here's a baby!

finally...

There's a baby! It was long and hard but Angela made it...we are going to bed...

I just talked to the future grandmother, who has been up with her daughter all night. They speak Quiche, and she told me that in this idiom, one of the words for "midwife" is the equivalent fo "buyer, negotiator", since she is the person to negotiate the cost of the new life on earth. In the Mayan legends, "Iyom(?)" means grandmother, and also refers to the midwife, who has a big responsibility for the baby to be born.
No wonder the current politics on midwife education are not very successful... they do not take into account the standing of the midwife in the community and the respect she is owed traditionally.

Birth happening

...obviously not at the new center yet, but in Guate, at the Centro de Parto Natural. We have been up in turns during the night, Gabi and I, to look after Angela, an indigenous woman at 42 weeks of pregnancy. She came in at 11.30 pm and now, at 9.00 am, is pushing. The baby is an estimated 9 lbs and Angela is about 150 cms tall...this is still going to take awhile!

Yesterday we chose the colors for painting the future birthcenter&women's clinic in Ciudad Vieja. in the afternoon I had appointments here in the city, and told everybody about the new project...a client says her office is buying new desks and we can have the old ones!
And yesterday Terry from our local ad magazine donated three months worth of classifieds to ask for donations for the project.