two very different lives. . .

i would say one of the privileges of what i am able to do in life is sharing extremely personal and intimate times with people.  there are few things more personal and important in a woman’s life than the birth of her child.  you kinda up the ante when that mom is delivering in a place like haiti and complications can mean life or death.

i had two conversations today with moms who delivered here at heartline recently.  they couldn’t have had much starker contrast between their stories.  one of these moms i helped delivery and she had an extremely complicated delivery with pre-eclampsia and the other mom had a very complicated delivery just a few days ago and is still here because she had a severe infection.  both challenging, both facing the hard reality of life here in haiti, but completely different perspectives.

the first story was a young mother, she was the one i delivered about three months ago that had severe pre-ecplampsia.  she is here without her baby today for program.  the conversation we had was painful and challenging as i tried to ask sensitive questions, yet get the story of what is going on in her life.  she said that the father took her baby and gave him to the grandma in the country.  she doesn’t know where her baby boy is and feels like she doesn’t have any way to get him back.  i asked her if she wanted him (thinking perhaps she is young and really didn’t want to care for him anyway).  she said of course she does, she cries every day because she misses him.  i tried to get a little bit more history about what happened and she said that she was struggling because she was having problems breast feeding and her family said her milk would go to her head and make her crazy.  so she took some medicine they gave her and got better.  she said she has been to the police, but it would take money to get the paperwork to get the father to give her back her baby. . . money she doesn’t have.

i told her i didn’t really know what to do or have any ideas other than to pray together. that is what we did.  i asked her to come back and see me again next week.

the other conversation i had today was with a mom who has had her first baby at 36 years old.  she had a long difficult labor and was severely infected and the baby is now getting antibiotic treatment.  another difficult labor and delivery, but precious life.  how interesting the different perspective this mom has on life at 36 years old with her first child.

i asked her why she hadn’t had any children yet and she said she was going to school, then she listed off the things she had been studying, it is a pretty long list actually, gardening, typing, embroidery and sewing, songwriting, the father of her baby is an engineer and architect of sorts.  she is so happy to have a healthy little girl.  she sang me a song she wrote about january 12th.  we both teared up as she sang, but she said to me a couple times, “this country is broken, but you have to be able to take care of yourself, you can’t expect the president to take care of you and your children, you need to have an education and work with the people around you to build this country.”

more than anything what stuck out to me in these two conversations was the idea of education.  the mom who is 36 made her life choices because she had the opportunity for education.  the mom who had her child taken away from her, who has been strongly influenced by a family with no understanding has not had the same opportunities for education.

education really does make or break a society.

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