Bali Birth

Watching a birth in Bali at a maternal health center for poor families

If you want to fall in love with the world, really fall in love with it, watch a birth. Better yet, move to a developing country, work as a fundraiser for a birth centre for poor families, have no experience of birth yourself, and then watch a baby born into water.

I was walking home after an evening out when I got a message from Robin. She is a Filipino-American midwife who helped start the birthing centre in Bali where I had just started working as a grant writer and fundraiser. Occasionally, she is summoned with desperate calls on borrowed mobile phones to deliver babies in tin shacks with dirt floors for women so poor they cannot afford to pay the local untrained birth attendants two dollars to help. The family lacks transport. The women have never come for pre-natal check-ups. When Robin gets a call for a birth like this, she tucks several large rupiah notes into her tunic pocket to buy food for the postpartum woman and any other children she may have. She knows from experience that the new mother may not have eaten for days.

Apparently, a woman from just such a family was having a baby. She’d been able to get to the centre, arriving in a bemo, one of the small, public buses that ply Bali’s roads. The twenty-cent fare was contributed by the entire family.

Robin was adamant that I watch a birth, so I could see the work I was helping to support. Yet, I was leery of watching a stranger’s birth. Wouldn’t I be intruding? Reluctantly, I altered my walk home to head to the birth centre, leaving behind the hum of Ubud — with its shops and sidewalks and restaurants full of overweight tourists sweating profusely in the moist, tropical air — and strolling through the quiet lanes of Nyuh Kuning, a village of woodcarvers. The night was redolent with the smells of incense, smoke from burning garbage fires, and night-blooming jasmine. Street dogs stirred at my approach and sniffed the air for my scent, one loping along behind me silently. It was just after 11 p.m.

Robin met me outside the birth room. “This will be a good birth for your first time,” she said. “She’s a second-time Mom, and fully dilated. The baby will be out soon.”

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