Nafas... santai... bagus.

Breathe... relax.... good.

Bali is exquisite.

I arrived late afternoon on Friday 8/8/8 after 24 hours of traveling. Robin Lim met me at the clinic gate with kisses. This is her baby (well, one of many I suppose), but her Yayasan Bumi Sehat clinic means Healthy Mother Earth. At the clinic there are 8 local Indonesian midwives, or bidans, and several volunteer midwives who come from all over to bring their expertise and learn the Balinese way of birth, or maybe Robin’s way of birth—which is worth learning. When I arrived I met two nurse-midwives, one from Australia, one from Italy, as well as a Canadian studying midwifery in New Zealand. There was also another doula/nurse from San Francisco; today was her first day as well. 

Robin tells me immediately that there are two women in labor right now... taking the hint, I unpacked my things in the volunteer ashram across the street, and headed back. Apparently there hasn’t been much going on all week, so of course tonight was the night there were four babies born and thunderstorms struck outside. Hmm, now that I think about it, I started menstruating as well, and last month I started on the night of the double birth mentioned in a previous posting... 

So many beautiful things happen here when someone is born. Robin does two very striking things in preparation for a birth. She asks someone to bring pusba or flowers. That night she asked her granddaughter Zhouie to go across the street to shake the tree in front of the ashram and she brought back beautiful plumeria blossoms. With these Robin drizzles them into the warm bath water where a woman is laboring, and I am crouched and bent over with my arm in the bath so that she can have the counter-pressure she needs on her lower back as her baby descends. Robin then asks all her moms what religion they practice or place their faith, and she proceeds to chant or recite a beautiful prayer with each contraction until the baby is born. This night she sang the Balinese Hindu prayer song, recited the Catholic prayer to Our Heavenly Father and sang Ave Maria, and then by morning she was saying Allah to the Muslim couple in anticipation of the father reading the full prayer to this new baby as the first words she hears. Someone asks later and she tells us that her own religion is primarily based on women and babies and "gentle births bringing peace on earth"—sounds like a good religion to me. Lastly, though Robin does a gazillion things, something very sweet she does is to scoop the plumeria blossoms and strew them around the placenta in a bowl. I think it’s a gorgeous tribute to one, if not the most amazing organs in the human body. You need one, you make one, you need another one, and you make another one! When you’re done with one it nourishes whatever it goes to; the earth if planted or the body if ingested, anyplace that is except a biohazardous waste bag in a landfill somewhere.

Of the six births during my first 24 hours I saw the above stunning posterior water birth (baby with his face up to the sky and eyes opening under water as he was born), and I walked into a room where a man kept poking his head out, his wife was laboring beautifully but he seemed so nervous. I stepped back out to get the midwife and went right back in to her room. She lifted her skirt and there was a baby’s head all the way out! The midwife came in behind me and with no time for gloves, eased out the rest of this little lady. It was a beautiful and busy number of hours. We did, unfortunately, have to send one baby to the hospital for suspected respiratory complications, a perfect birth but she just couldn’t cry that fluid out of her lungs.

This birth center and clinic is amazing how it creates so much with so little. I think my favorite so far is instead of medical supply KY lubricant for the Doppler ultrasound machine for listening to fetal heart tones, we use cheap and lovely smelling aloe vera gel!

Robin has many theories on why this world works in the ways that it does, and sometimes that involves saying things like, “I’ve never had a good feeling about this bed, tomorrow we’re getting rid of it,” after the baby who was transferred to the hospital was born in it. Getting rid of beds aside, they are definitely at capacity here, there are several beds to a room already, and so Robin is hoping to expand the clinic to accommodate the community—this is part of the One Million Mothers campaign.

And so it goes, this is birthing in Bali.