Shanti Uganda - Bishop Asili Birth Center

SHANTI UGANDA 2/9/2010

Today we traveled to visit Shanti Uganda, where Natalie, founder and only age 27, has started birthing centers for women and camaraderie groups of HIV+ women. They are located in the Luwero district of Uganda, over an hour north of Kampala.

Upon driving up in the bus, the countryside is quite beautiful. The country is very green and lush in this region, unlike the deserts in Northern Africa. We passed banana trees and other tropical plants as well as street side markets of people selling various fruits and vegetables. Motorcycles are all over the place as well, people selling, fixing, and driving them. All the roads are dirt roads, but smooth, with mud/brick huts of homes and small household farms along the entire route.

The Luwero district is much more concentrated than the road, full of markets and mud/brick huts. Upon turning down a side road, a woman selling bananas sees the likes of us in the bus and rushes over to try and sell her stock. We move on, but there is a clear association of the wealth of the white people that visit, and they visit on very a rare occasion.

As we walk down to the birthing center, there is an enormous greeting of 28 women, HIV+, dressed in their best clothing, clapping, screaming, excited for our arrival. We come down the road they come and hug us while draping us in necklaces and we all dance. Then we see a beautiful sign these women created out of fabric and beads reading “Thank You Off the Mat Into the World”. It was such a wonderful welcome.

We then went under a gazebo type hut, to meet the women. They went through a brief training on breastfeeding safely with HIV. Then they sang a song and danced for us, we joined in on the dancing, and then we sang a song to them. It was a wonderful greeting. These women, despite being HIV+, had the kindest, brightest spirits. These were all beautiful women, who danced and laughed and nourished each other. There were babies and super sweet kids around doing yoga with us and simply having a good time. The children were all such angels, especially one who was actually deaf and seemed to have some kind of mental delay or condition. He just smiled and waved, and we slapped hands few times as a game in different combinations, and to hear his laugh was such a joy. It was not a normal laugh, due to his deafness, but it was the cutest giggling and moan sounds, not really “moan” but single tone sounds. He was so sweet and his grandmother truly loved him, he was a child very easy to love.

Then we ate a delicious meal the women cooked. After that we taught them yoga, learned how to make beads, and toured the birthing center. These women made beautiful beads out of paper, in long triangular shapes, using a needle they rolled them tightly from the wide base to the point, sealed with glue. They then varnish them and string them into necklaces and bracelets.

The birthing center was extraordinary. Traditionally, women give birth in very unsanitary conditions, and it is likely the mother and/or child can die in the process of childbirth, and many from a simple infection. Shanti Uganda is extremely good at keeping their facilities very sanitary. There are so many complications with childbirth, that women will walk for days from their homes to this birthing center to give birth. Actually, Africans practiced a very natural for of childbirth that is slowly coming back, squatting, walking to encourage the baby’s release with the help of gravity. However though Westerners that through the area told them their practice was not right, and taught childbirth on a table with the stirrups, as still done today in the West. Now, doulas or trained midwives are helping to bring the traditional, safer and more effective ways back. Many women either birth at home, which is not good when complications arise, or in a hospital, which in itself is a very scary place for women and based on Western practices, so the birthing center is something in between. They do have a C-section ward, but only do C-sections when the natural way is truly not an option due to a complication….not like the West now, where birthing is done by appointment through C-sections. The women go all natural, with no painkillers, no epidurals, etc. And most of them just need the caring support and encouragement of another individual. The men are rarely ever with the woman at childbirth (married or not), so usually a sister or other family member helps in the process.

We ate a delicious lunch and dinner, both consisting of local clean food, sometime that tasted like potatoes, some beans that looked like green lentils, cooked greens (like kale of the sort), a delicious nut sauce (like a peanut flavor), rice, and some kind of tree pulp I think, matoka, which is probably the wrong term, but it was something like that. Soooo delicious is authentic Ugandan food.

People are quite interested in us, too. Although many have seen 1 or 2 white people, it is much more rare to see a group of them, especially at night, which 5 of us were doing relaxing after dinner with our guide…. But they are all very nice and friendly people, curious about us just as much as we are curious about them.

Tomorrow we will get dirty, and help build the next birthing center with nonprofit Earth Rising, which our funds helped support.