So This Is What You’ve Been Doing All Along

Mambo mambo dear friends,

Birth work truly is the gift that keeps on giving, and even with that, there are gifts whose giving you get to be in active and continuous reciprocity with. The Wombs of the World Art of Labour Method is just that AND it is exactly the gift it thinks it is!

Kai here (:

So, when my son and I set out for Karatu at the end of April, I held this gift the way you hold anything about to burst through: nervous and exhilarated in equal measure. Gratefully, I was not traveling alone with it. In Arusha I met Whenna and Daniela, and the three of us carried it the rest of the way into the hills together, a maiden, mother, crone trio stewarding for a season something Charlotte had authored and entrusted to us to breathe into life. Tender and profoundly fulfilling work awaited: holding the space in which clinical professionals could stretch their minds and soften their hearts toward birth.

Over three back-to-back trainings, we learned how to breathe movement into the pages, where to slow down, where to play, where to let a hard truth land and sit. Daniela, a teacher by craft, was instrumental here, conjuring exercises on the spot when a room needed waking, so bodies would move before minds could open. And Whenna would arrive right on time with the stats, anchoring our conversations with evidence.

Because so much of this could not be taught from a chair, we got the clinicians up and into the positions themselves: onto all fours, so they could feel for themselves what it does to the pelvis, how it opens, how gravity becomes an ally rather than something to fight. We had them squeeze each other’s hips and gasp at the relief of it, feeling in their own bodies the medicine they would soon offer another. And sometimes the lesson was a single question. Do you poop lying flat on your back? The laughter, and then the light bulbs, going on around the circle one by one. Oh. So why do we ask her to push that way?

We sat in a circle the whole time, facing one another, no front of the room, no podium. And the land sat with us. We would be deep in a conversation about oxytocin when a flock of lovebirds lifted from the trees and swept in under the eaves, and a few of us would simply stop, and watch, and let the moment be what it was. It would start raining and everyone would huddle a little closer into the lush, green coziness of it. My son, mid-morning, would wander out just as we were demonstrating a position, wanting to try it on one of the clinicians, wanting to be part of it. The next generation, arriving early to the art of labor. He fell in love with the Physiology of Birth video by Formed Films, watching it over and over, and by the end of the week you could see him piecing it together in his own three-and-a-half-year-old way: that a baby starts in mama’s belly, then comes out, then is a baby held in arms. And looots of questions in between.

Not everyone came open. Some clinicians arrived skeptical, and honestly, that is healthy. But across three days, you could see the softening happen. By the third day, some of the most resistant had become the most engaged. Wombs of the World has worked in partnership with three of the facilities for nearly eight years, and in all that time their staff had watched us use counter pressure, hip squeezes, massage, the plain medicine of kindness, and had seen it work without quite understanding what they were watching. To bring them into the training was to hand them the key to a door they had been looking through for years. So this is what you have been doing all along. Those moments were everything.

And then there were the ones I will carry for a long time. On the last day of the first training, as the certificates were being given out, we closed with an exercise we call a warm shower, where each person, standing in the circle, speaks something good over another. Two of the clinicians who had seemed the toughest through the training broke open and wept, feeling seen, now feeling more equipped. That is so much of why this matters.

Because we did not only train them. We took care of them. We fed them, a mid-morning tea, lunch, and an afternoon snack, and it was no small thing. About seventy percent of the clinicians were women, women who finish a long, hard day and go home to families still waiting to be fed by them. They are rarely the ones who are fed. For three days they got to simply arrive, be encircled, be nourished, be in beauty. And that quality of being held, of patience and compassion and kindness met with the same, is what allows a person to feel grounded and anchored in themselves. That is what we hope they carry back into the labor room. You cannot pour calm into a birthing mother from an empty cup. So much of this work is resourcing the ones who go back to resource everyone else, who return to facilities where they are overworked, under-resourced, and underpaid, and who somehow keep giving anyway.

This is also about the material, and the difference it makes is plain and measurable. A few weeks later we returned to the facilities, and what we heard stopped us in our tracks. Across four of them, the Arusha facility and three in Karatu, cesarean rates are dropping, fundal pressure is down, more women are birthing physiologically and in different positions, and there is more skin-to-skin and kangaroo care for the newborns. All within weeks.

This is part of a larger vision, the Vertical Birth Project, working toward a day when women (in Karatu, in Tanzania, in East Africa, heck, all of Africa) can birth in positions that move with their bodies rather than against them. We learned early that you can equip a facility all you like, but nothing shifts until the people inside it shift first. So we began where the real alchemy happens: with the clinicians. Reverse engineering, you might call it.

Shukran sana to Whenna and Daniela, who facilitated beside me with such warmth, creativity, and openness to learning, and to Charlotte, whose beautiful workbook gave us good, solid ground to stand on. A heartfelt thank you, too, to the International Childbirth Initiative (ICI), our partners in this work, whose 12 Steps to Safe and Respectful MotherBaby-Family Maternity Care the training is designed to align with. We are now developing a facilitator guide and refining the workbook for what comes next.

Due to popular demand, we are going back in September for three more trainings, returning to many of the same facilities to reach more of their staff. We have also received requests from new facilities eager to take part, and we will be welcoming a couple of them into this next round. I am asking for your help to make it happen.

Across our May pilot, 52 clinicians from five facilities earned their Art of Labour certificates, and they are already changing how women in Karatu and Arusha meet childbirth. This September, we want to reach even more.

Will you sponsor a clinician?

For $350, you will cover one clinician’s full three-day training: meals, materials, transport, all of it. But you will be giving something far larger than that number suggests. You will be sending someone back to their labor ward with new hands, a softer presence, and a fuller cup. The women they serve will never know your name, but they will feel the difference.

A few resources made our learning richer, and we cannot recommend them enough: The Physiology of Birth by Formed Films, and the Global Health Media Project’s childbirth series. Beautiful, generous work.

By the end, we had a little refrain of our own, the kind of thing that belongs on a T-shirt one day. Whenever the work stretched us, one of us would say it, and the rest would grin:

I dare you to surprise me.

I’m a birth worker.

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