November 14, 2006
David was in the middle of redesigning our website last Thursday when the internet connection disappeared and we've been without the internet since. I have no idea what to do with myself without the internet! It's amazing how much time it takes up. Thursday, though, I wasn't too concerned about not being able to access internet because I was doing something a lot more fun. I spent 8 hours at the Braddock hospital being trained to be an "Ambassador" for the BirthCircle.
The BirthCircle is a tiny non-profit in Pittsburgh that started about 5 or 6 years ago to do something about the racial disparity of deaths of pregnant women and their infants in east Pittsburgh (which has some significant economic disparity, too). To do this, the group used Ambassadors, in an informal peer education program to talk to women in their communities about pregnancy and infant health issues, and provided free doula services, to support the birth process itself for low-income women. They've been so successful in East Liberty, the neighborhood they initially targeted, that they've been asked to expand the program to Braddock and Wilkinsburg, two small boroughs that geographically are part of Pittsburgh, even though they have entirely seperate governments. (The East Coast is so weird!)
I heard about the BirthCircle from a friend who volunteers as a doula for them. Since it fits so perfectly with what I'd like to do after I graduate (well, except we hope to be somewhere in Africa), I signed up for the next training session, which was last Thursday. I learned lots of neat stuff, especially about breast feeding! I'm hoping I'll be able to use the information with the Somali women I see through the tutoring I've done, but we'll see how it goes. My astonishing lack of Maay (the language most of the Somalis speak) may limit the information exchange. But then the Somali women probably know a whole lot more about the process of pregnancy and birth than I do.
