My Final Project

So I´ve been here on the Pacific Coast for Ecuador for two weeks now. The final month of our program is called Independent Study. Each student picked a different place to go to and project to do. I returned to my village from my first visit to the coast, called Libertador Bolívar, and I´m working and living with the local midwife.

Gladys Clemente is an awesome lady. She´s 54 and lives with her husband Pablo. Currently there are ten people living in her house. Her oldest son Pablo, 34 his wife, Jesse and their two daughters Ginger age 10 and Brittany age 1. Then her second oldest son, Wilson, 27 and his girlfriend Kady, 20. Then her youngest daughter, Gina, 22. Her nephew Luis, 21, lives in a small house in the backyard with his girlfriend Jomaira, 21, and the Grandma, Esperanzita, approximate age 80´s.

They are all very industrious and having a bunch of different incomes makes them one of the most well-off families in the village. Gladys has been a midwife for 30 years. She learned when an American girl cam down and offered a free course. She said they girl´s name was Monica and she never heard from her again after she left. I hope to someday make half the impact Monica has on someone´s life. Gladys attends to about 5 births a month, and over 30 years I would estimate that´s about 2,000 births.

Gladys´ husband Pablo, makes hammocks and sells them in Guayaquil (the biggest city in Ecuador, about 3 hours from my village) every weekend. He just sits on the house´s balcony in a hammock and makes them. He´s such a nice guy, he likes to dance and he´s really funny.

Her oldest son Pablo sits in the guard tower at night at a sardine factory about 4 miles away. He rides his bike there. His wife Jesse never stops working. She washes the whole family´s clothes by hand every other day, and cooks. She said it´s the tradition for the newest sister-in-law to wash everyone´s clothes. She taught me how to do it. It was actually kind of fun and you can really get all the stains out of your clothes, but it is very labor intensive. You wash the clothes three different times and rinse them twice, changing the water in between each time. Then we hang them, on the line.

The next oldest son Wilson, opened a Coctele (Cocktail) Bar on the beach. He built a little cabaña with a bunch of bar stools and has music and everything. He just opened it for the first time this season a couple weeks ago, he has these two little kids from the town helping him. It was a beautiful day so I went down for a drink and invited his girlfriend along. It was really fun! But I think it would not have been normal for his girlfriend to go if I hadn´t invited her.

Women don´t really go out in this town. Men are constantly sitting on benches or chairs in front of their houses, or at the bars, or in the town square. But women hardly ever leave the house unless they have to go somewhere, like run and errand or walk the kids to school. The men also play volleyball in the streets and on the beach, and women are never around when this is going on.

Kady, Gina, and Jomaira all cook; almost all day it seems. We have a big lunch everyday with soup, and a plate of rice and fish usually, sometimes chicken. Then for dinner we have a big plate again, just no soup. They have soup even on the HOTTEST days, to me it´s torturous.

Esperanzita, the grandma, runs all the errands. ¨Go and buy bread! Go and buy fish! Go and buy me a lemon!¨ Everyone´s always yelling at her. At first I thought it was kind of rude, they never say ¨thank you.¨ But one day I went out with her and she told me she really likes doing the shopping. She always laughs at me, I think because I call her Esperanzita and everyone else calls her Grandma, and I always tell her I like her dress if she´s wearing a pretty one. Pablo always jokes that Esperanzita wants to go out dancing with us and she just laughs. She had 13 kids. Also, she loves President Correa because he gave her a beach chair with an umbrella and she rents it out to tourists when they come. I can just picture her on the beach sitting next to you while you´re sitting in her chair.

Also, during February, March, And April, the family runs a hotel. They rent out their bedrooms for $8/night to the tourists who are plentiful during the sunny season. During that time they all live downstairs, which is crazy because there´s only two twin beds downstairs. And one of the rooms is a birthing room.

Everyday Gladys goes out to see the ladies. She visit patients who are expecting to give them belly massages to check on the baby´s progress, for which she charges $1. She also visit patients who have given birth to clean the baby´s umbilical cord and massage the lady´s belly to encourage the expulsion of excess blood from the uterus. The after visits are included in the cost of the birth. The cord usually falls off in 7 to 10 days.

I´ve been going by myself to clean the umbilical cords since Gladys has been sick. It´s fun, but I think the ladies are a little surprised when they see it´s just me. Especially because I look like I don´t really know what I´m doing.

We´ve had 4 births so far. Three in the house and one at the woman´s house. Usually it´s pretty quick because I´ll be sleeping through the whole dilatation process when the woman is just walking around the house for a few hours. Then Gladys calls me downstairs when the woman is almost 10 centimeters dilated. At this point the lady gets up on this high cement bed in a tiny room, there are lost of pads and sheets over the cement of course. At this point the lady pushes for about 20 minutes and the baby comes right out.

I thought it would be a lot harder than it is. The women seem to be in pain of course, but it just goes more quickly than I had thought. Even one lady, 18 years old, for whom it was her first birth, was quick, though she was doing a lot of praying during. One baby came out purple with the cord wrapped around its neck, We just took it off and rubbed alcohol over his body, especially patting his heart, and he was crying within five minutes.

Gladys is very anti-hospital. She thinks doctors do Cesarean-Sections far too often, when it is not necessary. With her massages, if the baby´s head is not in the right place she can move it. Though she refuses to attend to births of women who are very old or have high blood pressure.

On Saturday night a girl came to the house for Gladys to feel her belly and see how the baby was. People are constantly coming to the door at all hours for Gladys to do this. Anyhow, this girl was 18 and her mom told me she just found out her daughter was pregnant two days ago. The girl was 7 months pregnant! She was really small and skinny so you couldn´t really tell. Anyhow she said she had taken some abortion pills to try to get rid of the baby. Gladys says, ¨What are you crazy? That only works in the first 2 months. You can´t do that in your 7th month.¨The whole time the girl had this weird smile on, like she didn´t care. It was kind of disturbing.

People are pregnant out the wazoo here. We have a patient due in December who´s 15, this is her second baby, her first is one year old. But then we have some women who seem to be very good at family planning whether by using the pill or injections, or just not having sex when they are most fertile. Birth control is free from the hospital, as are all hospital services.

Which brings me to the topic of the paper. At the end of the month I have to write a 25-30 page paper about my experience. I plan to write about why women choose midwives. It is especially perplexing to me because the hospital is free and midwives cost $80. The eighty dollars is a struggle for many of these women, just today we went to a town trying to collect money owed to Gladys. Women pay, five or ten dollars at a time. A week ago when Gladys was sick, she had her daughter Gina and I go out and ask for money owed to her in our town. Just in our town, there were 10 women who owed her money from births. This was when Gladys was sick, so she told us to say my mother is sick and going to the hospital so we need the money, she said come back with your purse filled. Not one woman had money.

But really, it´s not the women´s fault. They don´t work, they need to ask for the money from their husbands. One lady we went to said her husband was out playing volleyball so she didn´t have the money. Another said her husband wasn´t home, and then we passed him drunk in a bar. Gladys said, ¨So that´s where the money goes.¨ There´s a huge alcoholism problem here, on Sunday mornings the number of drunk men walking (or sleeping) around the streets is astounding.

It´s amazing how other-worldly this environment is from Quito, the capital city I had been living in. Most people in Quito have travelled, are well-off, high school and college educated, basically it´s like much of America. But here is SO different. Many people have never left the coast, most are not high school educated and money is scarce.

Anyhow, I´m having a great experience! I have 2 weeks left on the coast and then one week of presenting our projects in Quito and I´ll be coming home. I feel like this blog post went in a million different directions, but I have a lot on my mind.

Overall, I´m having a lot of fun! I went to a wedding and danced til the early morning and we go out on weekends to this cool beach town nearby. I try to run on the beach and swim in the ocean everyday, and I couldn´t ask for a better life here! I was thinking this morning while swimming that this year has probably been the best of my life so far! (But then I had to make a quick exit from the water because I saw fins swimming around. Turns out they were dolphins! Oh, this is the life!)