Birth in the Time of Jesus

Birth in the Time of Jesus

Since becoming a midwife, I have on Christmas Eve, watched my thoughts slip into a wondering place about Mary and the birth of Jesus.  In the crèche that has been passed down from generation to generation, in our family, Mary and Joseph are sitting alone with some animals and an angel.   There is no sign of family, friends or neighbors.  There is no midwife.  My nativity scene has grown, over the years, to include many babies and many mothers, fathers, angels and animals.  There are crèches made in Haiti, Guatemala, Ecuador and the tribes of our first people.  There is a play mobile crèche and animals made from clay and wood.    It is now a whole village of people gathered to celebrate the birth of Jesus.   Small dolls, smurfs and action figures have found a place there as well. All are welcome.

They face one direction; moving towards a common light, no matter their background or nationality.   If there should be a problem, there are many people to go for help or offer assistance.   The baby has been born, however, and all seems to have gone well.  There are gifts of food, clean water and a community that cares about its children.  This is the crèche I create on these cold, winter days. It is the only crèche my children and grandchildren have ever known. 

I have learned a great deal about birth from the women and midwives of Haiti, Vietnam and Cambodia as well as from the archaeologists and scholars who have studied life in the time Mary would have given birth to Jesus.   I also know that no two people ever tell a birth story in the same way; that the midwife, the father, the mother and friends and family all have different perspectives on one common event.  This is the way of stories. 

The women, who gave birth in the area of Judea, were part of small Jewish communities who were under the rule of the Roman Empire.  The Roman Empire was vast and each part of the Empire was governed by a local administrator.  The Jewish community was guided by rabbis and the temple in Jerusalem.  They were warm, costal communities nested into the dry, rocky shores of the Mediterranean Sea.  The women were born, grew up, and celebrated the coming of adulthood, marriage and birth within the laws of their faith.  A young woman, giving birth, would be part of a strong community made up of family, friends and neighbors.  She would have known since early childhood, the activities surrounding birth and the care of the newborn.   Her own first menarche would have been celebrated and a husband carefully selected by her family and the community.  Perhaps she had helped with the birth of a sister, a mother or a cousin; the way women naturally gather to support a woman and family having a baby. 

Much of what we know about birth, at this time, is from archaeology and also from two authors; Pliny the Elder and Soranus.  Soranus wrote a book about midwives in the 2^nd century AD.  From his book, Gynaecolgy, we read his description of a good midwife:

(3) ... A suitable person ... must be literate in order to be able to comprehend the art through theory too: she must have her wits about her so that she may easily follow what is said and what is happening: she must have a good memory to retain the imparted instructions (for knowledge arises from memory of what has been grasped). She must love work in order to persevere through all vicissitudes (for a woman who wishes to acquire such vast knowledge needs manly patience). She must be respectable since people will have to trust their household and the secrets of their lives to her and because to women of bad character the semblance of medical instruction is a cover for evil scheming. She must not be handicapped as regards her senses since there are things which she must see, answers which she must hear when questioning, and objects which she must grasp by her sense of touch. She needs sound limbs so as not to be handicapped in the performances of her work and she must be robust, for she takes a double task upon herself during the hardship of her professional visits. Long and slim fingers and short nails are necessary to touch a deep lying inflammation without causing too much pain. This skill, however, can also be acquired through zealous endeavour and practice in her work ...

(4) ... We call a person the best midwife if she is trained in all branches of therapy (for some cases must be treated by diet, others by surgery, while still others must be cured by drugs); if she is moreover able to prescribe hygienic regulations for her patients, to observe the general and the individual features of the case, and from this to find out what is expedient, not from the causes or from the repeated observations of what usually occurs or something of the kind. Now to go into detail: she will not change her methods when the symptoms change, but will give her advice in accordance with the course of the disease: she will be unperturbed, unafraid in danger, able to state clearly the reasons for her measures, she will bring reassurance to her patients, and be sympathetic. And it is not absolutely essential for her to have borne children, as some people contend, in order that she may sympathise with the mother, because of her experience with pain; for [to have sympathy] is not more characteristic of a person who has given birth to a child. She must be robust on account of her duties but not necessarily young as some people maintain, for sometimes young persons are weak whereas on the contrary older persons may be robust. She will be well disciplined and always sober, since it is uncertain when she may be summoned to those in danger. She will have a quiet disposition, for she will have to share many secrets of life. She must not be greedy for money, lest she give an abortive wickedly for payment; she will be free from superstition so as not to overlook salutary measures on account of a dream or omen or some customary rite or vulgar superstition. She must also keep her hands soft, abstaining from such wool-working as may make them hard, and she must acquire softness by means of ointments if it is not present naturally. Such persons will be the best midwives.

 In Soranus’s book he describes the supplies a midwife should bring to a birth.   They include the following:

olive oil [clean, not previously used in cooking], warm water, warm fomentations [ointments applied to the body], soft sea sponges, pieces of wool, bandages [to swaddle the infant], a pillow [on which to which to place the infant], things to smell [pennyroral, dirt, barley groats, apples, quinces, lemons, melons, cucumbers; these were used as we use spirits of ammonia to revive someone who has fainted], a midwife's stool or chair [this was the property of the midwife; she brought it with her to the home where the delivery was to take place], two beds [a hard one for use during labor and a soft one for rest after delivery], and a proper room [of medium size and moderate temperature]. (38)

If possible a midwife should also, he writes, bring a birthing chair but if this was not available a woman should sit on the laps of two women and be supported in this way. They did not give birth on their back.  There is also an indication that sometimes a hole was dug for a woman to squat over with brightly painted birth bricks for her feet.  In all situations, the laboring woman was held up, encouraged and supported by other women with the midwife sitting in front of her to catch the baby.   Soranus recommends that the midwife cover her hands with cloth, as the baby is quite slippery. 

A woman, giving birth in the time of Jesus, would have lived in a small stone house with perhaps one or two rooms.   Most families had a room upstairs for living and a room below for the animals.  This is how it was in Cambodia and Vietnam.  Animals were kept close to the family so they could be easily watched and cared for.   I remember, this Christmas season, the women who rested, after birth, on platforms, next to cows and so now the image of a mother and baby in a place of animals comes with it, an image of mothers laughing and smiling as the cows lazily chew their cud on a warm afternoon.   In the place where Mary gave birth, the animals might have been in a cave with the house on top.

Each community would have had a mikveh; a pool for women to wash themselves in after they give birth or during their monthly bleeding.  After the birth, a woman would have gone and submerged herself in fresh rainwater.  For those of who have given birth, having a pool deep enough to completely submerge ourselves in after birth, sounds peaceful and soothing, after the hard work of birth.  A wealthy family might own their won pool but we might imagine that in a middle class family this would have been shared by extended family and would have been sued by the mother before when she bathed there with her menarche. 

When she returned to her house, the baby would have been washed in salt water or wine and rubbed with olive oil.  The baby would have been wrapped in pieces of linen with the arms and legs straight.  The baby was swaddled as we all swaddle babies but this was also thought to help the baby develop strong, straight arms and legs. Room was left free for the baby to go the bathroom. There were no diapers. The baby was kept close to the mother at all times and she caught droppings in a small clay pot. 

Her house most likely would have opened onto a shared courtyard that was shared by other small houses.   Sisters, aunts, cousins and grandmothers would have ben close by to help with the recommended 40 days of rest for mother and baby.   At 40 days, a family would travel to the temple in Jeruselum to present the baby to the community. This is sometimes known as “Churching”the baby. The baby would have been circumcised, according to Jewish custom, at eight days of age. 

A baby was typically breastfed for 3 years and a special celebration was planned for the weaning of a baby.  Other than the natural spacing offered by early, exclusive breastfeeding, a woman of this time would give birth to many babies following the customs of her community.

When I reflect on the most familiar forms of the nativity scene I think of many things. 

I consider the image of a woman isolated from her community and from midwives; isolated from the unique religious and cultural customs of her life.  A woman who had no one to support her.  Her visitors are all men; shepherds and wise men and not women bringing food and wise council.  I think about hospitals all over the world in which women are forced to choose between their cultural traditions and safe birth; how the two often fail to come together.  I see the women in Haiti and Vietnam in a hospital bed, laboring all alone, flat on their back.    And so I build a new nativity in which women are always in the presence of caring friends and family; supported on either side by women, with a skilled midwife there beside her.

The other image is the image of “no room at the inn. “ These words are spoken at Christmas all over the world.   These words bring to mind the fact that hundreds of thousands of women each day, give birth without adequate prenatal care, clean water, a skilled midwife and emergency referral services.

I draw, in my mind, a crèche in which all these things are provided for all women; loving culturally appropriate practices, skilled midwives, emergency resources and the care of an extended community that provides a peaceful, equitable world for her child to be raised in. 

I can never know, this Christmas morning, what Mary’s birth was like. But based on what we know about Jewish law and the customs of her day, I build a crèche that includes midwives and the support of women in her community. I can see that animals within the home were a normal part of life both now and then.  

I also think of what it means to  follow, not just the Star of Bethlehem, but to follow the deep inner light that exists within all humanity.  I consider the simple message, offered by a then grown up Jesus; the one that asked us to love one another as he loved us.    

This message inspired and gave strength to many who strove make the world a better place for each baby born.   The church, named in this one baby’s honor, would struggle to understand these words as they saw the church as a place of exclusive membership that a brown skinned Mary, living as an oppressed religious minority, would have had difficulty recognizing.

And so on Christmas Eve, with my granddaughter beside me, I raise a candle and say a prayer for all the mothers and babies of the world. I pray for the healing and compassion and generosity that will make each child’s life safe and celebrated.  

My Lai Massacre

Visiting the Site of the My Lai Massacre

“We cannot forget the past but we cannot live with hate and anger either. With this park of peace, we have created a green, rolling, living, monument to peace.”

Mike Boehm, Veteran

Peace Park at site of the My Lai Massacre

I finish my workshops in the Quang Nhai province of Central Vietnam and wait for someone to take me, in the ambulance, one hour north to meet Nhan. I had just finished distributing the last of the ambu bags to the midwives at the district hospital a few hours earlier.

We had been warned that the typhoon, the one that caused so much damage in the Philippines, was headed to Vietnam.  They had all braced for the worst but then it changed course and went in another direction.   Now they report that another tropical storm is on its way.  No one shows any interest or concern. The rain had just begun as we took photos and said our farewells. 

The doctor who arranged the  training is my daughter in laws uncle.  Although he lives in Saigon, he was born in this province and has many family members to visit before taking the train back to the city. He is retired with grown children living and going to school all over the world.  He does not want to go live in Canada or Australia or the USA.  He loves his country.

As I climb into the van, which is also the ambulance, the doctor tells the driver to take me to My Lai.

“My Lai?”   I stop and turn, one foot in the van and one on the ground, not sure I want to continue.

“It’s just down the road.”

“My Lai?” 

I am thinking that I cannot go there. It is too much.  I am tired and it is really raining.  The War Remnants Museum in Saigon was hard enough.  The driver does not speak English so I cannot voice my fears at going to a place that holds such national pain for people from my country.

We wave our good-byes and I sit in silence as the ambulance makes its way down Highway 1.    It is not called My Lai in Vietnam. It was never My Lai. It was and is Son My. The US army called it Pinkville because they thought  many Vietcong were hiding there.   We turn down small, dirt roads where people move peacefully through the day’s end.  The palm trees are blowing. There is no sign of war or that a war was ever fought there.  I can see that life has returned, that children have been born and grown up to have their own children.  The rice has been planted and harvested hundreds of times since that day.

It is late in the day, when we turn into the park.  There are no other cars in the parking lot.   The driver points to the visitors center and I run through the rain to the open door and then stop.

My legs do not want to walk up the steps.   I can see that it is a park now and that it is dedicated to healing and peace.  I do not want to forgive.  I still want to be angry.   I try walking meditation; taking one step at a time and breathing.  I think, “I am here now. One step at a time.”

A young Vietnamese woman, wearing a traditional dress, welcomes me. She says,  “I know how hard it is for your generation of Americans to come here. I can see that. People who are your age are so sad.”

She gently touches my arm.  “Thank you for helping my village.’

I look at her and feel confused. I had not known I was working in the hospital of My Lai.   I hear her voice but I cannot focus.  Her relatives died in this place; in this place that once was a small hamlet like many others. She is saying some survived and remember.  She is saying she will have her baby in the hospital where I volunteered.  She is smiling.

I am disoriented.   I saw the pictures and read the news years ago.  I marched and stood in silent vigils.  But now I am here.  The photos are blown up and take up whole walls.  I am alone except for the ambulance driver who I can see wants me to hurry.   I want to lie in the grass. I look around for the people I knew at 18; the ones who marched and stood and organized with me but I can see I am doing this sad, lonely walk alone.  There are no songs or chants or cheers.   There is only the rain beating on the roof.

The guide, who is pregnant, is trying to show me photos and is paying particular attention to me.   Perhaps it is because of my nationality and age and because I had worked in the hospital. 

“It was March 16, 1968”

Where was I exactly?   I want to remember.  I do not want it to be an ordinary, forgetable day.

“It was early in the morning and everyone was getting ready to go to the market and rice fields. “

I know the sweet way life begins in the small hamlets and villages of Southeast Asia.   I was in school.   I was almost 19.  Perhaps I was walking to the college cafeteria for breakfast.  I feel a desperation.  I am at the Petagon in Washington DC.  There are people everywhere and we are being washed in a wave of protests up to the wall.  People are climbing the wall.  But there is tear gas and bayonets and we fall and lose our friends and people scream and cry and we do not climb the wall. We fall back and go home.  We do not take over the Petagon and we do not stop the war.   We do not stop this massacre.

“Seventeen of the victims were pregnant women.”

She recites the figures as she has many times before; infants, children, old women.  She tells me how the photographer hid the pictures and later sold them to Life magazine and that’s when the world found out.  This was a year later.  I look at his photos on the wall and try to listen.  She is telling me how they came back a week later and people were decaying. 

And then, the school shootings in the United States join the shootings at My Lai.  I cannot help it.  I think, to myself, we are still shooting children.  I see the small children in the irrigation ditch and they are lying side by side with the Sandy Hook children.   I cannot breathe.   I have to get out of there but she is smiling at me and guiding me from picture to picture.

The sign says that the helicopters landed and then the solders rounded up people and shot them and burned their houses and food.   They shot small boys on the road, mothers with babies in their arms.  Picture after picture. Statistic after statistic. 

She says they shot a baby and mother while the baby was still nursing; while the baby still sucked on her breast.

What is it to be almost, nearly born; to feel your mother’s life slip away around you before you ever see the light of day; to be buried within her in a mass grave made out of a crater of a bomb? 

A person from another country turns to me and says, “Everyone has guns in America, right?” 

“No.” I answer, “Not everyone.”  I feel shame.   I know what they are thinking.  They are thinking that despite all this we still let people shoot children.   

She leads me to a picture of a few solders and tells me how they tried to stop it and saved many civilians.  She must know I need this small story of hope for humanity.  I nod and am indeed thankful. 

She touches my arm.

“We know all people from America are not like this. We see them come and we can see how sad they are. Many have come and built schools and this park.”

The ambulance driver motions for me to come.  It has started to pour rain and its getting dark. 

Many men were eventually tried but only Lt William Calley was convicted and he was given a pardon by Nixon after just three and a half years of house arrest.  They show pictures of the solders eating lunch before starting up the killing again.  She tells me that Lt William Calley works in a jewelry store.  She repeats the sentence. “He is working in a jewelry store.” I can see her trying to imagine how it can be that the man who killed so many people could be standing in a jewelry store waiting on customers. 

I think of the video games the children play in my country; of the  stubborn refusal to regulate guns. I think of the school shootings, the wars, and the children who kill themselves with unlocked guns.  

My guide says the publication of the photos was a turning point in the war but we in, my country, would know other wars and other massacres.     

The people who oppose gun registration and regulation blame the mass killings on mental illness.   We send young boys to war.  We never heal from one war before we join another.

On the street corners of my city, veterans of many wars become homeless and beg for money; lost in alcohol and drugs, unable to bare the memories.  The hate and fear for Vietnamese and communists has been replaced by a hate and fear for other people and other ideologies. 

This was not the only massacre of civilians in this war or the wars fought before or after.  The children of Sandy Hook will not be the last children to die within a nation who wounds itself with the machinery of violence.

A child's drawing from the War Remnents Museum in Ho Chi Minh City

When we leave, the road is lined with students on bicycles.   I watch them laugh and call to each other.   Women carry food from the market and trucks rush by on the way to even larger markets.  The roadsides  are busy with conversation and small shops.  The ambulance driver plays his siren all the way to Quang Nhan where I am dropped off and walk in the semi-dark through flooded rice fields to where Nhan is waiting.  

I sink into the night, into the on coming storm and into the villages of Vietnam.   The monks chant in a small pagoda.  A candle is lit on the porch where they are expecting me. 

Warming the mother after the birth

Warming the Mother and Baby

We gather on the porch, in the dark, and watch the rainfall.  They have lit an oil lamp and made tea but it is still  a deep, damp,cold.  It is only five in the afternoon but a storm is coming and it gets dark early. Nhan has invited four women, from the surrounding houses, to visit.   They have known each other their whole lives. They too were born and  raised there amongst the rice fields; marrying someone they knew in childhood.  The men sat outside the circle  but listened attentively, jumping up to add a story or comment with considerable enthusiasm.

I have told Nhan that I want to meet with some older midwives and with women who gave birth during the war.  They were all good friends with my son’s mother and watched him grow up, before his family was forced to go to Saigon.  He was born only a few hundred yards from where we sat in a house that was never rebuilt after it was bombed. We are in the heart of what they called the “DMV” on the nightly news.  It was the place between north and south where most of the fighting took place.  

They had no access to birth control and so babies came every year or two.  They gave birth as part of a normal course of the day.  None of them had any problems with their births and all their babies lived at the time of the birth.  They all lost several children in the years after they were born.  They died of starvation, they supposed, or because there were no doctors.  They were not sure.  

“Having a baby did not hurt back then, “ they explain to me.  “We could feel some hard feelings but it didn’t hurt.”

Another woman, sitting straight in her chair, smiles at her friends and explains that most often she was outside and the baby just came.  They all nod.

“We liked to go out in the rice field as it was peaceful.”

I ask.  “Were you working out there?”

“No, its just peaceful.”

“Then we call for someone and go inside.  Then the midwife comes.”

The midwives main job, they explain, was to cut the cord.  She used a chopstick as a guide for where to cut the cord and tied it with string or bamboo cordage from a sewing basket. 

The mother then laid down on a raised bed and coals from the kitchen fire were placed beneath or near her.  I am very cold, shivering in a light dress, so I can see how this would be needed.

There is no source of heat in the house at all.  The only fire is in the outside kitchen and so they do what people the world over have done for centuries.  They take colas from the kitchen fire and put them near the person who needs to be warmed.  

I ask if they are trying to “roast” the mother and they laugh.

“No, just keep her warm.”   They show me a pot for this purpose and it is about a one -quart size pot.   

When I go to Italy to see my son, I am helping him clean the old grandmothers house and find a brass pot.  I ask what it is for and they say, “to put in under the bed to keep you warm.   You put coals in it.”

Ah, I think to myself so the practice of placing coals under the bed was done in Europe as well.  Perhaps it was even brought to Asia from Europe or vice versa. Perhaps it is so sensible that many people without heat devised such a method all over the world.

“Was it smokey?”  

They are patient with my questions that must seem to lack all intelligence.

“It is only a few coals.”

I can see the house is lovely and well made but also has much natural ventilation.  It is only a few warm coals.

In Asian culture things are seen as cold or hot; foods, events, seasons.  Labor and birth are seen as a cooling event so the mother must be warmed up and given “warm” foods.   They wear warm, woolen hats after birth; even when it is hot outside and are warmed by coals under the bed.  

They are fed a simple rice soup. Fruit is seen as too cooling and avoided.  Meat is also taboo.   There are  warm, traditional teas.

The practice of “mother roasting” is being discouraged at hospitals and they are given an assortment of prescriptions instead.   They include a pain killer and an iron pill.   These are helpful but will not warm the mother in the absence of electric heat. 

We laugh and they tell me story after story about birth and children and being a mother in Vietnam.  The paths between the rice paddies is flooded and so they say they should hurry home.  

It is cold so they warm water for my bucket shower on the kitchen fire.  I go outside and pour the warm water over me as the rain falls in hard, steady stream.  The bed is a bamboo mat on a board but I fall asleep quickly.

In the morning, the aunt, has made a fire in the cook house where we all sit to keep warm.   I am shown a small stool that nursing mothers used to keep warm in the kitchen.  Nhan and the aunt show me how you can take leaves and warm them and rub them on the mother and baby.  They do it for me and it feels wonderful.  

As I sit there by the fire, I consider how something so practical and simple can be turned into something strange and exotic in the western world.   A young woman comes by to say hello and she shares that she always had warm coals by her bed and always let the grandmothers care for her.   She has gone to college and has a good job but she will not give up this tradition.

I think of the grandmothers; how many  will watch, with  bewilderment, as her granddaughter arrives home with a scar from surgery and is put to bed with strict orders not to put coals under the bed.  Perhaps the grandmother’s pot will be rebuked as old fashioned or perhaps this is where they silently  draw the line and accept it as wisdom beyond medical understanding.   

The warmth drifts up into the bed and the smell of a simple rice soup fills the house.   The grand daughter smiles up at her grandmother who does these things for her as she did them for her mother.  She lies there and wonders how her grandmother gave birth so easily and she had to be cut open.  She had not wanted to be cut but the doctor said she had to be.  

She thinks these things until the warmth of the coals and the soup and her baby nursing relax her and she drifts into sleep.   Her grandmother is old and has lived through wars, famine and the birth of many children, grandchildren and now this new great grandchild.  She is happy that she has lived to be here for her after the birth; happy to hear her feet padding across the floorboards as they have her whole life.   

In my experiences in childbirth, I have seen many women shake after the birth and feel cold.   The mother may shiver a great deal.  Many midwives, warm a flannel sheet or a light blanket in the dryer and wrap it tightly around her.  We make a warm tea with sugar or honey and offer her a few sips.  In these ways she is able to warm herself and the shaking soon stops.  Of course, a midwife is attentive to the mother’s vital signs, bleeding and sign of shock.  She understands that breastfeeding soon after birth and an empty bladder prevent many problems.    She understands that after the birth is a time for her to stay with the mother and baby for several hours, even if everything appears normal.   In our homes and hospitals, the beds are far too thick with box springs and mattresses to ever allow heat to penetrate them from below but we, like our SE Asian sister midwives, assure the warmth of mother and baby after the birth.   I am struck with the many wise ways midwives have accomplished this the world over.   In hospitals all over the world, babies are put in very expensive warmers rather than on the mothers own warm body.   Now science teaches us that there are many benefits to putting a baby on the mother and not in a warmer; things that midwives and grandmothers have always known.  

The Geography of Birth

The Geography of Birth

The land I walk on, was born from the sea; rising up as the waters receded, leaving a rich, fertile place where rivers emerged from mountains.  Surrounded  on all three sides by the ocean, it is blessed with all forms of sea life and a clear view of the horizon where other lands also grow and shift with the changing climate.  

Small bands of people from Africa, left their land hundreds of thousands of years before these stories take place.  Women, in small communities, crossed the Red Sea into present day Yemen.  From there, with intelligence and cooperation, followed the coastlines and rivers to populate the whole of earth.   As they made their way they settled, hunted, fished, learned new technologies and developed new ways of living. They also formed families and had babies.   These babies, in turn, grew up and had babies of their own. Some people stayed and created semi- permanent  communities while others continued to explore new lands and make the slow ,perhaps a mile a year, migration towards what we now know as South East Asia. 

The geography of birth explores the patterns and processes that helped women give birth safely in the context of their landscape and cultural experience.  It examines how women adapted to change, used natural resources, shared information and cared for the young.   The birth practices of most humans was tied to the landscape they lived within.  Much of what we know about the migratory patterns of humans is from the study of archeology.   Today we can learn through the sharing of stories.

Archeologists, who study the bones of  ancient people, report that there are almost no signs of babies being buried inside a mother’s pelvis and few burials of mothers and babies together.  They consider that if there had been significant problems with childbirth, there would have been more mothers and babies born together but there is little evidence of this.   This along with the vast evidence of the human ability to populate the earth, helps us to believe that birth was and is inherently a normal and safe part of the human experience.   In the Geography of Birth we look at outside influences; those people or events that changed birth practices and how they impacted the safety of women and babies.

The first evidence of these modern, human ancestors in SE Asia. were found in a cave in present day Laos; people who lived hunted and gathered the food of the rich peninsula.

Archaeologists believe that some people, following the coastlines went to Australia.  Others pushed up to China and others remained in present day India.   For most of these 200,000 years, people lived in small tribes and bands following migratory animals and seasonal crops.  There is no part of human migration in which women were not giving birth.  There is no historical event, war or act of genocide that was not also accompanied by women giving birth.

Like many people everywhere, the people of Southeast Asia developed a desire and ability to make permanent structures, grow crops and domesticate animals.  They developed pottery and iron works and sophisticated systems of working with stone and wood.  As these systems became more sophisticated, the people spent more time in permanent villages.  These villages grew larger and over time turned into city-states.  Meanwhile people were navigating and continuing their exploration of the coastlines and seas.  People from the north, south and east came to the land to settle and trade.  Some, who came to trade, never returned home. They married and stayed bringing new thought systems, technologies and beliefs.

During this time, in every place on earth, people believed in some form of earth based spirituality in which the natural world is filled with spirit. The rivers, the sea, the trees, the mountains, the flowers and the sky were all deeply connected to a force that slowly becomes known as God.  Just as small city-states began to develop, so did larger, more structured religions.   Hinduism would make its way to SE Asia from India.  The Chinese would bring Confucianism and Nepal would give them Buddha Later the French and Spanish would bring Christianity.  

What was once small bands of people roaming one landscape; free to hunt, gather and fish as they needed became a land divided into kingdoms and dynasties that often followed former tribal routes. Their formation and decline was often closely linked to the landscape and their use and misuse of natural resources.   Rulers joined forces with the world’s great religions to create monarchies linked to God and heaven. Societies that had enjoyed equalitarian life styles became divided into rich and poor; ruler and slave.   Empires such as the Khmer and Cham became prominent and then declined.

The Chinese pushed down from the North, as smaller tribes worked to survive and consolidate their resources.  The Europeans made their way too around the globe and set out to colonize many lands including SE  Asia. People who had once had power over their own futures were forced to work to create great wealth for colonial powers.  What had been one peninsula of free roaming people was divided into Vietnam. Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma.  Their borders would be determined by treaties made in Paris.

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A version of this story can be told all over the world as people, countries, religions and ethnic groups fought for survival, wealth and power.  The deaths of millions of mothers and babies was and is a consequence of  greed and a desire for power.   I am assured, by the women, I interviewed that childbirth was far less the cause of death than political and economic warfare waged on innocent people.

There is no way to wage a political, economic or religious war without hurting and killing mothers and babies.   The woman who first walked out of Africa is our common genetic mother. Some call her our Mitochondrial Eve.  I feel confident that the first band of people that left Africa, did so out of a love for their children and a wish to secure a better future for them.   It is the same reason my son set out on a boat across the South China Sea and why my daughter walked through landmines to reach Thailand.

We honor all the women of the world, when we take care of one another and the amazing, bountiful land that has taken care of us for all these generations.  I love listening to the stories of the oldest midwives left on earth.  I want to know, how they survived war and famine and an ever-changing society.    I  believe they have the power to teach me the vast lessons of graciousness. 

I will try to paint for you, my unknown reader, the stories of birth I have collected in a backdrop of geography, archeology, history and religion.   I feel my way along the shores of my own uncharted territory; following streams within the ever-changing seasons of my life, using birth and midwives as the star in the dark night as my guide.

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