Well this didn't work

Oct 30, 2006

We drove to another village today to spend 8 hours. This village was very remote. Although this whole area of Pakistan rarely has rain for years and years, there was a major monsoon in July. There is still a great deal of standing water even close to many of these villages. This means Dengue and Malaria are very present this year.

This village was also a Sindhie speaking village and this ended up being a problem. Although Naheed spoke simple Urdu the women in this villlage struggled with the concepts of The Pink Kit due to the language barrier. We had also made one of those huge mistakes that happen. No one knew we were coming. The head man who was supposed to set up the meeting had taken ill the day before and gone to hospital 2 hours away without telling anyone we were coming. So four of us arrived (Naheed, Bahia, Nadia and myself … called ‘auntie) and dropped off before we discovered no one had expected us. There we were for 8 hours.

Most of the women were working in the fields. Although this area of Sindh Province has more green than the other villages this area is still a desert. The shrubs are thorny with large tracts of sand between. Cotton is grown and grasses such as rice. Most all the food grown is for sustainance. There is a huge irrigation system coming off the Indus River.

The women were out picking cotton. A few older women and two pregnant women arrived. The indoor space they put us was very small and cramped. Eventually about 20 married women squeezed in. I was able to share the breathing skills with them. They liked what they understood.

Then I made mistake #2.

In previous villages the women wanted to break to cook mid-day meal for the families about noon and then return about 2:00pm. So after 2 ½ hours, I suggested the same to these women Well, two hours later only 5 women returned. In this village they don’t have a noon meal so the women had returned to the fields to pick cotton. They never returned.

The women who stayed for the afternoon were old women and one pregnant woman having her first baby. This village is very conservative Hindu. The pregnant woman was the second wife of a man. His first wife had arthritis of her hands and could no longer massage him after his work so he had gone to another village and bought another wife.

Conservative Hindu women are also not able to show their face around certain men so they cover up as soon as a man arrives anywhere near the hut. The Dai from this village was one of the older women. She was in her late 80s, about 4 feet tall and probably 60 pounds. She loved the information and shared some of her skills.

Unlike the other Dais, she does feel inside women during labour. She knew something opened up inside. In most villages the women do not relate the pain of contractions to anything particular.

In fact when asked ‘Where does the pain come from?’ They would answer ‘God’. So I had to change the question to ‘What causes the pain?’ They said they didn’t know.

Even when The Pink Kit is shared to well educated women living in modern countries, they don’t know either. Some may know it is caused by the dilation of the cervix; however, if women truly understood this then we won’t fight birth as much as we do. We'd just say things like 'Crikkey this hurts heaps but I know why it hurts. This amount of pain tells me my cervix is half way dilated'.

Once we truly understand something it usually becomes easier to work with the issue. The dilation of the cervix is hidden within us. It’s easy to understand why women don’t really ‘get’ where the pain comes from.

This Dai did know something opens and when this something opened up then she would wash the inside of the vagina to clean it for the baby.

In this village when the women are having pain they are pounded on the hips, legs and back with fists. This was different from another village where women patted the mother's shoulders and arms and upper back. In fact, every village did things their way and every Dai did things her way.

This has made The Pink Kit skills very easy and successful to share. All the women realize these are common skills that can be learned, practiced and used in any birth along with the skills they also use. All the women in every village have all said the same thing about the PK skills … these skills should be everywhere … they are common sense … we didn’t know them … we will share them with our friends, sisters, daughters and daughters-in-law. None of the women feel shame for not knowing these skills nor do they feel their skills aren’t good. They were just glad they now understood.

Anyway, we met with this small group of women for a few hours more but then they too left to bring the goats in for the evening milking. We waited for hours for Samsheer to pick us up. We all agreed 8 hours was too long for one session. We also acknowledged there had to be a fluent speaker of the language doing the translations. We also knew it was better to come 3 days in a row for 3-4 hours each than to try to do everything at once.

http://www.commonknowledgetrust.com
http://www.birthingbetter.com
http://www.thepinkkit.com