Deserted Beaches, Ancient Midwives, and Spiritual Water-Skiing

Thursday was my last day in the field with tropical insects.  We visited homes to help teach the locals how to prevent the spread of disease and ended the day on a stunning deserted beach near Chila, with some prickly local foliage. :)

Friday afternoon, Sol took me to a pueblo to visit with a 'partera', the traditional mid-wife of the Mexican culture.  A partera uses only natural herbs to heal her patients, and specializes in pregnancy and childbirth.  About 20 years ago, the government recognized that parteras were too deeply ingrained in Mexican culture to ignore, and so they began a certification process that allows a partera to be covered under their social healthcare insurance, and a women will only receive a birth certificate for her child if he is delivered by a doctor or certified midwife.  This helped reduce the tetanus that was transmitted by cutting the umbilical cord with dirty knives, etc.  Absolutely every woman in Mexico, insurance or not, is covered 100% when pregnant, so midwivery is becoming a dying vocation, because women now just go to the hospital (where Cesareans are the prominent method for childbirth).  Their will be no one to carry on the wisdom of this particular midwife:  

She is 90 years old, and still in practice, and started working in the trade at 20.  She has delivered just about every person in her pueblo, plus many more come to see her, including a local religious sect called Los Hermanos (the Brothers), which from what I gather is like a Mormon fundamentalist group who allow no medicinal assistance, even herbal.  They pray fiercely over the delivering mother, who sometimes dies from dehydration because no water may be given during the birth.

According to my partera, no woman or child has ever died in her care.  She has 11 children herself, 2 of which she delivered BY HERSELF.  No husband, no mother even, to help her.  She has 40 grandkids, and 40 great grandkids, and she doesn't know how many great, great ones.  She is the god mother of 100 babies.  She talked about how in the old days she would make house calls and have to walk to Puerto...the walk was three hours there and back on the beach, which at that time was filled with wild animals, including jaguars, wild boars, and crocodiles.

Here are photos of her, including her hair which is down to her knees (the other woman in that photo is Sol, my house mom).  The bed you see is the delivery bed, where women will traditionally hold a rope hanging from the ceiling while squatting to deliver the baby.  The shack you see is the room that the delivery bed is in.

Finally, yesterday I went to my friend Casey's house, which is about 12 km outside of town on the Laguna de Manialtepec, a mixed fresh and salt body of warm water surrounded by mangroves.  She is engaged to a guy from Mexico City, and they live on a sprawling property, with their main house and two bungalows for rent (but which are hardly rented).  They have beach front property and in the afternoon, before a delicious meal of fresh camarones empanizados (fried shrimp :), we got our work out in on the paddle boards.  Paddle boarding was so fun, as you use your core to balance and your upper body strength to row.  Then, the crown jewel of my week, I got to water ski in the lagoon.  I had the hugest smile on my face as I carved through the wake with the sun setting and the mountains in the background.  I was like, holy sh*t, I'm water-skiing on a lagoon in southern Mexico...thank you, God.  So incredibly present for the experience, and so, so grateful.