Frog's, Floods and Midwives

My day began at 5am as we had been told that we were leaving the hospital at 6.30 to travel with the lead midwife and the head of the Maternal and Child health department to Kompot, a Health Centre about an hour away. However no one else arrived until 7am and it was then decided to have breakfast in the local café. My Volunteer Assistant ,Channa, was especially pleased about this as he was hungry and likes the breakfasts at this café. His braised beef on rice with a fried egg on top and side salad did look more interesting than my 5am muesli.

So 7.30 we set off by motor bike following the Sekong River upstream. The rains this year have been very severe so the river is very high and the rice fields flooded which look beautiful with bright green shoots in perfect hand planted rows. Consequently the road is flooded in places but Channa just drives straight in with a casual comment that the engine might stop if the water gets in. I have become very good at tucking my feet up to avoid a soaking. However the water buffalo we passed seem to enjoy the mud and floods –I just wish they would stay off the roads.

On arrival at the Health Centre the lead midwife interrupted a busy Antenatal clinic to test the standards of practice of the midwife. For the next hour she fired questions from a checklist at her: how do you deliver a breech baby? What are the signs of pre eclampsia? What do you do when a woman hemorrhages? What constitutes a post natal check? We were sat in the tiny examination room and I suddenly became aware of a dirty cloth hanging from the tap of the water bucket –did it move or was it just the breeze? Yes it definitely is moving! So interrupting the verbal exam as calmly as possible I asked what on earth the thing on the tap was. ‘’Just some frogs for my lunch,’’ came the midwife’s reply. And yes indeed that was all it was; 5 live frogs tied by their back legs with a strip of dirty cloth and hung on the tap in the AN clinic. I always said you see something different every day in midwifery!

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