"Our Culture is Our Resistance"

I LOVE having a bag full of the following items in my living room:

* receiving blankets, onesies, hats, teeny socks, and sleepers (x 40)

* stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, fetoscope, penlight and non-sterile gloves

* bottles and bottles of ibuprofen, prenatal vitamins, ferrous gluconate and syringes

* scrubs, self-filtering water bottles, arnica, expensive camera, sketchbook and journal (the real paper kind, not a computer)

* Call the Midwife, A Midwife's Tale, Where There Are No Doctors, a Spanish dictionary and The Glass Castle

* poncho from a friend who went last year for the afternoons when it drenches and pours

* an expectation that I will somehow get to experience a sweat lodge with one of the traditional Mayan midwives, comadronas, and learn more Spanish.

* passport

Wish me luck on yet another guaranteed-to-change-your-life-once-in-a-lifetime-experience-cultural-immersion-adventure.

PS. if you ever find yourself capable of acquiring any of the following items, I decided that I could probably use a regular income of these for future endeavors: onesies, receiving blankets, non-sterile gloves (smalls), prenatal vitamins, iron, ibuprofen, arnica (homeopathic), amoxicillin, metformin, glucophage, one touch test strips, or urine dip sticks. Save 'em for me, I promise to spread them around the world.

Cheers!

Photographs from the amazing and beautiful book Our Culture is Our Resistance: repression, refuge, and healing in Guatemala by Jonathan Moller.