TBA training in progress

Beautiful mountain village where the training was held

the view from the Volunteer's roof, same village

A coach in high school said something that has stuck with me through the years: “We often go through life and never tell the people who mean the most to us how we really feel about them”. It’s such a simple idea, such a simple statement, and it seems so obvious… but it’s not, in reality. The people who are the most pivotal in our lives, either in the long run or in a more recent context, are the ones we trust the most, and are thus the ones we are most likely to take for granted. It’s no coincidence that Father’s Day is coming up (Love you Dad!.. and Mom!), and that I’ve had a particularly challenging last week, that I’m writing all of this… but I’m feeling philosophical about a lot of things relevant to my current experience, so I thought it was worth writing about.

Last Thursday morning, someone in my site who has become very important to me, and who will remain anonymous out of respect, miscarried her baby, and the entire situation has affected me in a much more profound way than I would have expected (because this situation was all about me, right? Anyway…). Just for perspective’s sake, I will elucidate how special this woman is: In a very, very rural area of Morocco that has never hosted a foreigner before, where no-one speaks English (or has any real desire to), she has the innate gift of understanding that I feel lonely and isolated at times, and has often known the exact moment to give me a smile or some small indication that she understands… The innate gift of empathy. I don’t think she even knows she has it. Now, seeing her visibly in pain is heartbreaking, and I can’t help but share in a part (albeit very, very small) of her loss.

This happens all the time here, though. Women in rural Morocco, of the marginalized regions and lower classes, are entitled to socialized healthcare and maternal care, but at a basic level. For those women who live in incredibly rural areas, this “right” to checkups and education on pregnancy health is complicated by transportation difficulties and costs, as well as the cultural complexities involved in women travelling alone. Prenatal checkups begin at 3 months, and my friend’s miscarriage occurred just before she was planning on travelling to see the OB-GYN (an hour bus ride away, over both dirt and paved roads, crammed in a van with 30 other people). I know that her loss was most likely due to a genetic problem with her pregnancy, and not any mistake on her or someone else’s part, but the fact remains that absolutely no education is available to the women here on prenatal nutrition and health. And this brings me to the ironically balanced aspect of my last week:

All of this happened to my friend on Thursday morning, as I was preparing to attend a TBA (“traditional birthing attendant”) training on Friday and Saturday in a nearby village, put on by a fellow Community Health volunteer. This project, developed by this volunteer over the last several months, was a three-day seminar for the women of many villages around hers on maternal and child health education. The seminar covered everything from the female reproductive system, to prenatal nutrition and safety, delivery techniques, education about the advisability or danger of traditional birthing practices, and education on how to recognize emergency situations and how best to deal with them. This volunteer brought up to me a shocking observation:

“Caity, many of these women have never had their own reproductive systems explained to them. They know that they have menstrual cycles, and that when they are pregnant, the cycle stops… but, how scary would it be to have something irregular happen, at any stage- pregnant or otherwise- and not have any way of finding out what was wrong, or what it meant?”

The clichÈ goes “Knowledge is power”, but knowledge is also peace of mind… safety… a right. How many amazing, compassionate women like my friend suffer from a similar fate, yet in situations where it could be avoided? It is a particularly curious aspect of rural Moroccan culture that very soon after meeting many women, they will openly talk about loosing pregnancies or young babies. In America, these topics are not “get to know you” chit-chat, but here, the ardent belief in God’s will above all things allows for the candid transparency of how frequently this happens to women. Before last Thursday, every time a woman in my village told me about this happening to her I was sorry, but I had never seen one of them, who I really cared about, go through it.

So how does this relate to what my coach told me? Well, I was writing my parents a letter about this week, and in it I told them about how seeing my friend go through this really affected me. I have come to understand, in my struggles to communicate and relate to people here, the pure, innocent acceptance that only very small kids are capable of and it has shed a new light on parenthood and children for me. Not only is it a fragile process, but it’s a really profound relationship. My friend will have other children, and they will be just fine, I’m sure, but for now I want to let her know how much she means to me by making every effort to help improve her future situation and that of her peers. I don’t have the words to tell her how sorry I am in a delicate way, so I want to show her what she means to me, and has meant to me so far, through my actions.

I don’t want to end this post on such a depressing note, so I should highlight the positives from attending and learning from this training. It was organized and designed really well by the volunteer who wrote the grant, and I was impressed by her plan to do follow-up outreach in the weeks following the seminar, debriefing in smaller groups about what women took away from the sessions and spreading the information to women in those villages who were unable to attend via these sessions (over tea and cookies!). I hope to put on something similar in my area, if the women are interested. I’ve received positive responses so far, so I am hopeful that it will work out. That will definitely have to come after I’ve grasped the language a bit more, however, as no one wants to talk about vaginas and the menstrual cycle with someone who has the vocabulary of a 5 year old… though I’m sure it would be entertaining for them, it would probably not be very informative.

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