the shadows, or falling into unseen holes. The rain finally stopped this morning and everything is soggy and the humidity was intense today. In town, I stopped at one of the bootlegged DVD stores and got 2 movies for $1.50 each. Then I went to my favorite restaurant here and had yummy chicken soup and iced tea. I geeked out on some early Cat Stevens while I ate, and I missed Austin. Walking home, it was especially late and the Balinese aren’t used to white women walking alone in the dark at night. I was probably stopped 10 times by guys on motorbikes wanting to know if I needed a ride to my hotel (“Free?” one of them offered as I waved him off). Since Austin and therefore the scooter has gone and I’m back to walking everywhere, I noticed that I’m developing quite a phobia of the sidewalks in Ubud because of my fall. I am seeing every foot of walkway ahead of me as having the potential to crumble beneath my feet and send me back into the grimy, watery depths of the Bainese gutter. So I’ve been walking on the curb, or even in the street. I’m less afraid of being hit by a car or a motorbike than I am of falling through the sidewalk or not seeing a hole where the sidewalk used to be. Every time I feel one of the walk tiles shift under my feet, my heart jumps up into my throat and my pulse quickens. It is making walking around here unpleasant.
As I alternated between gingerly stepping on the wobbly sidewalk and playing chicken with the oncoming traffic in the street, I wondered if taking one of these “helpful” gentlemen up on their offer of a ride wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. Which, of course, got me thinking about men in general and sort of fondly acknowledging that guys the world over are basically the same. Most of the guys pulling over to offer me a ride were hoping to get paid to ride me down the hill a few blocks, but I think there was also a secondary motivation of a young woman walking alone at night and the potential that I might “like” them. That’s basically how guys work, right? While Austin was here, we came to the decision to stop denying that we are in a relationship. Both of us were wanting to take it “slow,” to test the waters for a while, not pressure ourselves with a label, to give me some time to heal from my previous relationship (that only ended two months ago!). But we both had to admit that we were not really taking it slow, that we’d spent all our time together since we met up until I left, and then he flew halfway around the world and at great expense to surprise me here. Did either one of us want to see other people still? No. We were falling in love. It was time to just call a spade a spade. I can’t predict what is on the road ahead for us, but I adore him. He showed up so completely while he was here, participating in the clinic, making real connections with my friends here, adopting this temporary home of mine as his too. It was exactly what I would have wanted. Its so early still and I know the love drugs are running strong in our systems right now, but I’m really happy.
With all the happiness comes some insecurity, because I DON’T know what comes next. It echoes the thread that is running through my life at the moment. What am I doing? Where am I going? What do I want? EVERYTHING feels young and tender right now. There isn’t anything that feels established or old news. It’s a strange time in my life, to be sure. Embarking on what feels like a totally new chapter in my life, everything still in its cellophane to be unwrapped, explored, hoping it won’t get spoiled, and knowing it is the nature of things to change. I keep thinking of Cat Stevens songs (yes, I’m obsessing on him a little bit right now), “Miles from nowhere/ guess I’ll take my/ time to reach there.” and “You’re still young/ that’s your fault/ there’s so much you have to go through.” I am so acutely aware of my age right now, feeling SO young and immature, recognizing that most of what I’m going through will only go away with more time and experience. I feel like I’m re-living that awkward geeky stage of ages 14 and 15, when I was all lumpy and too big for myself and my teeth didn’t fit in my mouth well and my boobs made me uncomfortable. I am feeling that way spiritually right now. Just uncomfortable in my skin, self-aware enough to mostly laugh about it, and generally just looking forward to it being over, not feeling like the ugly duckling anymore. I’m ready to be the swan.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Departures
Thursday July 23, 2009 9:09pm
Austin left this morning, back to foggy San Francisco. I'm sad. We spent our last couple days together having a great time. I convinced him to volunteer with me at the acupuncture clinic on Monday night as "moxa boy" --the guy taking blood pressures and changing rounds of moxa on acupuncture patients. He was nervous and shy to jump into the fray (acupuncture clinic is CRAZY busy and the acupuncturist, Dr. B, is intense) but I stayed with him through for the first few patients and everyone else stepped in to help him and in no time, he was doing great. He was AMAZING, actually, and rocked clinic, remembering instructions and details about the patients' treatment that I couldn't have done. He also now does a hilarious Dr. B impression that gets us all rolling in our seats. After clinic, he has his first acupuncture treatment, which was not nearly painful enough to warrant revenge for his delight in my pain the previous week. I also had another acupuncture treatment on my sore leg (another round of "Ring The Dragon" which means they circle the whole wound with acupuncture needles OUCH, and they also "bled my liver" again which means they pricked my big toe with a lancet and made me bleed. Double ouch. I'm a whiner.) but I'm excited to say that it FINALLY looks and feels SOOOOO much better. It has started itching like crazy, which everyone is glad about, but I'm not sure its much better than the pain because its making me a little nuts.
We made a new friend with another Californian acupuncture student, Tyler, who was here visiting Danielle, and we hung pretty hard with him Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday when he left. Its amazing how quickly you can build friendships when you're out of your element and far from home. We spent Monday morning going through the big market and getting dubious "good prices" on various things for Austin to take home for friends and family. I have discovered that I am a GREAT haggler, and have been employing my skill to my own advantage on taxis, a new bag and THREE dresses (all for under $75 total). On Tuesday night, Danielle, Austin and I went to Mosaic, which is considered the French Laundry of Bali. I panicked when informed the dress code stated no flip flops and I didn't have anything else, but was able to borrow a pair of Danielle's shoes. We arrived, went through a metal detector, were shown into a lovely lounge, and then had a really tasty 6 course French meal for $55 each, which is VERY expensive by Balinese standards, but bargain basement for food and service of this quality compared to home. It was a lovely evening, and I think deserves a reprise with Kira when she arrives next week. Last night, to commemorate his last day, Austin wanted to go back to Sari Organic, the magical organic restaurant out in the rice paddies, with Tessa, Sue, and Danielle. We decided to ride scooters, with three of us on Austin's scooter and two on Danielle's. We got through the Monkey Forest, giggling mightily over the sight of three adults on a scooter, and then saw we had caused a flat tire. Oops. So we had to hire a taxi to take us the rest of the way. The taxi dropped us at the end of the driveway that marked the beginning of the mile long walk in the dark out to the restaurant. As we began our walk, it began to drizzle. Then rain. Then POUR. We were screaming, laughing and RUNNING along the narrow path between paddies, barely able to see through the rain and the darkness with our meager little phone flashlights. It was hysterical and we took many pictures to prove the ridiculousness of it. We got to the restaurant and, due to the inclement weather, they had closed early. However, in true Balinese fashion, re-opened and served us a wonderful dinner as rain pounded on the thatched roof over us and they wrapped us in table cloths to keep us warm in our soaked clothes. Of course, we had to go back out into the rain when we finished, which was less fun, but it worked out okay in the end.
Really though, does it get any more magical? Its not just anywhere that you can run through the rain in the dark to get to a lovely organic restaurant in the middle of miles of rice paddies, to be served dinner privately with some of your favorite people, wrapped all up in table cloths.
I said a tearful goodbye to Austin this morning and then, to quell my welling homesickness and Austsickness and because the clinic was closed today, a group of us went out to lunch and then to a lovely spa where I had a manicure and a pedicure ($10!!). Its been raining on and off since last night's deluge. Not just raining, but RAINING. The kind of rain that makes you understand how people can see the weather as an indicator of the moods of the Gods. I woke up at one point in the night last night and sleepily wondered if the house could collapse under the power of the rain. Its been RAINING. It began raining again during my pedicure, on a chaise lounge in an open air room, with some of my friends sitting close by and we discussed midwifery, the births we've seen here, and it poured all around us in the good natured warm Bali rain kind of way that it does, and we sipped warm ginger tea and I understood how people could never leave here. So long as their boyfriends are here too. As for me, I'm going home when this trip is over. But maybe I'll be back. Too much magic here to just let it sit here all unabsorbed.
p.s. I've gotten a couple emails expressing concern and wonder that I may have gotten back together with my ex-boyfriend Austin. I would like to clarify that this is NOT the same Austin, just someone with the same name. Thanks for all the concern though, peeps!
Austin left this morning, back to foggy San Francisco. I'm sad. We spent our last couple days together having a great time. I convinced him to volunteer with me at the acupuncture clinic on Monday night as "moxa boy" --the guy taking blood pressures and changing rounds of moxa on acupuncture patients. He was nervous and shy to jump into the fray (acupuncture clinic is CRAZY busy and the acupuncturist, Dr. B, is intense) but I stayed with him through for the first few patients and everyone else stepped in to help him and in no time, he was doing great. He was AMAZING, actually, and rocked clinic, remembering instructions and details about the patients' treatment that I couldn't have done. He also now does a hilarious Dr. B impression that gets us all rolling in our seats. After clinic, he has his first acupuncture treatment, which was not nearly painful enough to warrant revenge for his delight in my pain the previous week. I also had another acupuncture treatment on my sore leg (another round of "Ring The Dragon" which means they circle the whole wound with acupuncture needles OUCH, and they also "bled my liver" again which means they pricked my big toe with a lancet and made me bleed. Double ouch. I'm a whiner.) but I'm excited to say that it FINALLY looks and feels SOOOOO much better. It has started itching like crazy, which everyone is glad about, but I'm not sure its much better than the pain because its making me a little nuts.
We made a new friend with another Californian acupuncture student, Tyler, who was here visiting Danielle, and we hung pretty hard with him Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday when he left. Its amazing how quickly you can build friendships when you're out of your element and far from home. We spent Monday morning going through the big market and getting dubious "good prices" on various things for Austin to take home for friends and family. I have discovered that I am a GREAT haggler, and have been employing my skill to my own advantage on taxis, a new bag and THREE dresses (all for under $75 total). On Tuesday night, Danielle, Austin and I went to Mosaic, which is considered the French Laundry of Bali. I panicked when informed the dress code stated no flip flops and I didn't have anything else, but was able to borrow a pair of Danielle's shoes. We arrived, went through a metal detector, were shown into a lovely lounge, and then had a really tasty 6 course French meal for $55 each, which is VERY expensive by Balinese standards, but bargain basement for food and service of this quality compared to home. It was a lovely evening, and I think deserves a reprise with Kira when she arrives next week. Last night, to commemorate his last day, Austin wanted to go back to Sari Organic, the magical organic restaurant out in the rice paddies, with Tessa, Sue, and Danielle. We decided to ride scooters, with three of us on Austin's scooter and two on Danielle's. We got through the Monkey Forest, giggling mightily over the sight of three adults on a scooter, and then saw we had caused a flat tire. Oops. So we had to hire a taxi to take us the rest of the way. The taxi dropped us at the end of the driveway that marked the beginning of the mile long walk in the dark out to the restaurant. As we began our walk, it began to drizzle. Then rain. Then POUR. We were screaming, laughing and RUNNING along the narrow path between paddies, barely able to see through the rain and the darkness with our meager little phone flashlights. It was hysterical and we took many pictures to prove the ridiculousness of it. We got to the restaurant and, due to the inclement weather, they had closed early. However, in true Balinese fashion, re-opened and served us a wonderful dinner as rain pounded on the thatched roof over us and they wrapped us in table cloths to keep us warm in our soaked clothes. Of course, we had to go back out into the rain when we finished, which was less fun, but it worked out okay in the end.
Really though, does it get any more magical? Its not just anywhere that you can run through the rain in the dark to get to a lovely organic restaurant in the middle of miles of rice paddies, to be served dinner privately with some of your favorite people, wrapped all up in table cloths.
I said a tearful goodbye to Austin this morning and then, to quell my welling homesickness and Austsickness and because the clinic was closed today, a group of us went out to lunch and then to a lovely spa where I had a manicure and a pedicure ($10!!). Its been raining on and off since last night's deluge. Not just raining, but RAINING. The kind of rain that makes you understand how people can see the weather as an indicator of the moods of the Gods. I woke up at one point in the night last night and sleepily wondered if the house could collapse under the power of the rain. Its been RAINING. It began raining again during my pedicure, on a chaise lounge in an open air room, with some of my friends sitting close by and we discussed midwifery, the births we've seen here, and it poured all around us in the good natured warm Bali rain kind of way that it does, and we sipped warm ginger tea and I understood how people could never leave here. So long as their boyfriends are here too. As for me, I'm going home when this trip is over. But maybe I'll be back. Too much magic here to just let it sit here all unabsorbed.
p.s. I've gotten a couple emails expressing concern and wonder that I may have gotten back together with my ex-boyfriend Austin. I would like to clarify that this is NOT the same Austin, just someone with the same name. Thanks for all the concern though, peeps!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Half way through
Wednesday July 22, 2009 11:39am
I haven’t been to a birth in a week. This is mostly okay with me, but I’m starting to stress about it a little bit. It is not about the “numbers” (the number of births I need to attend as a primary midwife before I qualify to sit for licensure) because, technically, I have all my numbers. But I don’t feel “good” about all those numbers, so I’ve been sort of replacing some births that I counted as primary at home in the States with births I’m doing as primary here because I feel like I was more autonomous at the birth and would prefer to count it toward my license instead. This probably makes very little sense, and is probably very unnecessary, but I’m noticing that it has felt important to me to do. So, if there are only 3 births from home that I feel good about counting, added to the births from Senegal that I want to count, added to the births that I’ve done here so far, I’d like to do 4 more births here before I go. Which is totally doable. Before coming to Bali, I expected to attend on the order of 20 to 30 births as primary while I was here. So far, in three weeks, I’ve attended 8. That doesn’t mean that I won’t get to 20 or 30 births, but it doesn’t look great. This is at least partly, if not entirely, my own doing. If I wanted to spend every night at the clinic, I’d have done a lot more. I don’t live next to the clinic so its not easy for me to get to a birth if its happening quickly, and I’m not as “in” with the Indonesian midwives as other volunteers so I don’t always get called. And Bali is distracting. In Senegal, we were in such a remote place, that there was actually NOTHING to do but lurk at a clinic, read, or sleep, and the midwives called us on one of our two phones and we all collectively decided who would go. Things work differently here. And there’s so much more to do. Cafes, bookstores, monkey forests, boyfriends all luring me away from my intended purpose here. So, starting tomorrow, I’m back to hanging around the clinic like a bad smell.
I’m trying to decipher what it is that I want to come away from this trip with. What is my educational goal? The numbers are not the motivating factor. If anything, it’s the remaining sense of greenness I am seeking to scrub away, the wondering when and how I’m going to feel Ready if being nearly qualified to sit for my license hasn’t produced that sense of confidence. I feel more like a midwife now than I did when I left for Senegal, more like one even since I returned only 7 months ago, but I still don’t feel qualified to be solely responsible as a primary caregiver. I’ve mostly made my peace with the fact that, once licensed, I probably *still* won’t feel fully qualified and have resolved to spend my first few years working only in team with other midwives whose experience and qualification I trust, because two heads are better than one and because I am not going to be the foolhardy youngster charging full speed ahead straight out of the gate. That’s not my style.
The importance that I gain that confidence feels so urgent because it’s not just me I’m concerned about. Of course, my ego worries that I could be shamed publicly, could lose the respect of the midwifery community (if I can gain it in the first place), or lose the respect of my friends and family if I ended up in a situation that I couldn’t handle and had bad outcomes. But what about those outcomes? They translate to people. And the ego pales in comparison to the weight of my conscience if I had something tragic happen on my watch that could have been prevented if only I had been better prepared. The entire time I’ve been working toward this license I’ve been wondering how I can know what I don’t know, if I don’t know I don’t know it. I cannot afford, spiritually or emotionally, to be caught with my pants down. Further, midwives are a hunted species. If something happens due to ignorance or irresponsibility that reflects on ALL midwives EVERYWHERE. That’s not true for doctors, for firefighters and paramedics, or even police officers. Sure, sometimes individuals are singled out, questioned for negligence or poor training or abuse, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. They have communities who protect them, who advocate for them, who support them. That is not as true for midwives. We stand, for now anyway, more or less alone.
Anyway, I have practical skills I need practice with, like suturing. And they use a lot of herbs here, which is something I have next to no knowledge of. So I stand to gain some skill in those departments over the next few weeks, if I can make nuisance enough of myself to be included. I am, however, still chewing on the question of what I’m really doing here. Honestly, if it weren’t for those last 4 catches, and Kira coming next week, I’d probably just head home. This is not what I was hoping for, and of course it so rarely is. But its so far from what I felt like I was needing. Even writing that, I’m aware of the naivete of the statement. There is what I feel like I need, and then there is what I actually need. And while there are a lot of moments in my life I can point to and say I didn’t get what I WANTED, I don’t know that there is any time I can point to and say I didn’t get what I ultimately needed. So I guess my counsel to myself is that I need to have faith. I need to believe that, while this trip so far has been disappointing on many levels, it has been surprising and wonderful in many other unexpected ways. And even though I may come away with some lingering sense of disappointment overall, as long as I make myself available to it, I’ll get what I need. Even if it’s just 4 more catches.
I haven’t been to a birth in a week. This is mostly okay with me, but I’m starting to stress about it a little bit. It is not about the “numbers” (the number of births I need to attend as a primary midwife before I qualify to sit for licensure) because, technically, I have all my numbers. But I don’t feel “good” about all those numbers, so I’ve been sort of replacing some births that I counted as primary at home in the States with births I’m doing as primary here because I feel like I was more autonomous at the birth and would prefer to count it toward my license instead. This probably makes very little sense, and is probably very unnecessary, but I’m noticing that it has felt important to me to do. So, if there are only 3 births from home that I feel good about counting, added to the births from Senegal that I want to count, added to the births that I’ve done here so far, I’d like to do 4 more births here before I go. Which is totally doable. Before coming to Bali, I expected to attend on the order of 20 to 30 births as primary while I was here. So far, in three weeks, I’ve attended 8. That doesn’t mean that I won’t get to 20 or 30 births, but it doesn’t look great. This is at least partly, if not entirely, my own doing. If I wanted to spend every night at the clinic, I’d have done a lot more. I don’t live next to the clinic so its not easy for me to get to a birth if its happening quickly, and I’m not as “in” with the Indonesian midwives as other volunteers so I don’t always get called. And Bali is distracting. In Senegal, we were in such a remote place, that there was actually NOTHING to do but lurk at a clinic, read, or sleep, and the midwives called us on one of our two phones and we all collectively decided who would go. Things work differently here. And there’s so much more to do. Cafes, bookstores, monkey forests, boyfriends all luring me away from my intended purpose here. So, starting tomorrow, I’m back to hanging around the clinic like a bad smell.
I’m trying to decipher what it is that I want to come away from this trip with. What is my educational goal? The numbers are not the motivating factor. If anything, it’s the remaining sense of greenness I am seeking to scrub away, the wondering when and how I’m going to feel Ready if being nearly qualified to sit for my license hasn’t produced that sense of confidence. I feel more like a midwife now than I did when I left for Senegal, more like one even since I returned only 7 months ago, but I still don’t feel qualified to be solely responsible as a primary caregiver. I’ve mostly made my peace with the fact that, once licensed, I probably *still* won’t feel fully qualified and have resolved to spend my first few years working only in team with other midwives whose experience and qualification I trust, because two heads are better than one and because I am not going to be the foolhardy youngster charging full speed ahead straight out of the gate. That’s not my style.
The importance that I gain that confidence feels so urgent because it’s not just me I’m concerned about. Of course, my ego worries that I could be shamed publicly, could lose the respect of the midwifery community (if I can gain it in the first place), or lose the respect of my friends and family if I ended up in a situation that I couldn’t handle and had bad outcomes. But what about those outcomes? They translate to people. And the ego pales in comparison to the weight of my conscience if I had something tragic happen on my watch that could have been prevented if only I had been better prepared. The entire time I’ve been working toward this license I’ve been wondering how I can know what I don’t know, if I don’t know I don’t know it. I cannot afford, spiritually or emotionally, to be caught with my pants down. Further, midwives are a hunted species. If something happens due to ignorance or irresponsibility that reflects on ALL midwives EVERYWHERE. That’s not true for doctors, for firefighters and paramedics, or even police officers. Sure, sometimes individuals are singled out, questioned for negligence or poor training or abuse, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. They have communities who protect them, who advocate for them, who support them. That is not as true for midwives. We stand, for now anyway, more or less alone.
Anyway, I have practical skills I need practice with, like suturing. And they use a lot of herbs here, which is something I have next to no knowledge of. So I stand to gain some skill in those departments over the next few weeks, if I can make nuisance enough of myself to be included. I am, however, still chewing on the question of what I’m really doing here. Honestly, if it weren’t for those last 4 catches, and Kira coming next week, I’d probably just head home. This is not what I was hoping for, and of course it so rarely is. But its so far from what I felt like I was needing. Even writing that, I’m aware of the naivete of the statement. There is what I feel like I need, and then there is what I actually need. And while there are a lot of moments in my life I can point to and say I didn’t get what I WANTED, I don’t know that there is any time I can point to and say I didn’t get what I ultimately needed. So I guess my counsel to myself is that I need to have faith. I need to believe that, while this trip so far has been disappointing on many levels, it has been surprising and wonderful in many other unexpected ways. And even though I may come away with some lingering sense of disappointment overall, as long as I make myself available to it, I’ll get what I need. Even if it’s just 4 more catches.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Home again home again
2:36pm Saturday July 18th, 2009
In the car heading home to Ubud. We had a mellow and uneventful remainder of our stay in Amed. We spent most of the afternoon sunbathing and then reading/napping in the shade and took the motorbike a few miles down the road for a forgettable dinner at a cute restaurant on the water. We had to get gas for the scooter and were sent across the street by the hotel receptionist to a little roadside store. For 60 cents US, we bought a liter of gas from a little girl who poured it into our tank from an Absolut Citron bottle and a funnel. On the way to dinner, we marveled at the beauty of the coastline, especially as the sun was setting, and I had to admit I was beginning to understand why people came to vacation in this region. The ride to dinner was only marred by the number of bugs we got beaned in the face with on the scooter, and passing two villagers carrying a huge pig tied to a long bamboo branch carried between them, squealing for its life. Almost enough to make me a vegetarian. We had the morning to ourselves before our driver came to collect us and spent a good portion of it by the pool and tangled in each other’s legs reading in the chaise lounge on the porch of our little bungalow. I’ve been picking up and putting down The People’s Act of Love by James Meek for the better part of the last year and I finally hit my stride with it while in Amed and then couldn’t put it down. I had read maybe a quarter of it over the last year and then read the remaining three quarters over the last 24 hours. A VERY good book. One of the best I’ve read in a while and it was a total sneak attack –I love when books surprise you and turn into more than you could have anticipated from them. Anyway, I’m sad its over, as I’ve now run out of fiction to read. Luckily, there are English book shops in Ubud. Once again, stark contrast to Senegal, where I was reduced to re-reading Eat Pray Love (and hating it less the second time around).
Our driver told us about a bombing at the Ritz in Jakarta yesterday which, I think, underscores some of the issues at play in 3rd world countries such as Indonesia’s and the influx of Western influence and wealth. Anyway, its very sad to hear so many people died, and for what?
We asked our driver about whether the hotels like the ones in Amed are good for the village or not. He said he thought they were good. They bring jobs, they bring people to buy the things they sell. Balinese, he said, don’t differentiate between white skin and brown skin –if you’re a westerner and you come and are respectful of the Balinese, you become family. So maybe my haughty dismissal of Amed’s false paradise as a bourgeois parasite on a poor fishing village was hasty. Maybe I’m just being pretentious assuming I know what the Balinese need better than they do, maybe they welcome the rich westerners. What do I know, really?
We stopped by the big Water Palace on the way home, a sprawling 500 year old temple made primarily of ponds and pools. CRAZY beautiful (also home to the wettest, grossest toilets ever known to man). You can pay 6,000 Rpa (about 60 cents) and swim in the large pools, which are black with algae and full of fish. If we weren’t so eager to get home and my leg were a little better, I’d have gone for it. Austin and I agreed it would be a perfect place to spend a day sunbathing and swimming surrounded by total beauty.
Looking forward to getting back to our sleepy village, familiar faces, better food, and some birthin’.
In the car heading home to Ubud. We had a mellow and uneventful remainder of our stay in Amed. We spent most of the afternoon sunbathing and then reading/napping in the shade and took the motorbike a few miles down the road for a forgettable dinner at a cute restaurant on the water. We had to get gas for the scooter and were sent across the street by the hotel receptionist to a little roadside store. For 60 cents US, we bought a liter of gas from a little girl who poured it into our tank from an Absolut Citron bottle and a funnel. On the way to dinner, we marveled at the beauty of the coastline, especially as the sun was setting, and I had to admit I was beginning to understand why people came to vacation in this region. The ride to dinner was only marred by the number of bugs we got beaned in the face with on the scooter, and passing two villagers carrying a huge pig tied to a long bamboo branch carried between them, squealing for its life. Almost enough to make me a vegetarian. We had the morning to ourselves before our driver came to collect us and spent a good portion of it by the pool and tangled in each other’s legs reading in the chaise lounge on the porch of our little bungalow. I’ve been picking up and putting down The People’s Act of Love by James Meek for the better part of the last year and I finally hit my stride with it while in Amed and then couldn’t put it down. I had read maybe a quarter of it over the last year and then read the remaining three quarters over the last 24 hours. A VERY good book. One of the best I’ve read in a while and it was a total sneak attack –I love when books surprise you and turn into more than you could have anticipated from them. Anyway, I’m sad its over, as I’ve now run out of fiction to read. Luckily, there are English book shops in Ubud. Once again, stark contrast to Senegal, where I was reduced to re-reading Eat Pray Love (and hating it less the second time around).
Our driver told us about a bombing at the Ritz in Jakarta yesterday which, I think, underscores some of the issues at play in 3rd world countries such as Indonesia’s and the influx of Western influence and wealth. Anyway, its very sad to hear so many people died, and for what?
We asked our driver about whether the hotels like the ones in Amed are good for the village or not. He said he thought they were good. They bring jobs, they bring people to buy the things they sell. Balinese, he said, don’t differentiate between white skin and brown skin –if you’re a westerner and you come and are respectful of the Balinese, you become family. So maybe my haughty dismissal of Amed’s false paradise as a bourgeois parasite on a poor fishing village was hasty. Maybe I’m just being pretentious assuming I know what the Balinese need better than they do, maybe they welcome the rich westerners. What do I know, really?
We stopped by the big Water Palace on the way home, a sprawling 500 year old temple made primarily of ponds and pools. CRAZY beautiful (also home to the wettest, grossest toilets ever known to man). You can pay 6,000 Rpa (about 60 cents) and swim in the large pools, which are black with algae and full of fish. If we weren’t so eager to get home and my leg were a little better, I’d have gone for it. Austin and I agreed it would be a perfect place to spend a day sunbathing and swimming surrounded by total beauty.
Looking forward to getting back to our sleepy village, familiar faces, better food, and some birthin’.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Live From Amed
1:31pm Friday July 17th, 2009
Okay. Here we have to get into uncomfortable territory, where I talk about the elephant that enters the room whenever someone like me (middle-class, educated, white, American) travels to a third world country. I am not well-equipped to discuss this topic eloquently, and am bound to say ignorant things or trip over topics I don’t fully comprehend, or stuff both my feet in my mouth by the time I’m done, but here goes. So we are in Amed. It is a remote area of Eastern Bali, about 45 minutes beyond Candidasa (where were planning to stay originally based on some friends’ recent travels and enjoyment). Amed, according to my guide book, is actually only one village out of the several villages along the coastline here but savvy hoteliers have lumped them all together to lure tourists to “the Amed region.” My landlord Made insisted this was the place to come, said it is “paradise” and told us it is a relatively undeveloped, quiet coastal village, that it would be easy to find someplace small right on the beach to stay for about $40 US a night, including breakfast. We were told to expect to have the place to ourselves.
Instead, we spent 2 and a half hours trying to find a hotel that had rooms available, with nothing cheaper available than $65 a night –and that was at a private villa with a strange punch drunk European couple whose dog barked at us mercilessly and bit our driver so we opted not to stay. We chose the cutest and second-cheapest place we saw, a hotel with a series of little detached houses leading down to the beach. Ours has a queen bed downstairs and a loft upstairs with two twin beds, a nice bathroom and an outdoor shower. Its clean, nicely landscaped and has a pool and beach access, though there isn’t much beach to speak of, as most of it is taken up by the fishing boats that the rest of the village use to make their living every day. There is no place to “go” from here –its all hotels or beach, there is a hotel café that is overpriced and not very good, and the place itself is full of fat Australians, loud Italians, and their collective obnoxious offspring (okay, okay and two, late-twenties, pasty skinned, childless, judgmental and self righteous Americans). We had come too far to turn around and go home last night so we bought our driver dinner and stayed but both Austin and I lay awake feeling unsettled about what we had just set ourselves up for. We were expecting low key beach getaway, not this weird Club Med in Bali. We both fell asleep more out of defeat than actual exhaustion at about 9pm last night and were awakened through the night by the sounds of dogs barking and fighting, and then the bossy roosters that seem to be everywhere and have no sense of time or decency.
This morning, we ate the included breakfast, which was passable, if not inspiring, and then went to walk on the beach to stake out a place to sunbathe. We’d been on the beach maybe 3 minutes when we were approached by a Balinese guy carrying a pair of flippers. He introduced himself, asked where we are from, commented that we were in the “best” place to be seeing Bali for the first time, and offered to take us snorkeling or out in his boat to see an American warship wreck from WWII. We declined politely. He told us he lived next door to the hotel so we could come ask for him if we changed our minds. He seemed so earnest and desperate to make a sale and continued to make small talk, at one point mentioning that the hotel we are staying at is owned by an American. Austin stiffened at that –he had been particularly specific with our driver that he wanted to stay someplace Balinese owned. We assumed we were doing that and it was a bummer to learn we were not. I eventually had to suggest we keep walking before the guy with the flippers got the hint and let us continue on our way. We made it to the end of the beach and Austin was quiet next to me, I could tell feeling uncomfortable with being “American Tourists” and all its attendant implications. We made our way back the way we’d come and were greeted by a Balinese woman at the shoreline. Her shirt had holes in the shoulders and back. She introduced herself and asked if we’d like to buy a massage. Again we politely declined. She followed us back towards the hotel and she was met by a younger woman with a small child coming from the property next door to the hotel, where the man with the flippers said he lived. I looked beyond the two women and the child and saw there was a group of people on the property, working on something together. They were obviously very, very poor. The women continued to call after us as we walked to the hotel, trying to convince us to get a massage with them, but their calls stopped as we stepped onto the hotel’s pathway, and I got the sense that we were now “off limits” to them and I felt incredibly self-conscious.
Austin and I tried to sunbathe by the pool for a while, but he couldn’t sit still. He’d lie down for a minute and pick up his book, then go back to the room for a few minutes, then come back, then lie back down, then go stand at the hotel wall and look at the ocean, then come back. I finally asked what was wrong. He said he didn’t really know but he was having a hard time just being here. I agreed. We finally had to acknowledge that this sucks. We aren’t good at just laying by a pool, let alone at a really swanky hotel that we can’t afford, especially with people who have next to nothing waiting on the property line to beg to sell us something so their kids can eat. We aren’t impervious to the facts of the matter. I don’t know how to turn of my conscience for this kind of thing. This is not what we came here expecting. This is not what we thought we were signing up for.
The other tourists here seem content. They’re paying hotel staff to massage them by the pool, letting their kids splash the other guests laying out near by, not wandering off the property. Austin and I rented a motorbike for the day and cruised up the road. Everywhere that isn’t a posh hotel here is a slum. Cinderblock houses and warrungs and sundry stores. It’s a completely fabricated paradise. It is Las Vegas. Even the Balinese on the street don’t seem friendly like in the village where I live –which I am now realizing is far more affluent than I understood it to be. All along the road they scowled, instead of smiling. I would too, I suppose, if this is what had become of my home. I hate it here. So we’ve decided to go home. We’ll spend the night tonight, because it was too late to not pay for the room by the time we’d been honest with each other with how not into this we both were, and we’ll hightail it out of here first thing in the morning. What a bummer and a waste of money.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this discomfort. Because it’s not like I can just go hand Rupiah to each person on the street outside this stupid hotel, or like it would make much of a difference if I did. Or like this is the only place where terrible opulence sits in counterpoint to extreme poverty. I am aware that I am contributing to the problem by staying in this place, by coming for a beach vacation sight unseen without doing my research first, but staying one less night, or having not come at all doesn’t eliminate the problem either. Maybe I’m not giving the other tourists here benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’re all as disgusted with this as I am, but had paid in advance for a week’s stay and got the time off work to take a holiday with their families and they got here and found out that this isn’t a sleepy beach town with Balinese hoteliers feeding their families by hosting Europeans and Australians and Americans. Maybe they’re stuck here and are making the most of it. But I doubt it.
I have been wondering what my landlord thinks of me that he thought *this* was what I wanted for a weekend holiday? (A “honeymoon” he called it) I guess he assumes I want what other Americans or Europeans he’s hosted have wanted or enjoyed. But this isn’t paradise. This is embarrassing and shameful and I’m disgusted that we’re here at all, that I traded time in the clinic for this. There are no Balinese staying here, so I don’t imagine this is where he brings his family to vacation at the beach.
Sigh. Rant over. It’s a challenge. In short, don’t bother going to Amed. It’ll only bring you down.
Okay. Here we have to get into uncomfortable territory, where I talk about the elephant that enters the room whenever someone like me (middle-class, educated, white, American) travels to a third world country. I am not well-equipped to discuss this topic eloquently, and am bound to say ignorant things or trip over topics I don’t fully comprehend, or stuff both my feet in my mouth by the time I’m done, but here goes. So we are in Amed. It is a remote area of Eastern Bali, about 45 minutes beyond Candidasa (where were planning to stay originally based on some friends’ recent travels and enjoyment). Amed, according to my guide book, is actually only one village out of the several villages along the coastline here but savvy hoteliers have lumped them all together to lure tourists to “the Amed region.” My landlord Made insisted this was the place to come, said it is “paradise” and told us it is a relatively undeveloped, quiet coastal village, that it would be easy to find someplace small right on the beach to stay for about $40 US a night, including breakfast. We were told to expect to have the place to ourselves.
Instead, we spent 2 and a half hours trying to find a hotel that had rooms available, with nothing cheaper available than $65 a night –and that was at a private villa with a strange punch drunk European couple whose dog barked at us mercilessly and bit our driver so we opted not to stay. We chose the cutest and second-cheapest place we saw, a hotel with a series of little detached houses leading down to the beach. Ours has a queen bed downstairs and a loft upstairs with two twin beds, a nice bathroom and an outdoor shower. Its clean, nicely landscaped and has a pool and beach access, though there isn’t much beach to speak of, as most of it is taken up by the fishing boats that the rest of the village use to make their living every day. There is no place to “go” from here –its all hotels or beach, there is a hotel café that is overpriced and not very good, and the place itself is full of fat Australians, loud Italians, and their collective obnoxious offspring (okay, okay and two, late-twenties, pasty skinned, childless, judgmental and self righteous Americans). We had come too far to turn around and go home last night so we bought our driver dinner and stayed but both Austin and I lay awake feeling unsettled about what we had just set ourselves up for. We were expecting low key beach getaway, not this weird Club Med in Bali. We both fell asleep more out of defeat than actual exhaustion at about 9pm last night and were awakened through the night by the sounds of dogs barking and fighting, and then the bossy roosters that seem to be everywhere and have no sense of time or decency.
This morning, we ate the included breakfast, which was passable, if not inspiring, and then went to walk on the beach to stake out a place to sunbathe. We’d been on the beach maybe 3 minutes when we were approached by a Balinese guy carrying a pair of flippers. He introduced himself, asked where we are from, commented that we were in the “best” place to be seeing Bali for the first time, and offered to take us snorkeling or out in his boat to see an American warship wreck from WWII. We declined politely. He told us he lived next door to the hotel so we could come ask for him if we changed our minds. He seemed so earnest and desperate to make a sale and continued to make small talk, at one point mentioning that the hotel we are staying at is owned by an American. Austin stiffened at that –he had been particularly specific with our driver that he wanted to stay someplace Balinese owned. We assumed we were doing that and it was a bummer to learn we were not. I eventually had to suggest we keep walking before the guy with the flippers got the hint and let us continue on our way. We made it to the end of the beach and Austin was quiet next to me, I could tell feeling uncomfortable with being “American Tourists” and all its attendant implications. We made our way back the way we’d come and were greeted by a Balinese woman at the shoreline. Her shirt had holes in the shoulders and back. She introduced herself and asked if we’d like to buy a massage. Again we politely declined. She followed us back towards the hotel and she was met by a younger woman with a small child coming from the property next door to the hotel, where the man with the flippers said he lived. I looked beyond the two women and the child and saw there was a group of people on the property, working on something together. They were obviously very, very poor. The women continued to call after us as we walked to the hotel, trying to convince us to get a massage with them, but their calls stopped as we stepped onto the hotel’s pathway, and I got the sense that we were now “off limits” to them and I felt incredibly self-conscious.
Austin and I tried to sunbathe by the pool for a while, but he couldn’t sit still. He’d lie down for a minute and pick up his book, then go back to the room for a few minutes, then come back, then lie back down, then go stand at the hotel wall and look at the ocean, then come back. I finally asked what was wrong. He said he didn’t really know but he was having a hard time just being here. I agreed. We finally had to acknowledge that this sucks. We aren’t good at just laying by a pool, let alone at a really swanky hotel that we can’t afford, especially with people who have next to nothing waiting on the property line to beg to sell us something so their kids can eat. We aren’t impervious to the facts of the matter. I don’t know how to turn of my conscience for this kind of thing. This is not what we came here expecting. This is not what we thought we were signing up for.
The other tourists here seem content. They’re paying hotel staff to massage them by the pool, letting their kids splash the other guests laying out near by, not wandering off the property. Austin and I rented a motorbike for the day and cruised up the road. Everywhere that isn’t a posh hotel here is a slum. Cinderblock houses and warrungs and sundry stores. It’s a completely fabricated paradise. It is Las Vegas. Even the Balinese on the street don’t seem friendly like in the village where I live –which I am now realizing is far more affluent than I understood it to be. All along the road they scowled, instead of smiling. I would too, I suppose, if this is what had become of my home. I hate it here. So we’ve decided to go home. We’ll spend the night tonight, because it was too late to not pay for the room by the time we’d been honest with each other with how not into this we both were, and we’ll hightail it out of here first thing in the morning. What a bummer and a waste of money.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this discomfort. Because it’s not like I can just go hand Rupiah to each person on the street outside this stupid hotel, or like it would make much of a difference if I did. Or like this is the only place where terrible opulence sits in counterpoint to extreme poverty. I am aware that I am contributing to the problem by staying in this place, by coming for a beach vacation sight unseen without doing my research first, but staying one less night, or having not come at all doesn’t eliminate the problem either. Maybe I’m not giving the other tourists here benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’re all as disgusted with this as I am, but had paid in advance for a week’s stay and got the time off work to take a holiday with their families and they got here and found out that this isn’t a sleepy beach town with Balinese hoteliers feeding their families by hosting Europeans and Australians and Americans. Maybe they’re stuck here and are making the most of it. But I doubt it.
I have been wondering what my landlord thinks of me that he thought *this* was what I wanted for a weekend holiday? (A “honeymoon” he called it) I guess he assumes I want what other Americans or Europeans he’s hosted have wanted or enjoyed. But this isn’t paradise. This is embarrassing and shameful and I’m disgusted that we’re here at all, that I traded time in the clinic for this. There are no Balinese staying here, so I don’t imagine this is where he brings his family to vacation at the beach.
Sigh. Rant over. It’s a challenge. In short, don’t bother going to Amed. It’ll only bring you down.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Stress Not
9:00am Thursday July 16, 2009
Listening to Aretha Franklin, waking up slowly this morning. I finally slept well last night after three consecutive nights of relative sleeplessness due mostly, I think, to an extra body in my bed. Austin came to Bali to surprise me on Sunday, which is pretty amazing any way you slice it (even if it does raise the temperature of the mosquito netted bed to an uncomfortable level).
For those of you who don’t know about Austin, my relationship with my previous boyfriend ended just before my birthday in May. Two weeks later, I went camping with some homies and Austin came along too. It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that we haven’t really been apart since. So that happened. I’ve been missing Austin pretty intensely since getting here and when he got here Sunday, I’d been having a pretty miserable day. He couldn’t have picked a better time to show up and I’m really, REALLY, glad he’s here.
So what’s happened since the kittens made their bed my home, you ask? Well, the mama cat crept back in not long after I fell asleep and was shocked and amazed to find me sleeping with her babies. I tried not to scare her, but she hissed and growled and ran away anyway, and spent the next hour outside my bedroom window yoweling for her babies. I tried sitting on the floor away from the bed and encouraging her to come in. She didn’t go for it. I tried gathering my comforter around me and going to sleep on my porch, but it was uncomfortable and she didn’t go for that either. So I finally went back to bed and slept curled as far away from the kittens as I could. I woke up to her creeping out of my bed with a kitten in her mouth a few hours later. When she had safely left the room, I checked under the pillow and the kittens were gone.
I caught another baby on Sunday afternoon, a first timer who dilated quickly and pushed her baby out like a champ but tore badly and dumped some blood. I’d estimate her total blood loss at 600 ccs which is a bleed for sure, but a relatively small one. However, because she was small and thin and undernourished, it has taken a bit more of a toll on her than it would on a woman I might serve at home. I sutured the tear with the help of the Indonesian midwives, but didn’t feel good about my repair job. The Indonesian midwives eventually took over and I felt awful, wondering if I would ever get the practice and experience I need to suture competently, wondering what business I have trying to sit my license exam if I can’t confidently suture a second degree tear by myself at home. Once the mama was resting and nursing her baby and everyone left her alone, I spent the next few hours checking her vitals and monitoring her blood loss with the Australian midwife and doctor who were both supportive and reassuring to me that I hadn’t botched the birth. And she fainted while trying to use the toilet afterwards, which isn’t fun when it happens in English I can can communicate with the mother before she goes down, and with the father or other support people after she’s gone down, and can now attest that its even less fun when they do it in a language you don’t speak. Nevertheless, I was feeling low, my leg was still bothering me and I was wondering why I am here.
My phone rang with a blocked number. A familiar voice on the other end of the line, but he sounded strange. Austin made small talk with me while I cried with relief that he’d called me when he did, needing to hear a friendly voice so badly. It was the first time I’d talked on the phone to someone from home. He was asking me weird questions, like what I was doing, where I was, etc. “What’s going on? You sound weird. Are you okay?” I asked him. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just really excited to be talking to you.” He told me. Then it dawned on me. “Are you HERE?” I asked him. “No…” he began, “Well, maybe.” 20 minutes later he was at the clinic. Totally unprecedented and totally amazing.
So having Austin here has been interesting. We rented a motorbike, and he’s been riding me around Ubud on it since Monday. We got him a handphone so I can get hold of him when I need to be at the clinic. We’ve been eating A LOT. And it has been just all around pretty magical to have him here. I’ve only attended two births in the 4 days he’s been here, which is a little challenging for me since I’m here to attend births, not traipse around paradise with a handsome man on the back of his motorbike. But the two births I’ve attended have been lovely and a nice counterpoint to the confidence shaking of Sunday’s birth. The day before yesterday, I came down to the clinic to support Tessa, who was catching, and saw her do a nice waterbirth for a first timer, with a gorgeous third stage –I’ve never so clearly watched a placenta just creep down and come out unassisted—and then observed Tessa while she sutured. That night, as I was falling asleep, I had an Ah-HA! moment regarding suturing that I’d been needing, and felt much better prepared for the next tear I see. Yesterday, I was having lunch with Austin and got a text that there was a first timer at 3cm at the clinic if I wanted to come do the birth so I had Austin drop me off on the way home. Another lovely birth. She labored stoically, almost silently, and I saw no difference in her behavior or body language between 4 centimeters and 10 centimeters. Even when her water broke while she pushed, it was silent, undramatic, barely registering on anyone’s radar. I joked that she was just going to have her baby under her sarong and we wouldn’t know until it cried. As she began to bring the baby down more, I noticed that part of her labia looked odd, like raw meat and I wondered if she had some kind of STD or other infection that was causing her skin to look so…yucky. As the baby’s head began to crown, the labia parted further and I saw that it wasn’t her labia that was raw but that there was a long strip of it that was not attached to the rest of her vagina, and had a hole in it, through which I had been seeing her urethral sponge (sorry, to the squeamish amongst you). I’ve never seen anything like it before. I showed the other midwives in the room and everyone sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, lets hold it back and see what happens. So we did. Gorgeous, squalling baby was born with a nuchal hand, crossed over his chest and up near his opposite ear (little stinker), over an intact peri --no need for suturing, though the strip did detach on one side, leaving a very long skin tag that one of the Indonesian midwives cut off. I was THRILLED to have such a lovely birth with so many people in attendance, to help wipe away any negative perceptions that may have been formed after Sunday’s birth.
In other rockstar news, I may have correctly diagnosed a congenital defect in a newborn born at the clinic yesterday morning. No one knew what to make of the baby, but talking about what she was presenting with, I immediately offered up hypothyroidsim of the newborn, based on a case I saw a few years ago. The baby was transported to Denpasar to a hospital in the early afternoon and we are waiting to hear what the pediatricians think, but it was gratifying to learn that, after a bunch of research, everyone agreed my diagnosis was the best fit. Go me. Maybe.
My leg continues its slow road toward what I am hoping is healing. It was better over the weekend, and then worsened substantially Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday afternoon, we ran into the clinic acupuncturist, Dr. B, on the street and, seeing my leg, she asked that I come down to the clinic that evening for treatment because it was looking infected. Austin and I showed up at the end of clinic and Danielle and Dr. B conferred over my leg and then took me over to the table to “ring the dragon” which involved having acupuncture needles inserted all around the perimeter of the injury. It hurt like hell. Dr. B also looked at my tongue and declared I needed my liver and my stomach bled. What now? This meant they took lancets to my big and second toes on each foot. I bled like a stuck pig and started to regret my decision to let them treat me at all. In truth, it was great fun. Everyone from the clinic was there, including the mom of the baby I had caught Sunday night, and everyone laughed while I cried out in pain, and everyone took pictures of me being miserable on the bed. It was hilarious and painful and good times. After I thought all the torture was over, I showed someone how the bruise of my leg hadn’t ever materialized around the actual injury, but had pooled in my foot, below my ankle where there was now a huge purple spot. Dr. B scolded me for not pointing this out to her before and promptly stuck six more needles in the tender part of my foot. Me and my big mouth.
I began to get worried yesterday when the swelling was getting obviously worse. Tessa and I had a laugh on Tuesday night when she was examining it and we realized how bad the edema was and were poking our fingers into my tender leg and laughing at how deep the finger imprints left on my leg were. She warned me that she doesn’t like how close to the bone the infection is and that, in Australia, the treatment if my infection got worse would be maybe 4-6 weeks of IV antibiotics. Yeah, lets not go there. So I’ve been being extra diligent with the antibiotic cream everyone swears by and trying to elevate it whenever possible but it was undeniable yesterday that my leg hurt worse and looked bad again. I finally agreed to take antibiotics, if we could find the appropriate ones for me. Danielle overheard these plans and asked if I’d taken the Chinese herbs that Dr. B had suggested I mix in with the antibiotic cream for my leg. Of course I hadn’t. I’m lazy. Take them orally, she said. Seriously. So I took two doses yesterday and, this morning, my leg is 80% better. That stuff is NO JOKE. So I’ve got 8 more doses of the herb, and I’ll continue taking it over the next day or so and if my leg isn’t substantially better, then I’ll take the antibiotics. Who knew being injured in Indonesia would prove to be such a debacle?
Other magical things that have happened:
Austin and I walked through the monkey forest at dusk the other night and followed a path that I hadn’t gone down before. It led to a staircase/bridge over a deep ravine, surrounded on all sides by tall trees with roots plunging down from their branches. We followed the bridge down and walked past an old stone reflecting pool and along the river with the night falling quickly around us and could see bats flying nearby and the monkeys overhead. It was so lovely and amazing –like something out of a movie, like someone made it all up. It is still hard to fathom that someplace as beautiful as this exists.
Dr. B is associated with a school of spiritual teaching related to zen meditation I guess. Every Wednesday, she shows a movie related to these teachings and then gives a kind of blessing she was “ordained” (my word not hers) with on a pilgrimage to India. So, after my birth yesterday, someone mentioned she was going to see the movie and I remembered what day it was and quickly asked Austin if he wanted to go get blessed by Dr. B. “Duh” he said and we hopped on the motorbike and ran off. The movie was good –it was a taped interview with a teacher of the spiritual practice Dr. B is involved with but it was closely related to the tenets of Buddhism that I have been interested in for the past year, so it spoke to me anyway. Austin was pretty into the movie too and leaned over to me at one point and said “this is so much like The Process!” which I could totally relate it. I found myself renewing my promise to continue on the spiritual journey which I’ve been actively cultivating for the past year and feeling grateful to be building a relationship with someone who has parallel experience to me (via The Process) and is interested in doing that exploration with me. After the movie, Dr. B explained how the blessing works, what it’s purpose is, and how to receive it and then they turned down the lights, turned on some om shanti music and got to business. I don’t know if the blessing worked, but I can say if feels really good to get blessed by Dr. B –like she was massaging my brain. Whatever it was, Austin and I left feeling great, had a nice meal together, and then konked out like we hadn’t slept in days.
So, its now been a few hours since I began this entry, and Austin and I have packed our bags and are headed to spend a few days at the beach. We were planning to go one place on the island, knew where we would stay and everything, but then at the last minute had our minds changed by my landlord, who called his brother, who picked us up, and now we are being whisked off to a more remote part of the island where we have been promised quiet, both black and white sand beaches, coral reefs, diving if we want it, and generally “a honeymoon.” I realize this is totally counter to my purpose here but I’ve realized a few things over the last week. First, I’m here to observe and gain extra experience. No finite number of births is going to make or break me as a midwife –if I miss 3 births because I was gone 3 days, its not actually going to make a difference. Second, what I’m observing at the clinic isn’t how I practice at home or how I’m going to practice at home. If anything, many things I’ve observed have been educational primarily in how they reinforce how I’m NOT going to do it. This isn’t to say that what happens at the clinic isn’t appropriate –I think it is, for this clinic and this culture and level of poverty, etc. It is not homebirth in northern california. Not that I came here expecting homebirth, but it’s a good reality check that you alter your practice based on many circumstances, some of them not so obvious or even clinically based. In short, this clinic is not going to dramatically alter how I practice back home. Third, the clinic is crowded right now and tensions have been running high. I can remove myself from that for a few days, recharge, and make one less body at the clinic trying to “get” a birth. Fine with me. Even better that I’m going to spend those days on the beach with my man. So I feel less anxious to be at the clinic all the time. Probably the most valuable learning I’ve gotten here so far has been just sitting and talking with the Australian homebirth midwife, learning how she practices, listening to her 30 years worth of amazing stories. I have half a mind to invite myself to Eastern Australia where she lives and pick her brain and watch her births for 6 months. Anyway, I’m on vacation on my vacation and I’m stoked about it. I don’t feel in the least bit guilty. I’ve got 4 more weeks here. I would love 5 more primary births, but I don’t even need them. I’ve decided to just enjoy the time I have here, and stress not.
That’s the key to being here happily: Stress not.
Listening to Aretha Franklin, waking up slowly this morning. I finally slept well last night after three consecutive nights of relative sleeplessness due mostly, I think, to an extra body in my bed. Austin came to Bali to surprise me on Sunday, which is pretty amazing any way you slice it (even if it does raise the temperature of the mosquito netted bed to an uncomfortable level).
For those of you who don’t know about Austin, my relationship with my previous boyfriend ended just before my birthday in May. Two weeks later, I went camping with some homies and Austin came along too. It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that we haven’t really been apart since. So that happened. I’ve been missing Austin pretty intensely since getting here and when he got here Sunday, I’d been having a pretty miserable day. He couldn’t have picked a better time to show up and I’m really, REALLY, glad he’s here.
So what’s happened since the kittens made their bed my home, you ask? Well, the mama cat crept back in not long after I fell asleep and was shocked and amazed to find me sleeping with her babies. I tried not to scare her, but she hissed and growled and ran away anyway, and spent the next hour outside my bedroom window yoweling for her babies. I tried sitting on the floor away from the bed and encouraging her to come in. She didn’t go for it. I tried gathering my comforter around me and going to sleep on my porch, but it was uncomfortable and she didn’t go for that either. So I finally went back to bed and slept curled as far away from the kittens as I could. I woke up to her creeping out of my bed with a kitten in her mouth a few hours later. When she had safely left the room, I checked under the pillow and the kittens were gone.
I caught another baby on Sunday afternoon, a first timer who dilated quickly and pushed her baby out like a champ but tore badly and dumped some blood. I’d estimate her total blood loss at 600 ccs which is a bleed for sure, but a relatively small one. However, because she was small and thin and undernourished, it has taken a bit more of a toll on her than it would on a woman I might serve at home. I sutured the tear with the help of the Indonesian midwives, but didn’t feel good about my repair job. The Indonesian midwives eventually took over and I felt awful, wondering if I would ever get the practice and experience I need to suture competently, wondering what business I have trying to sit my license exam if I can’t confidently suture a second degree tear by myself at home. Once the mama was resting and nursing her baby and everyone left her alone, I spent the next few hours checking her vitals and monitoring her blood loss with the Australian midwife and doctor who were both supportive and reassuring to me that I hadn’t botched the birth. And she fainted while trying to use the toilet afterwards, which isn’t fun when it happens in English I can can communicate with the mother before she goes down, and with the father or other support people after she’s gone down, and can now attest that its even less fun when they do it in a language you don’t speak. Nevertheless, I was feeling low, my leg was still bothering me and I was wondering why I am here.
My phone rang with a blocked number. A familiar voice on the other end of the line, but he sounded strange. Austin made small talk with me while I cried with relief that he’d called me when he did, needing to hear a friendly voice so badly. It was the first time I’d talked on the phone to someone from home. He was asking me weird questions, like what I was doing, where I was, etc. “What’s going on? You sound weird. Are you okay?” I asked him. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just really excited to be talking to you.” He told me. Then it dawned on me. “Are you HERE?” I asked him. “No…” he began, “Well, maybe.” 20 minutes later he was at the clinic. Totally unprecedented and totally amazing.
So having Austin here has been interesting. We rented a motorbike, and he’s been riding me around Ubud on it since Monday. We got him a handphone so I can get hold of him when I need to be at the clinic. We’ve been eating A LOT. And it has been just all around pretty magical to have him here. I’ve only attended two births in the 4 days he’s been here, which is a little challenging for me since I’m here to attend births, not traipse around paradise with a handsome man on the back of his motorbike. But the two births I’ve attended have been lovely and a nice counterpoint to the confidence shaking of Sunday’s birth. The day before yesterday, I came down to the clinic to support Tessa, who was catching, and saw her do a nice waterbirth for a first timer, with a gorgeous third stage –I’ve never so clearly watched a placenta just creep down and come out unassisted—and then observed Tessa while she sutured. That night, as I was falling asleep, I had an Ah-HA! moment regarding suturing that I’d been needing, and felt much better prepared for the next tear I see. Yesterday, I was having lunch with Austin and got a text that there was a first timer at 3cm at the clinic if I wanted to come do the birth so I had Austin drop me off on the way home. Another lovely birth. She labored stoically, almost silently, and I saw no difference in her behavior or body language between 4 centimeters and 10 centimeters. Even when her water broke while she pushed, it was silent, undramatic, barely registering on anyone’s radar. I joked that she was just going to have her baby under her sarong and we wouldn’t know until it cried. As she began to bring the baby down more, I noticed that part of her labia looked odd, like raw meat and I wondered if she had some kind of STD or other infection that was causing her skin to look so…yucky. As the baby’s head began to crown, the labia parted further and I saw that it wasn’t her labia that was raw but that there was a long strip of it that was not attached to the rest of her vagina, and had a hole in it, through which I had been seeing her urethral sponge (sorry, to the squeamish amongst you). I’ve never seen anything like it before. I showed the other midwives in the room and everyone sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, lets hold it back and see what happens. So we did. Gorgeous, squalling baby was born with a nuchal hand, crossed over his chest and up near his opposite ear (little stinker), over an intact peri --no need for suturing, though the strip did detach on one side, leaving a very long skin tag that one of the Indonesian midwives cut off. I was THRILLED to have such a lovely birth with so many people in attendance, to help wipe away any negative perceptions that may have been formed after Sunday’s birth.
In other rockstar news, I may have correctly diagnosed a congenital defect in a newborn born at the clinic yesterday morning. No one knew what to make of the baby, but talking about what she was presenting with, I immediately offered up hypothyroidsim of the newborn, based on a case I saw a few years ago. The baby was transported to Denpasar to a hospital in the early afternoon and we are waiting to hear what the pediatricians think, but it was gratifying to learn that, after a bunch of research, everyone agreed my diagnosis was the best fit. Go me. Maybe.
My leg continues its slow road toward what I am hoping is healing. It was better over the weekend, and then worsened substantially Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday afternoon, we ran into the clinic acupuncturist, Dr. B, on the street and, seeing my leg, she asked that I come down to the clinic that evening for treatment because it was looking infected. Austin and I showed up at the end of clinic and Danielle and Dr. B conferred over my leg and then took me over to the table to “ring the dragon” which involved having acupuncture needles inserted all around the perimeter of the injury. It hurt like hell. Dr. B also looked at my tongue and declared I needed my liver and my stomach bled. What now? This meant they took lancets to my big and second toes on each foot. I bled like a stuck pig and started to regret my decision to let them treat me at all. In truth, it was great fun. Everyone from the clinic was there, including the mom of the baby I had caught Sunday night, and everyone laughed while I cried out in pain, and everyone took pictures of me being miserable on the bed. It was hilarious and painful and good times. After I thought all the torture was over, I showed someone how the bruise of my leg hadn’t ever materialized around the actual injury, but had pooled in my foot, below my ankle where there was now a huge purple spot. Dr. B scolded me for not pointing this out to her before and promptly stuck six more needles in the tender part of my foot. Me and my big mouth.
I began to get worried yesterday when the swelling was getting obviously worse. Tessa and I had a laugh on Tuesday night when she was examining it and we realized how bad the edema was and were poking our fingers into my tender leg and laughing at how deep the finger imprints left on my leg were. She warned me that she doesn’t like how close to the bone the infection is and that, in Australia, the treatment if my infection got worse would be maybe 4-6 weeks of IV antibiotics. Yeah, lets not go there. So I’ve been being extra diligent with the antibiotic cream everyone swears by and trying to elevate it whenever possible but it was undeniable yesterday that my leg hurt worse and looked bad again. I finally agreed to take antibiotics, if we could find the appropriate ones for me. Danielle overheard these plans and asked if I’d taken the Chinese herbs that Dr. B had suggested I mix in with the antibiotic cream for my leg. Of course I hadn’t. I’m lazy. Take them orally, she said. Seriously. So I took two doses yesterday and, this morning, my leg is 80% better. That stuff is NO JOKE. So I’ve got 8 more doses of the herb, and I’ll continue taking it over the next day or so and if my leg isn’t substantially better, then I’ll take the antibiotics. Who knew being injured in Indonesia would prove to be such a debacle?
Other magical things that have happened:
Austin and I walked through the monkey forest at dusk the other night and followed a path that I hadn’t gone down before. It led to a staircase/bridge over a deep ravine, surrounded on all sides by tall trees with roots plunging down from their branches. We followed the bridge down and walked past an old stone reflecting pool and along the river with the night falling quickly around us and could see bats flying nearby and the monkeys overhead. It was so lovely and amazing –like something out of a movie, like someone made it all up. It is still hard to fathom that someplace as beautiful as this exists.
Dr. B is associated with a school of spiritual teaching related to zen meditation I guess. Every Wednesday, she shows a movie related to these teachings and then gives a kind of blessing she was “ordained” (my word not hers) with on a pilgrimage to India. So, after my birth yesterday, someone mentioned she was going to see the movie and I remembered what day it was and quickly asked Austin if he wanted to go get blessed by Dr. B. “Duh” he said and we hopped on the motorbike and ran off. The movie was good –it was a taped interview with a teacher of the spiritual practice Dr. B is involved with but it was closely related to the tenets of Buddhism that I have been interested in for the past year, so it spoke to me anyway. Austin was pretty into the movie too and leaned over to me at one point and said “this is so much like The Process!” which I could totally relate it. I found myself renewing my promise to continue on the spiritual journey which I’ve been actively cultivating for the past year and feeling grateful to be building a relationship with someone who has parallel experience to me (via The Process) and is interested in doing that exploration with me. After the movie, Dr. B explained how the blessing works, what it’s purpose is, and how to receive it and then they turned down the lights, turned on some om shanti music and got to business. I don’t know if the blessing worked, but I can say if feels really good to get blessed by Dr. B –like she was massaging my brain. Whatever it was, Austin and I left feeling great, had a nice meal together, and then konked out like we hadn’t slept in days.
So, its now been a few hours since I began this entry, and Austin and I have packed our bags and are headed to spend a few days at the beach. We were planning to go one place on the island, knew where we would stay and everything, but then at the last minute had our minds changed by my landlord, who called his brother, who picked us up, and now we are being whisked off to a more remote part of the island where we have been promised quiet, both black and white sand beaches, coral reefs, diving if we want it, and generally “a honeymoon.” I realize this is totally counter to my purpose here but I’ve realized a few things over the last week. First, I’m here to observe and gain extra experience. No finite number of births is going to make or break me as a midwife –if I miss 3 births because I was gone 3 days, its not actually going to make a difference. Second, what I’m observing at the clinic isn’t how I practice at home or how I’m going to practice at home. If anything, many things I’ve observed have been educational primarily in how they reinforce how I’m NOT going to do it. This isn’t to say that what happens at the clinic isn’t appropriate –I think it is, for this clinic and this culture and level of poverty, etc. It is not homebirth in northern california. Not that I came here expecting homebirth, but it’s a good reality check that you alter your practice based on many circumstances, some of them not so obvious or even clinically based. In short, this clinic is not going to dramatically alter how I practice back home. Third, the clinic is crowded right now and tensions have been running high. I can remove myself from that for a few days, recharge, and make one less body at the clinic trying to “get” a birth. Fine with me. Even better that I’m going to spend those days on the beach with my man. So I feel less anxious to be at the clinic all the time. Probably the most valuable learning I’ve gotten here so far has been just sitting and talking with the Australian homebirth midwife, learning how she practices, listening to her 30 years worth of amazing stories. I have half a mind to invite myself to Eastern Australia where she lives and pick her brain and watch her births for 6 months. Anyway, I’m on vacation on my vacation and I’m stoked about it. I don’t feel in the least bit guilty. I’ve got 4 more weeks here. I would love 5 more primary births, but I don’t even need them. I’ve decided to just enjoy the time I have here, and stress not.
That’s the key to being here happily: Stress not.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Strange things in my bed
4:19am Saturday July 10, 2009
I just got home from catching baby number ?? 3? 4? I am only counting it as number 2 since it’s the second baby I’ve caught here where I felt like I managed the whole thing from start to finish. (Lovely 4th baby, tight nuchal cord, slow shoulders, intact peri, lovely 3rd stage. Just a gorgeous birth.) Its late and I walked home alone, once again soaked in afterbirth otherwise I might have slept at the clinic. Maura told me about encountering a really large snake on her walk home one afternoon a few weeks ago and since then, I’ve been paralyzed with my life-long fear of snakes on my pitch black walks home alone late at night. Add to it that someone told me yesterday there are cobras here and, understandably, that hasn’t helped things much.
So, I just got home. Getting home entails walking along a dark road, getting barked at by packs of dogs, and walking along even darker alleys with foliage that brushes along my bare legs and only adds to my already jumpy disposition. I spend much of the walk wishing I’d brought a flashlight to Bali, and digging my fingernails into my palms, repeating “I will NOT freak out. I will NOT freak out. I will NOT freak out.” There are lots of bumps in the night in Bali so, once home, I’m not guaranteed sanctuary from the heebie jeebies. Those “bumps” include the huge geckos that live on my celiling and giggle to themselves periodically throughout the day and, at night, make the most horrendous throaty sound that wakes me from a dead slumber and sets my teeth on edge. I like the little baby geckos just fine, but the enormous adults give me the creeps, staring at me with their dead dinosaur eyes from 15 feet over my head. I’m constantly scanning for them overhead and when, invariably, I find they are *directly* above me I always think, “Look guy, do what you need to do. Please just don’t fall on me, okay?”
Anyway, like I said. I just got home. Its almost 4:30am. Its dark and quiet out and there are noises. I’m a little spooked already from my walk home and, as I was washing up for bed in my bathroom just now, my bedside lamp bulb decided to burn out, eliminating the safe warm glow from the area around my bed and casting my house back into an ominous black darkness. I froze at my bathroom door. Um, not helping the creeped out factor much, thanks. I repeated my mantra “I will NOT freak out, I will NOT freak out” and made peace with the fact that, yes, it had been unfortunate timing but, no, it was not likely that a serial killer cobra had switched off my lamp and was waiting to eat me when I came out of the bathroom. I calmly walked out of the bathroom, turned out the porch light, and climbed into bed, naked, pulling my folded comforter up over me. I was midway through laying backwards onto my pillow when I knew something was horribly wrong. My bedspread was warm. Like someone or something had been sitting on it. Recently. I sat paralyzed for a moment, not sitting up and not lying down (ya know, letting my "core" do all the work). And as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw a dark furry thing laying at the edge of my bed, not moving. I reached down and quickly brushed it with my fingers. Small. Warm. Fuzzy. Not a sock, not a piece of my clothing. Nope. I jumped out of bed like –well, like I had just found a small warm fuzzy thing in my bed in the dark. Again, I repeated, “I will NOT freak out. I will NOT freak out.” I ran to my wardrobe. Somehow, being naked and confronting unknown fuzzy things in your bed doesn’t seem to mix. I pulled a dress over my head and said out loud, “Okay. There is a warm fuzzy thing in your bed. It’s okay. It is OKAY.” I turned the main overhead light on and realized there were noises now coming from my bed. Little noises. I listened. That sounds like… kittens. Feeling fairly sure of my discovery but still steeling myself against something much more horrifying, like badgers or snakes in fur vests, I pulled back the mosquito netting and examined the little fuzzy thing on my bed. Sure enough, a kitten, eyes still closed, scrambling for warmth and unhappy with his eviction from my covers. I sat down on the edge of the bed, fear dissipating mostly, but still thoroughly creeped out. I slowly unfolded my comforter and found two more.
There are three *tiny* kittens in my bed.
What the hell am I supposed to do about this? Its 4:30am, the mother is not around and, apparently, I’m a midwife. The cat has abandoned her kittens with me. Could there possibly be any further proof? So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of doing: I took an extra pillow, piled the kittens under it at the foot of my bed, covered the pillow with the end of my comforter and have climbed into bed with them. Balinese kittens. Kind of gross, pretty cute, I might die of some rare tropical feline disease, but whatever. It’s 4:30 in the morning and I am exhausted and have no idea what else I’m supposed to do right now. Anyway, its kind of nice to share my bed with someone else for the first time in a while. I just hope this is the last nasty surprise I have in my bed for long time. Also, no cobras on the walk home would be awesome too.
I just got home from catching baby number ?? 3? 4? I am only counting it as number 2 since it’s the second baby I’ve caught here where I felt like I managed the whole thing from start to finish. (Lovely 4th baby, tight nuchal cord, slow shoulders, intact peri, lovely 3rd stage. Just a gorgeous birth.) Its late and I walked home alone, once again soaked in afterbirth otherwise I might have slept at the clinic. Maura told me about encountering a really large snake on her walk home one afternoon a few weeks ago and since then, I’ve been paralyzed with my life-long fear of snakes on my pitch black walks home alone late at night. Add to it that someone told me yesterday there are cobras here and, understandably, that hasn’t helped things much.
So, I just got home. Getting home entails walking along a dark road, getting barked at by packs of dogs, and walking along even darker alleys with foliage that brushes along my bare legs and only adds to my already jumpy disposition. I spend much of the walk wishing I’d brought a flashlight to Bali, and digging my fingernails into my palms, repeating “I will NOT freak out. I will NOT freak out. I will NOT freak out.” There are lots of bumps in the night in Bali so, once home, I’m not guaranteed sanctuary from the heebie jeebies. Those “bumps” include the huge geckos that live on my celiling and giggle to themselves periodically throughout the day and, at night, make the most horrendous throaty sound that wakes me from a dead slumber and sets my teeth on edge. I like the little baby geckos just fine, but the enormous adults give me the creeps, staring at me with their dead dinosaur eyes from 15 feet over my head. I’m constantly scanning for them overhead and when, invariably, I find they are *directly* above me I always think, “Look guy, do what you need to do. Please just don’t fall on me, okay?”
Anyway, like I said. I just got home. Its almost 4:30am. Its dark and quiet out and there are noises. I’m a little spooked already from my walk home and, as I was washing up for bed in my bathroom just now, my bedside lamp bulb decided to burn out, eliminating the safe warm glow from the area around my bed and casting my house back into an ominous black darkness. I froze at my bathroom door. Um, not helping the creeped out factor much, thanks. I repeated my mantra “I will NOT freak out, I will NOT freak out” and made peace with the fact that, yes, it had been unfortunate timing but, no, it was not likely that a serial killer cobra had switched off my lamp and was waiting to eat me when I came out of the bathroom. I calmly walked out of the bathroom, turned out the porch light, and climbed into bed, naked, pulling my folded comforter up over me. I was midway through laying backwards onto my pillow when I knew something was horribly wrong. My bedspread was warm. Like someone or something had been sitting on it. Recently. I sat paralyzed for a moment, not sitting up and not lying down (ya know, letting my "core" do all the work). And as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw a dark furry thing laying at the edge of my bed, not moving. I reached down and quickly brushed it with my fingers. Small. Warm. Fuzzy. Not a sock, not a piece of my clothing. Nope. I jumped out of bed like –well, like I had just found a small warm fuzzy thing in my bed in the dark. Again, I repeated, “I will NOT freak out. I will NOT freak out.” I ran to my wardrobe. Somehow, being naked and confronting unknown fuzzy things in your bed doesn’t seem to mix. I pulled a dress over my head and said out loud, “Okay. There is a warm fuzzy thing in your bed. It’s okay. It is OKAY.” I turned the main overhead light on and realized there were noises now coming from my bed. Little noises. I listened. That sounds like… kittens. Feeling fairly sure of my discovery but still steeling myself against something much more horrifying, like badgers or snakes in fur vests, I pulled back the mosquito netting and examined the little fuzzy thing on my bed. Sure enough, a kitten, eyes still closed, scrambling for warmth and unhappy with his eviction from my covers. I sat down on the edge of the bed, fear dissipating mostly, but still thoroughly creeped out. I slowly unfolded my comforter and found two more.
There are three *tiny* kittens in my bed.
What the hell am I supposed to do about this? Its 4:30am, the mother is not around and, apparently, I’m a midwife. The cat has abandoned her kittens with me. Could there possibly be any further proof? So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of doing: I took an extra pillow, piled the kittens under it at the foot of my bed, covered the pillow with the end of my comforter and have climbed into bed with them. Balinese kittens. Kind of gross, pretty cute, I might die of some rare tropical feline disease, but whatever. It’s 4:30 in the morning and I am exhausted and have no idea what else I’m supposed to do right now. Anyway, its kind of nice to share my bed with someone else for the first time in a while. I just hope this is the last nasty surprise I have in my bed for long time. Also, no cobras on the walk home would be awesome too.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
About Today
2:20pm Friday July 9, 2009
I'm having a hard day today. I'm injured and I'm feeling frustrated with the clinic and wondering if I should just cash in my chips and call it a day, change my flight and head home.
All over Ubud, there are small portions of the sidewalk where it has caved in, leaving a 2 to 3 foot deep hole in the ground, and nothing protecting it. So it is wise advice to the traveler to keep your eyes to the ground here. Two nights ago, Tessa (the Australian doctor) and I were on our way to dinner when we were stopped outside the monkey forest and asked for directions. We helped them and then started to continue our walk. I was still turned, saying goodbye to the people we had helped, as I took steps forward and I missed the hole in the ground in front of me completely. Or rather, I didn't miss it at all, and I fell in.
I climbed out of the hole, laughing. People had pulled over to see if I was okay, and the people we'd given directions to stopped as well, looking on horrified as I cackled and blood and dirt and gutter water ran down my leg. I realized I'd lost my flip flops in the fall and had to go in again, head first, to pull them out. Tessa poured some drinking water over my wound, and luckily I had a handkerchief to try to stop the bleeding. We continued on our way with me reassuring everyone that I was fine, and I limped on to dinner, stopping every now and again to dab away more blood. We had a mediocre dinner and I had trouble concentrating on the conversation because I was in a lot of pain. I figured I'd get home and take some ibuprofen and I'd be fine.
I got home okay and went straight to bed but slept terribly. My leg ached and kept bleeding, and no position was comfortable. The next morning, the leg was swollen and tender and difficult to put weight on. I cleaned it the best I could with cold water and body wash and limped down to the clinic. All along the way, Balinese people kept stopping to ask what happened, if I was alright, if I needed a ride. I can't get over how sweet people are here. At the clinic, I took some arnica and cleaned the wound with some iodine and slathered it with neosporin. The woman who runs the clinic had arranged a girls' spa day and took a group of us to get massages ($10 for an hour!). My leg gets stiff and painful any time I sit down for too long and getting out of the car was really difficult and I saw I was still bleeding and oozing some. The ladies at the spa were very concerned with my leg and cleaned it up for me again before my massage. The massage, despite my leg pain, was lovely. They placed a bowl of hot water with nutmeg roots and vetiver and something else nice under the table, and the massage treatment room was open air, looking out to rice paddies and had a nice breeze. Naked on a table, covered with a light sarong, I almost forgot about the pain, except for when she massaged my right foot and thigh.
We went out for lunch after our massages, which had already taken quite a while, and I felt irritable that we'd spent an entire day away from the clinic, that my leg hurt so much, and that I was spending my time in Bali lunching and being massaged when I felt like I should be working and learning (I know. Where are my priorities?!). When we finally got back to the clinic, things were pretty quiet and I rested and studied until late. When no one came in in labor by about 10pm, I decided it was better to go home and rest than wait up all night. There were no births last night, so I made the right choice.
I woke up this morning and my leg hurt even more. Its increasingly difficult to put weight on it, but once I am upright and start moving, the tension and swelling seems to ease until I can walk on it again. I'm sure its not broken, but fractured maybe? I don't know if I'd be able to walk on a frature either. My leg is hot and swollen tight --it actually feels like I have an ace bandage on it. The wound is on the shin, which I know is a strong part of the leg, and I'm confident that, even if the bone is a little damaged, there's nothing to be done about it. Just have to listen to my body, rest, and try to keep walking on it, not let the muscles atrophy. But it hurts like hell. People continue to stop me to ask why I'm limping, if I'm alright. They can't fix their sidewalks, but otherwise they sure are concerned with the well-being of others.
I've got the deck stacked against me a bit because I'm less mobile, my food options are more limited. I'm having difficulty getting adequate protein as it is right now because the local diet is pretty crappy and its a long walk up hill to the restaurants where I could get a decent tuna steak or a nice portion of chicken. So I'm feeling the effects of crappy blood sugar, feeling hopeless and weak. And being hurt far away from home doesn't feel awesome, either. So I'm homesick again today. Like, really, really homesick.
What am I doing here?
I've been here 8 days and attended 3 births. Only one of those births will I count as primary for my license requirements. I'd like to do 8 at least, but was planning to attend at least 20 or 30 births in the 6 weeks I'm here. I figured that was a reasonable estimate. And while I know that can't be the whole focus of my being here, I'm frustrated. I thought I'd be busier, that I'd be included more immediately, that I wouldn't have to work so hard to get what I need. Being less mobile, dreading getting up from my chair isn't helping. How am I supposed to do births like this? What use am I all gimpy like this?
Today I'm frustrated that I'm here alone. I've been fine with it mostly, if sad that my loved ones aren't here to share it with me. But today, the practical aspect of having someone else here feels huge. It would be good to have someone I could rely on today. I've got people here, but they're new people. I don't want to lean too heavily on them for support (literally), use up their good will. I wish I could talk to one of you and cry and say the irrational, pouting, ungrateful things I want to say, just to get it out, even though I know its not helpful to be negative, resistant to what is simply so. It would be nice to hear a familiar voice, to hear something encouraging.
I miss you extra lots today.
I'm having a hard day today. I'm injured and I'm feeling frustrated with the clinic and wondering if I should just cash in my chips and call it a day, change my flight and head home.
All over Ubud, there are small portions of the sidewalk where it has caved in, leaving a 2 to 3 foot deep hole in the ground, and nothing protecting it. So it is wise advice to the traveler to keep your eyes to the ground here. Two nights ago, Tessa (the Australian doctor) and I were on our way to dinner when we were stopped outside the monkey forest and asked for directions. We helped them and then started to continue our walk. I was still turned, saying goodbye to the people we had helped, as I took steps forward and I missed the hole in the ground in front of me completely. Or rather, I didn't miss it at all, and I fell in.
I climbed out of the hole, laughing. People had pulled over to see if I was okay, and the people we'd given directions to stopped as well, looking on horrified as I cackled and blood and dirt and gutter water ran down my leg. I realized I'd lost my flip flops in the fall and had to go in again, head first, to pull them out. Tessa poured some drinking water over my wound, and luckily I had a handkerchief to try to stop the bleeding. We continued on our way with me reassuring everyone that I was fine, and I limped on to dinner, stopping every now and again to dab away more blood. We had a mediocre dinner and I had trouble concentrating on the conversation because I was in a lot of pain. I figured I'd get home and take some ibuprofen and I'd be fine.
I got home okay and went straight to bed but slept terribly. My leg ached and kept bleeding, and no position was comfortable. The next morning, the leg was swollen and tender and difficult to put weight on. I cleaned it the best I could with cold water and body wash and limped down to the clinic. All along the way, Balinese people kept stopping to ask what happened, if I was alright, if I needed a ride. I can't get over how sweet people are here. At the clinic, I took some arnica and cleaned the wound with some iodine and slathered it with neosporin. The woman who runs the clinic had arranged a girls' spa day and took a group of us to get massages ($10 for an hour!). My leg gets stiff and painful any time I sit down for too long and getting out of the car was really difficult and I saw I was still bleeding and oozing some. The ladies at the spa were very concerned with my leg and cleaned it up for me again before my massage. The massage, despite my leg pain, was lovely. They placed a bowl of hot water with nutmeg roots and vetiver and something else nice under the table, and the massage treatment room was open air, looking out to rice paddies and had a nice breeze. Naked on a table, covered with a light sarong, I almost forgot about the pain, except for when she massaged my right foot and thigh.
We went out for lunch after our massages, which had already taken quite a while, and I felt irritable that we'd spent an entire day away from the clinic, that my leg hurt so much, and that I was spending my time in Bali lunching and being massaged when I felt like I should be working and learning (I know. Where are my priorities?!). When we finally got back to the clinic, things were pretty quiet and I rested and studied until late. When no one came in in labor by about 10pm, I decided it was better to go home and rest than wait up all night. There were no births last night, so I made the right choice.
I woke up this morning and my leg hurt even more. Its increasingly difficult to put weight on it, but once I am upright and start moving, the tension and swelling seems to ease until I can walk on it again. I'm sure its not broken, but fractured maybe? I don't know if I'd be able to walk on a frature either. My leg is hot and swollen tight --it actually feels like I have an ace bandage on it. The wound is on the shin, which I know is a strong part of the leg, and I'm confident that, even if the bone is a little damaged, there's nothing to be done about it. Just have to listen to my body, rest, and try to keep walking on it, not let the muscles atrophy. But it hurts like hell. People continue to stop me to ask why I'm limping, if I'm alright. They can't fix their sidewalks, but otherwise they sure are concerned with the well-being of others.
I've got the deck stacked against me a bit because I'm less mobile, my food options are more limited. I'm having difficulty getting adequate protein as it is right now because the local diet is pretty crappy and its a long walk up hill to the restaurants where I could get a decent tuna steak or a nice portion of chicken. So I'm feeling the effects of crappy blood sugar, feeling hopeless and weak. And being hurt far away from home doesn't feel awesome, either. So I'm homesick again today. Like, really, really homesick.
What am I doing here?
I've been here 8 days and attended 3 births. Only one of those births will I count as primary for my license requirements. I'd like to do 8 at least, but was planning to attend at least 20 or 30 births in the 6 weeks I'm here. I figured that was a reasonable estimate. And while I know that can't be the whole focus of my being here, I'm frustrated. I thought I'd be busier, that I'd be included more immediately, that I wouldn't have to work so hard to get what I need. Being less mobile, dreading getting up from my chair isn't helping. How am I supposed to do births like this? What use am I all gimpy like this?
Today I'm frustrated that I'm here alone. I've been fine with it mostly, if sad that my loved ones aren't here to share it with me. But today, the practical aspect of having someone else here feels huge. It would be good to have someone I could rely on today. I've got people here, but they're new people. I don't want to lean too heavily on them for support (literally), use up their good will. I wish I could talk to one of you and cry and say the irrational, pouting, ungrateful things I want to say, just to get it out, even though I know its not helpful to be negative, resistant to what is simply so. It would be nice to hear a familiar voice, to hear something encouraging.
I miss you extra lots today.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Indonesian lessons
4:13pm Wednesday July 8th, 2009
I'm officially feeling like I've settled in. I have more work to do in terms of fully integrating, ingratiating, and insinuating myself in the clinic, but I feel like I'm making headway (so many birth puns, so little time!) there.
My landlord Made came and visited me today and asked if I still wanted to rent Danielle's little apartment, so I'm moving across the compound later today. The new room is pretty neat and has a small kitchen, which I'm really going to appreciate, and the bed has mosquito netting, which I also really appreciate. There is a shower, but no bathtub, which I'm a little sad about, but I think I'll get over it. The apartment is situated next to the family temple and the grain storage loft, so there's lots of awesome stuff happening visually around my new digs and it has a large porch with a table and chairs for sitting, so Kira and I should be pretty comfy when she comes to visit. Made's visit also helped me solve a big Balinese mystery that has been haunting me since my second day here. On my porch, *something* has been lunching, and pooping, at night. I have never seen poop quite like this poop, and thought it might be a monkey or a large bird. Turns out its a bat. There are bats everywhere here and I love them. They're amazing. And I'm both a little creeped out and totally stoked that a bat has been hanging out on my porch every night, even if he was pooping all over the nice wicker chair that was out there.
My bahasa Indonesia (the language they speak here) is getting better. If, by better, I mean I can say "thank you" and "good morning" and "walking" and "good" and "mother" and "baby." But also, I've taken my relationship with my neighbor the woodcarver to the next level. This morning, I called my usual good morning to him and he beckoned me over. I tried to ask him about the big presidential election being held here today, but he didn't understand. I'm sorry, he told me the best he could, but maybe we could practice English and Bahasa together? I happily agreed and he told me how to say in a full sentence that I was walking to eat breakfast. I've forgotten it all, of course, because I was so excited we talking at all. He asked me to write down my name, and he wrote down his (again, I've forgotten because I'm a big jerk and was too busy grinning to think to write it down for myself) and we talked about me being a midwife at the clinic and being from California. He held my hands and peered at me over his glasses, grinning from ear to ear, and explained that he sees me walking "every day!" and every day, I look so "happy!" and he likes this about me. I didn't know how to explain to him that saying good morning to him every morning was the reason for my happiness, so I told him Bali makes me happy. He understood this. He told me how to say "see you later" (yeah, I forgot that too) and we high-fived, and of I went. I walked by again this afternoon and we shook hands and he asked me if I was going to Ubud. "Yes," I told him, "I'm going to Kafe." "Always, you are going to the cafe." he told me. "Yeah," I said. "Its true. I eat a lot." And then he told me how to say "good afternoon" (salemat soire) and I practiced it the whole way to the restaurant with everyone I passed.
I attended another birth last night -a VBAC with a very sweet second time mom. She progressed quickly and had her baby at almost exactly midnight. I sat with her through much of her labor and encouraged her as she pushed in a squat at the end of the bed. In the effort of one of her pushes, she farted loudly twice and the whole room of Indonesian midwives and the father of the baby dissolved into laughter. Seeing I wasn't laughing, the father of the baby tried to explain why they were laughing and told me "Pass wind!" which of course made me laugh and then the midwives started laughing again. One of the Indonesian midwives said a word in bahasa to me and asked "do you know?" I didn't so she told me it meant "laugh." "Laugh?" I said to her, confirming that's what she said. She shook her head vigorously "NO! 'Laugh' not 'love'!" she cried. "That's what I said." I told her. For some reason, she thought that was really funny and said something in bahasa that got the other midwives laughing and she laughed so hard she draped herself over my shoulders where I was sitting on the floor to hold her up. I didn't get the joke, but it always makes me smile to see someone laughing like that. The head was soon visible but I was surprised to learn I wasn't catching, when one of the other Indonesian midwives stepped in as the head was born. Whatever. It was fine, and the birth was lovely --slow shoulders and a deep tear but baby was quick to cry. The father wept over his wife and baby and it made me a little teary eyed too. I love it when the dads cry. I watched another masterful suturing job done by the midwife who took over the birth, feeling antsy to get some time practicing it myself. This morning, I visited the mother of that baby and the mother of the baby I caught the night before last and they were both very happy to see me and their babies looked great. Sometimes, in the deep concentration of labor and the shock of the immediate postpartum, I'm not sure if I was of any service, or I wonder if my presence had been more of an annoyance than helpful to the mothers I serve. But, when they greet me with big smiles and are eager to show me their babies, I know that I don't need to feel insecure. Its true that it is often long, frustrating, sometimes gross, and sometimes scary, but I love my job.
The full moon was last night, so I expect a slew of babies tonight or tomorrow so I'm eating a good meal (tomato soup, seared tuna, and the best drink ever: blended pineapple with coconut milk) and then heading back to the clinic after I move my things into the new place. It really is lovely here... my only complaint is that I'm not sharing it with anyone. The alone time is nice, but it gets boring and old. I'm really looking forward to Kira getting here, so I can say to her later "remember?" I've been here a week now, officially. It feels like longer. And shorter.
I'm officially feeling like I've settled in. I have more work to do in terms of fully integrating, ingratiating, and insinuating myself in the clinic, but I feel like I'm making headway (so many birth puns, so little time!) there.
My landlord Made came and visited me today and asked if I still wanted to rent Danielle's little apartment, so I'm moving across the compound later today. The new room is pretty neat and has a small kitchen, which I'm really going to appreciate, and the bed has mosquito netting, which I also really appreciate. There is a shower, but no bathtub, which I'm a little sad about, but I think I'll get over it. The apartment is situated next to the family temple and the grain storage loft, so there's lots of awesome stuff happening visually around my new digs and it has a large porch with a table and chairs for sitting, so Kira and I should be pretty comfy when she comes to visit. Made's visit also helped me solve a big Balinese mystery that has been haunting me since my second day here. On my porch, *something* has been lunching, and pooping, at night. I have never seen poop quite like this poop, and thought it might be a monkey or a large bird. Turns out its a bat. There are bats everywhere here and I love them. They're amazing. And I'm both a little creeped out and totally stoked that a bat has been hanging out on my porch every night, even if he was pooping all over the nice wicker chair that was out there.
My bahasa Indonesia (the language they speak here) is getting better. If, by better, I mean I can say "thank you" and "good morning" and "walking" and "good" and "mother" and "baby." But also, I've taken my relationship with my neighbor the woodcarver to the next level. This morning, I called my usual good morning to him and he beckoned me over. I tried to ask him about the big presidential election being held here today, but he didn't understand. I'm sorry, he told me the best he could, but maybe we could practice English and Bahasa together? I happily agreed and he told me how to say in a full sentence that I was walking to eat breakfast. I've forgotten it all, of course, because I was so excited we talking at all. He asked me to write down my name, and he wrote down his (again, I've forgotten because I'm a big jerk and was too busy grinning to think to write it down for myself) and we talked about me being a midwife at the clinic and being from California. He held my hands and peered at me over his glasses, grinning from ear to ear, and explained that he sees me walking "every day!" and every day, I look so "happy!" and he likes this about me. I didn't know how to explain to him that saying good morning to him every morning was the reason for my happiness, so I told him Bali makes me happy. He understood this. He told me how to say "see you later" (yeah, I forgot that too) and we high-fived, and of I went. I walked by again this afternoon and we shook hands and he asked me if I was going to Ubud. "Yes," I told him, "I'm going to Kafe." "Always, you are going to the cafe." he told me. "Yeah," I said. "Its true. I eat a lot." And then he told me how to say "good afternoon" (salemat soire) and I practiced it the whole way to the restaurant with everyone I passed.
I attended another birth last night -a VBAC with a very sweet second time mom. She progressed quickly and had her baby at almost exactly midnight. I sat with her through much of her labor and encouraged her as she pushed in a squat at the end of the bed. In the effort of one of her pushes, she farted loudly twice and the whole room of Indonesian midwives and the father of the baby dissolved into laughter. Seeing I wasn't laughing, the father of the baby tried to explain why they were laughing and told me "Pass wind!" which of course made me laugh and then the midwives started laughing again. One of the Indonesian midwives said a word in bahasa to me and asked "do you know?" I didn't so she told me it meant "laugh." "Laugh?" I said to her, confirming that's what she said. She shook her head vigorously "NO! 'Laugh' not 'love'!" she cried. "That's what I said." I told her. For some reason, she thought that was really funny and said something in bahasa that got the other midwives laughing and she laughed so hard she draped herself over my shoulders where I was sitting on the floor to hold her up. I didn't get the joke, but it always makes me smile to see someone laughing like that. The head was soon visible but I was surprised to learn I wasn't catching, when one of the other Indonesian midwives stepped in as the head was born. Whatever. It was fine, and the birth was lovely --slow shoulders and a deep tear but baby was quick to cry. The father wept over his wife and baby and it made me a little teary eyed too. I love it when the dads cry. I watched another masterful suturing job done by the midwife who took over the birth, feeling antsy to get some time practicing it myself. This morning, I visited the mother of that baby and the mother of the baby I caught the night before last and they were both very happy to see me and their babies looked great. Sometimes, in the deep concentration of labor and the shock of the immediate postpartum, I'm not sure if I was of any service, or I wonder if my presence had been more of an annoyance than helpful to the mothers I serve. But, when they greet me with big smiles and are eager to show me their babies, I know that I don't need to feel insecure. Its true that it is often long, frustrating, sometimes gross, and sometimes scary, but I love my job.
The full moon was last night, so I expect a slew of babies tonight or tomorrow so I'm eating a good meal (tomato soup, seared tuna, and the best drink ever: blended pineapple with coconut milk) and then heading back to the clinic after I move my things into the new place. It really is lovely here... my only complaint is that I'm not sharing it with anyone. The alone time is nice, but it gets boring and old. I'm really looking forward to Kira getting here, so I can say to her later "remember?" I've been here a week now, officially. It feels like longer. And shorter.
Monday, July 6, 2009
late night ruminations
3:33am Tuesday July 7th, 2009
My left pant leg is wet with afterbirth but I don't have any clothes to change into and I'm too tired to walk home in the dark right now. I just caught a lovely little boy for a first time mom who I saw for a prenatal on Saturday night. It was neat to see her in labor after meeting her prenatally --that didn't happen for me while I was in Senegal.
I'm slowly, forcefully, pushing my way into the clinic. Sort of like the babies I see being born here. At home, and in Senegal, I've been lucky with intact perineums, but the mothers of the two babies I've caught here so far both had tears that needed suturing. I want to believe its not my technique... I suspect it has something to do with every woman being made to push in a knees-to-chest position --it really puts a lot of strain on the vaginal tissues and doesn't give them as much time to stretch and open. Of course, I'm looking for blame because I'm feeling guilty, especially over this last one. She ripped damn near down to her anus, and I felt it happen under my hands. I am of two minds about being hands-on during the delivery of the head. On one hand, it makes sense to me that you'd want to support those tissues, give the mother something to push against with one hand, while maintaining flexion with the other hand, so the smallest diameter of the baby's head emerges. On the other hand, I like the idea of being hands off. Let mothers push in a way that feels good for them, in a position that feels good for them, let them slow it down when they feel the burn, gingerly let their baby's head emerge and stretch their tissues, let them put their own hands there if it feels better, keeping my damn hands away from the whole affair. I struggled with it in Senegal, when I had to keep my hands near or inside a woman's vagina to keep the bossy, rough hands of the impatient matrones out. But if I was left alone, I kept my hands away, only lending support if I sensed she really could use it. And even then, what did I know? I've been happy to be hands off at the last few births I've attended, and it works nicely. But here, they want you to have your hands on. They practically want you draped over the whole business. So I'm going along with it, because my soapbox has no place here. But its not always easy.
The upside was, like I said, I'm pushing my way in around here and so I managed the entire delivery on my own, with a lovely Indonesian midwife and a brand spankin' new, green-as-a-lime-skittle Balinese midwifery student by my side. It was great. They do a few things here that I would like to incorporate into my own practice, even though it may border on too hippie dippy for my taste. For example, they float flowers in the bath where many women give birth. For many women here, this is the first bath they have ever had. It feels like a profound gesture of respect and reverence to the women giving birth that flowers are floated in the water in honor of the amazing feat she is performing. Further, as the head becomes visible, they begin to sing. It is my great hope that I will learn the song before I leave because it is very beautiful. They sing it softly at first, as the baby is just starting to appear, and then more clearly as the birth is more imminent. I have heard them singing it as a large group when many people are present at a difficult birth and it is stunning, but it is equally beautiful when there are only two midwives in the room. They have sweet voices and the melody is at once an encouragement, and a prayer, and a welcome. Today's baby came and his mother continued the song where the midwives left off, singing it to her newborn as we welcomed him and dried him on her chest. Gorgeous. After the placenta is born, they remove the flowers from the birth tub and place them over the placenta. Another simple, lovely touch that honors the event that has taken place, and the amazing role the placenta played in it. The Balinese are not skimpy on the pretty details, that much is certain.
It looks like I'm moving again, and maybe even a third time this week. My friend Danielle left on a surfing trip today because our next acupuncture clinic isn't until Saturday. There has been some strange political stuff happening at the clinic recently related to the Indonesian government not liking certain things about how the clinic is operated. It looked, for a time anyway, like the western volunteers might need to make themselves scarce for a while (which I wasn't thrilled about), and Danielle nearly had me convinced to take this week off with her and go surfing about 2 hours away. It sounded really nice. BUT, I was responsible, and I remain here, dutifully un-suntanned and un-beachy. Anyway, Danielle's apartment across the compound from my room is now vacant and she's not planning to move back in. Because it has a kitchen and is bigger, I'm going to take it over when its ready for me. But also, my bestie Kira is coming to visit me on the 27th and there are supposedly a few houses coming up for rent that would have an extra bed and some more space for more than one person, so I'm looking into that possibility as well. I had really had my heart set on renting a house, so that would be my preference, but I'm open to whatever is going to happen. It really doesn't matter so long as its shelter.
I had dinner this evening with two of the Aussies --the mother midwife, daughter doctor combo whom I really enjoy. They invited me over and made me a lovely curry and we talked shop for several hours. The daughter was a double footling breech born at home and her mother has gorgeous photographs of the event. She (the midwife) is a pretty well-known birth activist in Australia and she showed me one of the presentations she had given at a conference down there, followed by a video montage of her daughter's birth, feet first. I totally wept while watching it, I'm not going to lie. It was really, really beautiful. I'm a little in awe of them and fantasizing that they'll invite me to come live with them in Australia and attend births with them. Australian homebirth midwives are currently under a huge threat from the government and it looks like New Zealander homebirth midwives are next. Its shameful to see countries that I've looked to for hope and sense when homebirth midwives in the United States are being marginalized and outright persecuted, beginning to slip backward in their protection of reproductive rights. Not cool, Australia, not cool.
The lizards on the ceiling over my head are chit-chitting at each other testily, and I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open. I suppose I'll lie here in my damp pants and get eaten by mosquitoes until dawn and then stumble back to my bed. Ah, birth. The life of the midwife is so glamorous.
My left pant leg is wet with afterbirth but I don't have any clothes to change into and I'm too tired to walk home in the dark right now. I just caught a lovely little boy for a first time mom who I saw for a prenatal on Saturday night. It was neat to see her in labor after meeting her prenatally --that didn't happen for me while I was in Senegal.
I'm slowly, forcefully, pushing my way into the clinic. Sort of like the babies I see being born here. At home, and in Senegal, I've been lucky with intact perineums, but the mothers of the two babies I've caught here so far both had tears that needed suturing. I want to believe its not my technique... I suspect it has something to do with every woman being made to push in a knees-to-chest position --it really puts a lot of strain on the vaginal tissues and doesn't give them as much time to stretch and open. Of course, I'm looking for blame because I'm feeling guilty, especially over this last one. She ripped damn near down to her anus, and I felt it happen under my hands. I am of two minds about being hands-on during the delivery of the head. On one hand, it makes sense to me that you'd want to support those tissues, give the mother something to push against with one hand, while maintaining flexion with the other hand, so the smallest diameter of the baby's head emerges. On the other hand, I like the idea of being hands off. Let mothers push in a way that feels good for them, in a position that feels good for them, let them slow it down when they feel the burn, gingerly let their baby's head emerge and stretch their tissues, let them put their own hands there if it feels better, keeping my damn hands away from the whole affair. I struggled with it in Senegal, when I had to keep my hands near or inside a woman's vagina to keep the bossy, rough hands of the impatient matrones out. But if I was left alone, I kept my hands away, only lending support if I sensed she really could use it. And even then, what did I know? I've been happy to be hands off at the last few births I've attended, and it works nicely. But here, they want you to have your hands on. They practically want you draped over the whole business. So I'm going along with it, because my soapbox has no place here. But its not always easy.
The upside was, like I said, I'm pushing my way in around here and so I managed the entire delivery on my own, with a lovely Indonesian midwife and a brand spankin' new, green-as-a-lime-skittle Balinese midwifery student by my side. It was great. They do a few things here that I would like to incorporate into my own practice, even though it may border on too hippie dippy for my taste. For example, they float flowers in the bath where many women give birth. For many women here, this is the first bath they have ever had. It feels like a profound gesture of respect and reverence to the women giving birth that flowers are floated in the water in honor of the amazing feat she is performing. Further, as the head becomes visible, they begin to sing. It is my great hope that I will learn the song before I leave because it is very beautiful. They sing it softly at first, as the baby is just starting to appear, and then more clearly as the birth is more imminent. I have heard them singing it as a large group when many people are present at a difficult birth and it is stunning, but it is equally beautiful when there are only two midwives in the room. They have sweet voices and the melody is at once an encouragement, and a prayer, and a welcome. Today's baby came and his mother continued the song where the midwives left off, singing it to her newborn as we welcomed him and dried him on her chest. Gorgeous. After the placenta is born, they remove the flowers from the birth tub and place them over the placenta. Another simple, lovely touch that honors the event that has taken place, and the amazing role the placenta played in it. The Balinese are not skimpy on the pretty details, that much is certain.
It looks like I'm moving again, and maybe even a third time this week. My friend Danielle left on a surfing trip today because our next acupuncture clinic isn't until Saturday. There has been some strange political stuff happening at the clinic recently related to the Indonesian government not liking certain things about how the clinic is operated. It looked, for a time anyway, like the western volunteers might need to make themselves scarce for a while (which I wasn't thrilled about), and Danielle nearly had me convinced to take this week off with her and go surfing about 2 hours away. It sounded really nice. BUT, I was responsible, and I remain here, dutifully un-suntanned and un-beachy. Anyway, Danielle's apartment across the compound from my room is now vacant and she's not planning to move back in. Because it has a kitchen and is bigger, I'm going to take it over when its ready for me. But also, my bestie Kira is coming to visit me on the 27th and there are supposedly a few houses coming up for rent that would have an extra bed and some more space for more than one person, so I'm looking into that possibility as well. I had really had my heart set on renting a house, so that would be my preference, but I'm open to whatever is going to happen. It really doesn't matter so long as its shelter.
I had dinner this evening with two of the Aussies --the mother midwife, daughter doctor combo whom I really enjoy. They invited me over and made me a lovely curry and we talked shop for several hours. The daughter was a double footling breech born at home and her mother has gorgeous photographs of the event. She (the midwife) is a pretty well-known birth activist in Australia and she showed me one of the presentations she had given at a conference down there, followed by a video montage of her daughter's birth, feet first. I totally wept while watching it, I'm not going to lie. It was really, really beautiful. I'm a little in awe of them and fantasizing that they'll invite me to come live with them in Australia and attend births with them. Australian homebirth midwives are currently under a huge threat from the government and it looks like New Zealander homebirth midwives are next. Its shameful to see countries that I've looked to for hope and sense when homebirth midwives in the United States are being marginalized and outright persecuted, beginning to slip backward in their protection of reproductive rights. Not cool, Australia, not cool.
The lizards on the ceiling over my head are chit-chitting at each other testily, and I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open. I suppose I'll lie here in my damp pants and get eaten by mosquitoes until dawn and then stumble back to my bed. Ah, birth. The life of the midwife is so glamorous.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
yes please
9:34am July 6, 2009
I’ve got a little ritual down here for my mornings. I wake up, like clockwork, at about 7am. I lie in bed for a few minutes, absorbing that I’m in Bali, thinking about my dreams, listening to the sounds outside. I get up, bathe, dress, and walk up the road toward the monkey forest to get breakfast. I pass the woodcarver a few doors up from my house and he smiles and gives me the thumbs up. I smile and give him the thumbs up and say “Selamat pagi!” (good morning) and he says “jalan jalan?” (where are you walking?) and I mime coffee and he nods and smiles and gives me a thumbs up. I grin, fully from ear to ear, for the next half mile. This routine mostly continues, verbatim, with everyone I meet along the road. Everyone wants to know where I’m going, everyone wants to say hello, everyone wants to smile. I love this about Bali.
I usually walk into Ubud for breakfast, which entails walking through the monkey forest, along the road that doubles as the motorbike road. It’s a little stressful sometimes navigating the motorbikes coming in both directions and keeping a respectful distance from the monkeys that, I won’t lie, scare me a little bit. The walking is nice, since I drive almost everywhere at home, and because its so warm and lovely here. Breakfast is usually fresh blended fruit juice of some kind (it is official as of yesterday that I’m totally DONE with watermelon juice. I beat my love for that into the ground) and a bowl of fruit with yogurt, or an omelet.
I’ve officially given up milk and coffee, which is a huge bummer for me, but I figure will be easier to do here, so I can adjust more easily when I get home. I recognize that milk and I (as Austin would say) do not get along. My acupuncturists at home keep telling me that I suffer from “damp heat” and have told me repeatedly that it’s largely due to the amount of milk (half and half, actually) I drink and the amount of cheese I eat that I feel so crappy. But I haven’t been willing to give it up because I drink so much tea and so much coffee, and I cannot drink either without copious amounts of half and half in it. But, according to my new acupuncturist friend Danielle, coffee contributes huge amounts of heat into my body. So, the fact that I’m suffering from damp heat, means that every time I’m drinking a cup of coffee drenched with half and half, I’m introducing more of exactly what keeps me sick into my body. Mostly I only drink milk with my coffee or tea, so to eliminate coffee and tea means that 90% of my milk consumption will be taken care of. And, no, I’m not willing to try drinking my tea black. What’s the point? I live for half and half. I drink tea as an excuse to guzzle half and half. I told Danielle, I’d happily lie on a beach with a cold pint of half and half and a straw and be perfectly content. So I’ve given it up. Love and light to you, cream and coffee. I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry we can’t be together anymore.
I had a pretty magical day yesterday, which did not involve me setting foot in the clinic even once. I had my morning breakfast date with myself and then planned to head to the clinic but ended up kidnapped by Danielle on a crazy adventure to an organic restaurant hidden in a field of rice paddies, and then running into friends and listening to their stories about visiting the psychic who lives across from the clinic and Javanese medicine men, and then, of course, I needed a nap. And then, because we’d been doing nothing but sleeping and eating all day, Danielle and I felt we deserved a nice dinner so we went to a really great restaurant where we ordered $5 seared Ahi steaks (heck of delicious) and a huge piece of chocolate mousse cake and fried bananas. Our waiter kept setting dishes down in front of us saying, “yes please” which kills me. I’m basically not starving in Bali. On the way back, Danielle and I stopped outside a bar where a Balinese reggae band was playing --once again adorable beyond words, and spent the walk giggling at how many times we heard “Need transport? Taxi lady? Nice tattoo!” We started telling stories about bummer bugs, lizard, snakes, etc. and ended up scaring ourselves silly on our walk through the dark monkey forest when a dog ran up behind us. We think we scared the dog too, because when we both screamed, he stopped dead in his tracks and didn't move until we started walking again, doubled over from hysterical embarrassed laughter and how silly we were being. The dog ended up trotting along side us all the way home and tried to follow us into the family compound and we had to shut the wooden doors and latch them to prevent him from getting in. I went to bed feeling guilty that I had done nothing that day that related at all to my purpose here, but decided to let myself off the hook. I need to recount the story of my time in the acupuncture and prenatal clinics the other night still but I think I’ll wait. For now, I’ll say it was amazing and I worked really hard and I learned a lot. And yesterday was only day 4 and everyone takes Sunday off in Bali, and I’m still settling in and today is going to be a non stop clinic slog, so I declare that my day of eating and sleeping was okay. I’ve just got to be careful to not turn my trip into nothing but doing that. I fell asleep to a Balinese sing along of Hotel California being sung next door, the dog scratching on the wooden doors of the compound, and the sound of it beginning to rain.
Miss you guys. Wish you were here.
I’ve got a little ritual down here for my mornings. I wake up, like clockwork, at about 7am. I lie in bed for a few minutes, absorbing that I’m in Bali, thinking about my dreams, listening to the sounds outside. I get up, bathe, dress, and walk up the road toward the monkey forest to get breakfast. I pass the woodcarver a few doors up from my house and he smiles and gives me the thumbs up. I smile and give him the thumbs up and say “Selamat pagi!” (good morning) and he says “jalan jalan?” (where are you walking?) and I mime coffee and he nods and smiles and gives me a thumbs up. I grin, fully from ear to ear, for the next half mile. This routine mostly continues, verbatim, with everyone I meet along the road. Everyone wants to know where I’m going, everyone wants to say hello, everyone wants to smile. I love this about Bali.
I usually walk into Ubud for breakfast, which entails walking through the monkey forest, along the road that doubles as the motorbike road. It’s a little stressful sometimes navigating the motorbikes coming in both directions and keeping a respectful distance from the monkeys that, I won’t lie, scare me a little bit. The walking is nice, since I drive almost everywhere at home, and because its so warm and lovely here. Breakfast is usually fresh blended fruit juice of some kind (it is official as of yesterday that I’m totally DONE with watermelon juice. I beat my love for that into the ground) and a bowl of fruit with yogurt, or an omelet.
I’ve officially given up milk and coffee, which is a huge bummer for me, but I figure will be easier to do here, so I can adjust more easily when I get home. I recognize that milk and I (as Austin would say) do not get along. My acupuncturists at home keep telling me that I suffer from “damp heat” and have told me repeatedly that it’s largely due to the amount of milk (half and half, actually) I drink and the amount of cheese I eat that I feel so crappy. But I haven’t been willing to give it up because I drink so much tea and so much coffee, and I cannot drink either without copious amounts of half and half in it. But, according to my new acupuncturist friend Danielle, coffee contributes huge amounts of heat into my body. So, the fact that I’m suffering from damp heat, means that every time I’m drinking a cup of coffee drenched with half and half, I’m introducing more of exactly what keeps me sick into my body. Mostly I only drink milk with my coffee or tea, so to eliminate coffee and tea means that 90% of my milk consumption will be taken care of. And, no, I’m not willing to try drinking my tea black. What’s the point? I live for half and half. I drink tea as an excuse to guzzle half and half. I told Danielle, I’d happily lie on a beach with a cold pint of half and half and a straw and be perfectly content. So I’ve given it up. Love and light to you, cream and coffee. I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry we can’t be together anymore.
I had a pretty magical day yesterday, which did not involve me setting foot in the clinic even once. I had my morning breakfast date with myself and then planned to head to the clinic but ended up kidnapped by Danielle on a crazy adventure to an organic restaurant hidden in a field of rice paddies, and then running into friends and listening to their stories about visiting the psychic who lives across from the clinic and Javanese medicine men, and then, of course, I needed a nap. And then, because we’d been doing nothing but sleeping and eating all day, Danielle and I felt we deserved a nice dinner so we went to a really great restaurant where we ordered $5 seared Ahi steaks (heck of delicious) and a huge piece of chocolate mousse cake and fried bananas. Our waiter kept setting dishes down in front of us saying, “yes please” which kills me. I’m basically not starving in Bali. On the way back, Danielle and I stopped outside a bar where a Balinese reggae band was playing --once again adorable beyond words, and spent the walk giggling at how many times we heard “Need transport? Taxi lady? Nice tattoo!” We started telling stories about bummer bugs, lizard, snakes, etc. and ended up scaring ourselves silly on our walk through the dark monkey forest when a dog ran up behind us. We think we scared the dog too, because when we both screamed, he stopped dead in his tracks and didn't move until we started walking again, doubled over from hysterical embarrassed laughter and how silly we were being. The dog ended up trotting along side us all the way home and tried to follow us into the family compound and we had to shut the wooden doors and latch them to prevent him from getting in. I went to bed feeling guilty that I had done nothing that day that related at all to my purpose here, but decided to let myself off the hook. I need to recount the story of my time in the acupuncture and prenatal clinics the other night still but I think I’ll wait. For now, I’ll say it was amazing and I worked really hard and I learned a lot. And yesterday was only day 4 and everyone takes Sunday off in Bali, and I’m still settling in and today is going to be a non stop clinic slog, so I declare that my day of eating and sleeping was okay. I’ve just got to be careful to not turn my trip into nothing but doing that. I fell asleep to a Balinese sing along of Hotel California being sung next door, the dog scratching on the wooden doors of the compound, and the sound of it beginning to rain.
Miss you guys. Wish you were here.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Watermelon juice will cure all that ails me.
9:23am July 4, 2009
I just walked for 2 hours. Normally, if I'd been planning to walk for 2 hours, I wouldn't have any issue with this. However, I was NOT planning to walk for 2 hours. I was just taking an early morning walk to the ATM, then headed to breakfast/email/writing time, but I guess I overestimated my ability to navigate around here, and I ended up walking for 2 hours before finally giving up, acknowledging that I was lost, and getting a taxi to take me where I had been trying to go originally. It was a lovely walk. I stopped and got a bottle of water. I took some pictures. But I was wearing cheap Old Navy flip flops, and the space between my big toe and its neighbor is killing me. In my defense, I sensed I was going the wrong way about an hour into the walk, which is, it turns out, about exactly when I WAS going the wrong way, and I asked for directions. TWICE. I had been told by several people that the soccer fields are often the landmarks by which people give directions around here. In the village where I live, just outside the main town, I can say I live at so-and-so's house, near the soccer field. In the big town, the restaurant where I was going for breakfast is right on the soccer field, near the library. I figured that was plenty to go on in terms of asking for directions (I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant). I don't know what soccer field/library combo I was being directed towards, but it took me another hour and increasingly sore feet before I cried uncle, called one of the other volunteers here, confirmed I was lost, turned around and found a taxi.
Its a joke around here that you are constantly being asked if you need transport by taxi drivers looking for a fare. Often they hold signs that say "Do you need transport?" When, almost invariably, you say no thanks, they say "maybe tomorrow?" Supposedly there are t-shirts around here someplace that say "Do you need transport?" on the front, and on the back "Maybe tomorrow?" which I think is pretty charming. Anyway, I was asked if I needed transport maybe 15 times on my walk. I didn't think I needed transport. I'm not exactly flush with cash, and my legs work fine thankyouverymuch and it can't be THAT much further because the last two people I asked both told me to go this way and I've been walking FOREVER... Anyway, I finally turned around and went back to the nearest taxi place I'd seen. One guy was sitting there, outside of a black car with decals on the driver and passenger side doors that said "Sheriff" in official looking letters. I asked the guy if there was a taxi around. He gestured in sort of a "duh" way to the sheriff car and asked me where I wanted to go. I described the restaurant and the soccer field and the library and he said he knew where it was. I asked him how much it would be. 20,000 rpa, he told me. $2.00. (REALLY? What was I waiting for? Oh, brother) We got into the sheriff's car, with me still not totally sure if this was the sheriff ("Should I get in the front? Is that police social faux pas?" I wondered to myself as I opened the door) or if the western taboo of not impersonating officers of the law doesn't apply here. At any rate, the would-be sheriff got me to the restaurant in about 10 minutes, driving back along much of the way I came. It was TOTALLY worth $2.00. I'd have gladly paid much more.
And now, of course, I'm totally thinking I'm getting a motorbike. Because walking is nice and all but (excuse my language) FUCK THAT SHIT.
In other news, I'm homesick. Not in a crippling way, but in a, "gee, I have another 5 weeks here... this might get old soon" kind of way. I really wish I was able to share the culture and beauty here with some -ANY- of you in real time. It feels very isolating to me to be so far from home, having such a profound experience of another part of the world and feel like words fail me so completely. I hadn't planned to do this trip alone and, while its totally fine that I'm doing it alone, it is lonely. I woke up this morning and realized I was in Bali. And as beautiful a place as it is to wake up, I must have been dreaming about being home, because it was disconcerting to not be at home.
The work I came here to do is not going to be as easy to get to do as it was in Senegal. The midwives in Senegal were happy to step back and let us get in and do the "dirty work." They'd call us when someone was about to have a baby, especially if something "fancy" like breech or twins was happening. That is less true here. There are many Indonesian midwives who are paid to do the dirty work and are good at doing it, and not eager to let some young fresh-faced wanna be from the States jump in and take over. And while I completely respect and understand that, its not what I was expecting. Also, I was grossly misled in what was promised to me as a student coming here by the woman I interviewed with when I applied for this program. I was told I would be the ONLY student here, and therefore I wouldn't have to compete for births. Instead, there are FOUR students and three foreign midwives. All of them wanting births. So its frustrating. I'm not here to learn how to do blood pressures, or to be "allowed" to catch the baby as it is delivered and passed up to its mother. I don't think I need the training wheels anymore.
Some of you know that the hardest part of my educational path has been what should be the easiest part: doing my school work. I loved apprenticing, I love going to births. But I have this stack of school work that I have barely touched. All it is is lists and lists of questions that require me to open my text books and write in the answers. I won't get into how totally and completely I detest these questions and how absolutely inadequate I find them to prepare a young midwife for the very REAL and IMPORTANT practice she's going to undertake after doing all this silly work, but suffice to say, I hate it and I'm so resistant to doing it that, three years into my formal education, I still have most of it to do. In fact, it is the only thing preventing me from sitting for my license exam sooner rather than later. I'm not proud of that, but it's true.
So I've decided that, starting today, I'm camping out in the clinic. I'd had a vision of being able to hang out by the pool, work on my suntan, and get called for births. That's totally not happening. So I'll install myself. I'll be there for as many births as I can be. And when there are no births happening, I'm going to be in the office working on my stupid lists of stupid questions. I cannot use my disappointment with how this is going so far as an excuse to check out and just be on a 6 week vacation in Bali. And I'm hoping that by hanging around the clinic like a bad smell, learning some Indonesian, maybe I'll start to build some relationships with the Indonesian midwives and being included a little more in what's happening. Basically, I'm going to the mats.
After just one more watermelon juice.
I just walked for 2 hours. Normally, if I'd been planning to walk for 2 hours, I wouldn't have any issue with this. However, I was NOT planning to walk for 2 hours. I was just taking an early morning walk to the ATM, then headed to breakfast/email/writing time, but I guess I overestimated my ability to navigate around here, and I ended up walking for 2 hours before finally giving up, acknowledging that I was lost, and getting a taxi to take me where I had been trying to go originally. It was a lovely walk. I stopped and got a bottle of water. I took some pictures. But I was wearing cheap Old Navy flip flops, and the space between my big toe and its neighbor is killing me. In my defense, I sensed I was going the wrong way about an hour into the walk, which is, it turns out, about exactly when I WAS going the wrong way, and I asked for directions. TWICE. I had been told by several people that the soccer fields are often the landmarks by which people give directions around here. In the village where I live, just outside the main town, I can say I live at so-and-so's house, near the soccer field. In the big town, the restaurant where I was going for breakfast is right on the soccer field, near the library. I figured that was plenty to go on in terms of asking for directions (I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant). I don't know what soccer field/library combo I was being directed towards, but it took me another hour and increasingly sore feet before I cried uncle, called one of the other volunteers here, confirmed I was lost, turned around and found a taxi.
Its a joke around here that you are constantly being asked if you need transport by taxi drivers looking for a fare. Often they hold signs that say "Do you need transport?" When, almost invariably, you say no thanks, they say "maybe tomorrow?" Supposedly there are t-shirts around here someplace that say "Do you need transport?" on the front, and on the back "Maybe tomorrow?" which I think is pretty charming. Anyway, I was asked if I needed transport maybe 15 times on my walk. I didn't think I needed transport. I'm not exactly flush with cash, and my legs work fine thankyouverymuch and it can't be THAT much further because the last two people I asked both told me to go this way and I've been walking FOREVER... Anyway, I finally turned around and went back to the nearest taxi place I'd seen. One guy was sitting there, outside of a black car with decals on the driver and passenger side doors that said "Sheriff" in official looking letters. I asked the guy if there was a taxi around. He gestured in sort of a "duh" way to the sheriff car and asked me where I wanted to go. I described the restaurant and the soccer field and the library and he said he knew where it was. I asked him how much it would be. 20,000 rpa, he told me. $2.00. (REALLY? What was I waiting for? Oh, brother) We got into the sheriff's car, with me still not totally sure if this was the sheriff ("Should I get in the front? Is that police social faux pas?" I wondered to myself as I opened the door) or if the western taboo of not impersonating officers of the law doesn't apply here. At any rate, the would-be sheriff got me to the restaurant in about 10 minutes, driving back along much of the way I came. It was TOTALLY worth $2.00. I'd have gladly paid much more.
And now, of course, I'm totally thinking I'm getting a motorbike. Because walking is nice and all but (excuse my language) FUCK THAT SHIT.
In other news, I'm homesick. Not in a crippling way, but in a, "gee, I have another 5 weeks here... this might get old soon" kind of way. I really wish I was able to share the culture and beauty here with some -ANY- of you in real time. It feels very isolating to me to be so far from home, having such a profound experience of another part of the world and feel like words fail me so completely. I hadn't planned to do this trip alone and, while its totally fine that I'm doing it alone, it is lonely. I woke up this morning and realized I was in Bali. And as beautiful a place as it is to wake up, I must have been dreaming about being home, because it was disconcerting to not be at home.
The work I came here to do is not going to be as easy to get to do as it was in Senegal. The midwives in Senegal were happy to step back and let us get in and do the "dirty work." They'd call us when someone was about to have a baby, especially if something "fancy" like breech or twins was happening. That is less true here. There are many Indonesian midwives who are paid to do the dirty work and are good at doing it, and not eager to let some young fresh-faced wanna be from the States jump in and take over. And while I completely respect and understand that, its not what I was expecting. Also, I was grossly misled in what was promised to me as a student coming here by the woman I interviewed with when I applied for this program. I was told I would be the ONLY student here, and therefore I wouldn't have to compete for births. Instead, there are FOUR students and three foreign midwives. All of them wanting births. So its frustrating. I'm not here to learn how to do blood pressures, or to be "allowed" to catch the baby as it is delivered and passed up to its mother. I don't think I need the training wheels anymore.
Some of you know that the hardest part of my educational path has been what should be the easiest part: doing my school work. I loved apprenticing, I love going to births. But I have this stack of school work that I have barely touched. All it is is lists and lists of questions that require me to open my text books and write in the answers. I won't get into how totally and completely I detest these questions and how absolutely inadequate I find them to prepare a young midwife for the very REAL and IMPORTANT practice she's going to undertake after doing all this silly work, but suffice to say, I hate it and I'm so resistant to doing it that, three years into my formal education, I still have most of it to do. In fact, it is the only thing preventing me from sitting for my license exam sooner rather than later. I'm not proud of that, but it's true.
So I've decided that, starting today, I'm camping out in the clinic. I'd had a vision of being able to hang out by the pool, work on my suntan, and get called for births. That's totally not happening. So I'll install myself. I'll be there for as many births as I can be. And when there are no births happening, I'm going to be in the office working on my stupid lists of stupid questions. I cannot use my disappointment with how this is going so far as an excuse to check out and just be on a 6 week vacation in Bali. And I'm hoping that by hanging around the clinic like a bad smell, learning some Indonesian, maybe I'll start to build some relationships with the Indonesian midwives and being included a little more in what's happening. Basically, I'm going to the mats.
After just one more watermelon juice.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Today's rain has NOT been cancelled
4:44am July 3, 2009
I’m sitting on the covered porch of my new room, listening to it rain. I’m awake, again, at an ungodly hour, and I heard the rain coming from a distance. It was so beautiful to listen to starting to build. Even from my sleepy place in bed, I knew what it was immediately. The sound continued to grow until it reached the house where I live, and I got up and came out here. It is perfectly warm, and it smells sweet like flowers around me. And it is raining really, REALLY hard. It is, as I keep saying about Bali, pretty magical.
Someone told me yesterday that Bali is like the liver of the world; People come here to detox from emotional things, whether or not they know it. And I’m going to have to say, after only one full day here, that I think that might be true. How can you not, sitting on a covered porch, overlooking a compound comprised of temples and water fountains and stone pots filled with flower petals and statues of gods (and I LIVE here!) in a rainstorm that smells like tropical flowers, let go just a little bit? It feels impossible, in this moment, surrounded by this kind of beauty, despite being so far from home and the attendant insecurities of distance, to hold on to any kind of suffering. It is 5 in the morning, I’m awake and alone. Shouldn’t I be homesick? Shouldn’t I be aching for my own bed, for the arms of my lover, for the familiar faces of my loved ones and food and time zones? I’m not. I’m just going to sit here and listen to it rain. A total cliché, like loving walks on the beach, but I do love the sound of rain probably more than almost any other sound.
I’m sitting on the covered porch of my new room, listening to it rain. I’m awake, again, at an ungodly hour, and I heard the rain coming from a distance. It was so beautiful to listen to starting to build. Even from my sleepy place in bed, I knew what it was immediately. The sound continued to grow until it reached the house where I live, and I got up and came out here. It is perfectly warm, and it smells sweet like flowers around me. And it is raining really, REALLY hard. It is, as I keep saying about Bali, pretty magical.
Someone told me yesterday that Bali is like the liver of the world; People come here to detox from emotional things, whether or not they know it. And I’m going to have to say, after only one full day here, that I think that might be true. How can you not, sitting on a covered porch, overlooking a compound comprised of temples and water fountains and stone pots filled with flower petals and statues of gods (and I LIVE here!) in a rainstorm that smells like tropical flowers, let go just a little bit? It feels impossible, in this moment, surrounded by this kind of beauty, despite being so far from home and the attendant insecurities of distance, to hold on to any kind of suffering. It is 5 in the morning, I’m awake and alone. Shouldn’t I be homesick? Shouldn’t I be aching for my own bed, for the arms of my lover, for the familiar faces of my loved ones and food and time zones? I’m not. I’m just going to sit here and listen to it rain. A total cliché, like loving walks on the beach, but I do love the sound of rain probably more than almost any other sound.
day one here
7:10am July 2, 2009 Ubud, Indonesia
Earplugs are my best friend. I never wore them when I went to shows as a kid, but someone suggested I take some to Africa and they were so right. Bali, like Senegal, is full of life all the time. That means that, at night, there are frogs and dogs, and other unknown noises, and at dawn there are roosters and geese and donkeys and sheep. It is really loud. I remember waking up with the mussein (the call to prayer) at dawn in Senegal one morning and, half asleep, thinking that the cacophony of animals from miles around was the sound of a stadium full of people cheering. That’s how loud it is. And, so far, Bali is no different. I wore earplugs to bed last night to quiet the sound of the frogs and sheep and people next door, and I woke up this morning to maybe 200 geese chuckling to themselves in the open field behind the room where I am sleeping. Its beautiful, and it makes me think how dead our land is at home that we don’t hear the sounds of life outside all the time, and also, it can be kind of annoying. So, I reiterate, earplugs are my best friend.
And, um, p.s., I might never come home. This place is crazy beautiful. A driver from the clinic picked me up at the airport. I embarrassed myself by trying to climb into the passenger side of the front seat, to discover its right hand drive here. The embarrassment didn’t last long, however, as I was quickly absorbed into watching the fascinating dance of car versus scooter on the road. There are SO MANY scooters here. Women ride them in high heels, people carry their groceries in their laps on their scooters. People ride with their baby wedged, helmetless, between them, or riding on the lap of the driver of the scooter. I saw one family, with their 2 or 3 year old daughter riding on her father’s lap, with both her feet and her hands extended straight in front of her all pressed against the steering column, face scrunched into hard determination like she was daring the scooter to go faster. I was grinning from ear to ear at that sight. Her mom saw me see her daughter and she laughed and waved and all three of them smiled and gave me a thumbs up as they zoomed by. Everywhere here, there is beauty. Along the road, I passed so many shops selling ornate carved doors and benches, I saw statues of all sizes, one place that made these amazing shelves out of the hulls of long boats, hanging basket swings… seriously, so much beautiful stuff that I’ll never be able to bring home with me. We could all fill a shipping container and have the most beautifully decorated houses imaginable. Who’s in?
Even the streetlights here are beautiful. The fronts of people’s houses are unbelievable. Everywhere is holy, a shrine, a place to leave offerings. We were doing 90 miles an hour on the two lane highway, bobbing and weaving between scooters, otherwise I’d have taken pictures. But oh, there will be pictures.
We arrived at the clinic about an hour after we left the airport. Ubud is in the center of Bali and, if you consider that I landed on the southern coast, that gives you a sense of how small this island is. The clinic was quiet, a western woman was laboring with her husband, still talking and laughing at 6cm. I met the midwife who runs the clinic, some of the people who help her, and was taken in by the volunteer coordinator and his wife, a couple from Ohio who are here for 6 months to a year to help out. Their house is across from the clinic, down a long driveway that I suppose probably isn’t a driveway, and part of a compound of three or four houses all surrounding a courtyard with trees and statuary and grass and a fountain. Once again, this is just “typical” Balinese architecture, and its like a dream to me. There were kittens in the yard chasing mice and it began to rain, which was pretty magical in the humid heat. The coordinator and his wife are young, late twenties, and sweet. They put my bags in their extra bedroom, sat me down on pillows around a low coffee table and gave me water and handed me delivery menus. WHAT? Yeah, delivery menus. From a Mexican restaurant, an Italian restaurant, or a hippy groovy health food store. I opted for the latter, ordered minestrone soup and a passion fruit, coconut, date smoothie (grand total $3.90), and we sat around the table and talked while we waited for my order. I have good news. First, food is going to be better and easier than it was in Senegal. Second, there are flushing European style toilets (at least, so far). Third, there was running hot water for me to take a shower. The running hot water is less common here, but it is so warm here that a cold shower isn’t the end of the world. The point is I didn’t have to take a bucket shower in a dank, dark cement room; I luxuriated in a bathtub.
The coordinator and his wife went to go out with the clinic’s acupuncturist and left me to get settled in. I was pretty stoked: I’d eaten and bathed, and was going to spend the night in an actual bed, in a room with screens on the windows, and electricity. This was so much better than I was prepared for. I climbed into bed, put in my earplugs, and fell quickly to sleep. I’d been up for nearly 48 hours.
I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, of course. I hate that feeling. I had lost an earplug and a couple mosquitoes were making lunch out of me, but I was too tired to do much about it. I finally got back to sleep and woke up again with the geese at about 5:45am (which I think is 2:45pm at home the day before?). I’m glad to be getting on a (sort of) normal sleep/wake schedule from the start. I crept out of my room to pee (my room is through the coordinator and his wife’s room) and out onto the patio to go to the kitchen for more water. One of the Balinese who tend to the compound was there in ceremonial dress, waving incense over a shrine, and scattering fresh flowers over the sidewalk. “Morning, Bob” I thought to myself and I smiled and waved to him. Now, back in bed, waiting for the house to stir, I’m considering the weeks ahead of me and finding that I don’t really want to absorb how long I’ll be here. It’s beautiful, for sure, but lets acknowledge that I’m a homebody and traveling alone is tough. So I’ve decided I’m taking it in two-week increments. Just get through the next two weeks. I think I can do that.
Today, the plan is to get me more settled in. I’m going to buy a sim card for my cell phone, try to find a house to rent, and hopefully I’ll decide on my form of transportation. It’s a toss up between a scooter and a bicycle. I’m voting bicycle for now, but the scooters were so fast and looked fun (and certainly more dangerous), so I’m undecided at the moment. Of course.
4:42pm July 2, 2009
We walked into Ubud this morning and got breakfast (omelet, toast, fruit, watermelon juice, macchiato for $6.75 –and that’s expensive). I saw my first monkeys: two adults with a baby. I tried taking a photograph of them, and while I was distracted doing it, another one in a tree above me started to pee on me. I’m taking it as a good omen. The walk was long and along the way we stopped to get a sim card for my iphone (thank god my phone is hacked and therefore unlocked because the old Razr I brought wasn’t unlocked and didn’t work), so I now have an Indonesian phone number (if anyone wants to rack up minutes and make international calls or send me text messages of pure love). We also stopped and met up with the two Australian women who also arrived yesterday. One is an old timey homebirth midwife, and her daughter is a doctor who was specializing in Obstetrics, but has decided she can’t hang with hospital birth anymore. I liked them immediately. We all enjoyed breakfast together and were joined by another Aussie midwife and we spent about an hour just talking birth. That’s something that I don’t realize I love so much until I’m doing it and then I can’t stop. After breakfast, we looked for a house for me. There wasn’t much to rent, unfortunately, so I’ve decided on a room in a wing of the family compound of a woman who works at the clinic. It’s $10 a night and it feels like a good choice. I’m informed that her family is from the high caste, and living with her is akin to living with royalty. Okay then. I had my heart set on a house of my own, but I don’t have to stay in this room if I find something else. And even if I don’t, I’ll move into a guesthouse on the same compound in 10 days that is more removed from the main house and also has a kitchen, so it’ll be almost like a house. One thing I love about the city here so far is that it appears to all be along a couple main roads. But if you turn down a driveway or an alley, it’s actually this huge labyrinth of compounds, temples and fields. Its so totally what a nerdy little girl like I was (okay, like I AM) used to dream about when inventing magical places for myself. And the beauty! I know I’ve said it already but, unless you’ve been here, you don’t know what I mean. Its not pretty or quaint and old like Napa Valley or Italy or something. It is STUNNING, and the place where I am moving into is no exception.
We stopped by the clinic while we were looking for houses. I was planning to go back to the coordinator’s house where my things are to take care of some stuff, but one of the women in labor at the clinic was at 9cm and I got pulled into the birth room. She had her baby about an hour and a half later, I caught the gorgeous little girl in water, with the woman who runs the clinic at my shoulder. The placenta didn’t come, however, and I saw my first manual extraction, which I will spare you the details of, suffice to say it is rare, and entails reaching all the way up into the uterus to get the darn placenta when it refuses to come. Its dangerous, very painful for the mother, pretty fancy, and I was glad to see it, even if I’m not glad that it had to happen. I may practice for the next 25 years and never see another one. Fingers crossed. Anyway, that’s the news... I’m surprisingly un-jetlagged, and happy here so far. I miss home and I miss my loved ones (you know who you are) like crazy and I keep thinking how much I wish ANY of you were here to see this with me. It’s amazing. Photos soon. I’ve got to go move out of the coordinator’s house now, though. ☺
Earplugs are my best friend. I never wore them when I went to shows as a kid, but someone suggested I take some to Africa and they were so right. Bali, like Senegal, is full of life all the time. That means that, at night, there are frogs and dogs, and other unknown noises, and at dawn there are roosters and geese and donkeys and sheep. It is really loud. I remember waking up with the mussein (the call to prayer) at dawn in Senegal one morning and, half asleep, thinking that the cacophony of animals from miles around was the sound of a stadium full of people cheering. That’s how loud it is. And, so far, Bali is no different. I wore earplugs to bed last night to quiet the sound of the frogs and sheep and people next door, and I woke up this morning to maybe 200 geese chuckling to themselves in the open field behind the room where I am sleeping. Its beautiful, and it makes me think how dead our land is at home that we don’t hear the sounds of life outside all the time, and also, it can be kind of annoying. So, I reiterate, earplugs are my best friend.
And, um, p.s., I might never come home. This place is crazy beautiful. A driver from the clinic picked me up at the airport. I embarrassed myself by trying to climb into the passenger side of the front seat, to discover its right hand drive here. The embarrassment didn’t last long, however, as I was quickly absorbed into watching the fascinating dance of car versus scooter on the road. There are SO MANY scooters here. Women ride them in high heels, people carry their groceries in their laps on their scooters. People ride with their baby wedged, helmetless, between them, or riding on the lap of the driver of the scooter. I saw one family, with their 2 or 3 year old daughter riding on her father’s lap, with both her feet and her hands extended straight in front of her all pressed against the steering column, face scrunched into hard determination like she was daring the scooter to go faster. I was grinning from ear to ear at that sight. Her mom saw me see her daughter and she laughed and waved and all three of them smiled and gave me a thumbs up as they zoomed by. Everywhere here, there is beauty. Along the road, I passed so many shops selling ornate carved doors and benches, I saw statues of all sizes, one place that made these amazing shelves out of the hulls of long boats, hanging basket swings… seriously, so much beautiful stuff that I’ll never be able to bring home with me. We could all fill a shipping container and have the most beautifully decorated houses imaginable. Who’s in?
Even the streetlights here are beautiful. The fronts of people’s houses are unbelievable. Everywhere is holy, a shrine, a place to leave offerings. We were doing 90 miles an hour on the two lane highway, bobbing and weaving between scooters, otherwise I’d have taken pictures. But oh, there will be pictures.
We arrived at the clinic about an hour after we left the airport. Ubud is in the center of Bali and, if you consider that I landed on the southern coast, that gives you a sense of how small this island is. The clinic was quiet, a western woman was laboring with her husband, still talking and laughing at 6cm. I met the midwife who runs the clinic, some of the people who help her, and was taken in by the volunteer coordinator and his wife, a couple from Ohio who are here for 6 months to a year to help out. Their house is across from the clinic, down a long driveway that I suppose probably isn’t a driveway, and part of a compound of three or four houses all surrounding a courtyard with trees and statuary and grass and a fountain. Once again, this is just “typical” Balinese architecture, and its like a dream to me. There were kittens in the yard chasing mice and it began to rain, which was pretty magical in the humid heat. The coordinator and his wife are young, late twenties, and sweet. They put my bags in their extra bedroom, sat me down on pillows around a low coffee table and gave me water and handed me delivery menus. WHAT? Yeah, delivery menus. From a Mexican restaurant, an Italian restaurant, or a hippy groovy health food store. I opted for the latter, ordered minestrone soup and a passion fruit, coconut, date smoothie (grand total $3.90), and we sat around the table and talked while we waited for my order. I have good news. First, food is going to be better and easier than it was in Senegal. Second, there are flushing European style toilets (at least, so far). Third, there was running hot water for me to take a shower. The running hot water is less common here, but it is so warm here that a cold shower isn’t the end of the world. The point is I didn’t have to take a bucket shower in a dank, dark cement room; I luxuriated in a bathtub.
The coordinator and his wife went to go out with the clinic’s acupuncturist and left me to get settled in. I was pretty stoked: I’d eaten and bathed, and was going to spend the night in an actual bed, in a room with screens on the windows, and electricity. This was so much better than I was prepared for. I climbed into bed, put in my earplugs, and fell quickly to sleep. I’d been up for nearly 48 hours.
I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, of course. I hate that feeling. I had lost an earplug and a couple mosquitoes were making lunch out of me, but I was too tired to do much about it. I finally got back to sleep and woke up again with the geese at about 5:45am (which I think is 2:45pm at home the day before?). I’m glad to be getting on a (sort of) normal sleep/wake schedule from the start. I crept out of my room to pee (my room is through the coordinator and his wife’s room) and out onto the patio to go to the kitchen for more water. One of the Balinese who tend to the compound was there in ceremonial dress, waving incense over a shrine, and scattering fresh flowers over the sidewalk. “Morning, Bob” I thought to myself and I smiled and waved to him. Now, back in bed, waiting for the house to stir, I’m considering the weeks ahead of me and finding that I don’t really want to absorb how long I’ll be here. It’s beautiful, for sure, but lets acknowledge that I’m a homebody and traveling alone is tough. So I’ve decided I’m taking it in two-week increments. Just get through the next two weeks. I think I can do that.
Today, the plan is to get me more settled in. I’m going to buy a sim card for my cell phone, try to find a house to rent, and hopefully I’ll decide on my form of transportation. It’s a toss up between a scooter and a bicycle. I’m voting bicycle for now, but the scooters were so fast and looked fun (and certainly more dangerous), so I’m undecided at the moment. Of course.
4:42pm July 2, 2009
We walked into Ubud this morning and got breakfast (omelet, toast, fruit, watermelon juice, macchiato for $6.75 –and that’s expensive). I saw my first monkeys: two adults with a baby. I tried taking a photograph of them, and while I was distracted doing it, another one in a tree above me started to pee on me. I’m taking it as a good omen. The walk was long and along the way we stopped to get a sim card for my iphone (thank god my phone is hacked and therefore unlocked because the old Razr I brought wasn’t unlocked and didn’t work), so I now have an Indonesian phone number (if anyone wants to rack up minutes and make international calls or send me text messages of pure love). We also stopped and met up with the two Australian women who also arrived yesterday. One is an old timey homebirth midwife, and her daughter is a doctor who was specializing in Obstetrics, but has decided she can’t hang with hospital birth anymore. I liked them immediately. We all enjoyed breakfast together and were joined by another Aussie midwife and we spent about an hour just talking birth. That’s something that I don’t realize I love so much until I’m doing it and then I can’t stop. After breakfast, we looked for a house for me. There wasn’t much to rent, unfortunately, so I’ve decided on a room in a wing of the family compound of a woman who works at the clinic. It’s $10 a night and it feels like a good choice. I’m informed that her family is from the high caste, and living with her is akin to living with royalty. Okay then. I had my heart set on a house of my own, but I don’t have to stay in this room if I find something else. And even if I don’t, I’ll move into a guesthouse on the same compound in 10 days that is more removed from the main house and also has a kitchen, so it’ll be almost like a house. One thing I love about the city here so far is that it appears to all be along a couple main roads. But if you turn down a driveway or an alley, it’s actually this huge labyrinth of compounds, temples and fields. Its so totally what a nerdy little girl like I was (okay, like I AM) used to dream about when inventing magical places for myself. And the beauty! I know I’ve said it already but, unless you’ve been here, you don’t know what I mean. Its not pretty or quaint and old like Napa Valley or Italy or something. It is STUNNING, and the place where I am moving into is no exception.
We stopped by the clinic while we were looking for houses. I was planning to go back to the coordinator’s house where my things are to take care of some stuff, but one of the women in labor at the clinic was at 9cm and I got pulled into the birth room. She had her baby about an hour and a half later, I caught the gorgeous little girl in water, with the woman who runs the clinic at my shoulder. The placenta didn’t come, however, and I saw my first manual extraction, which I will spare you the details of, suffice to say it is rare, and entails reaching all the way up into the uterus to get the darn placenta when it refuses to come. Its dangerous, very painful for the mother, pretty fancy, and I was glad to see it, even if I’m not glad that it had to happen. I may practice for the next 25 years and never see another one. Fingers crossed. Anyway, that’s the news... I’m surprisingly un-jetlagged, and happy here so far. I miss home and I miss my loved ones (you know who you are) like crazy and I keep thinking how much I wish ANY of you were here to see this with me. It’s amazing. Photos soon. I’ve got to go move out of the coordinator’s house now, though. ☺
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