Humanascer

Written by Tuly Van Prehn 

When I contacted Rixa from BWB, I was not expecting what an amazing journey this would be. We set up to exchange a book translation from English to Portuguese for a full 5 days in-person workshop for traditional midwives in Brazil. We had around 30 midwives attending plus a few more that just did the online portion. 

To give you some background, Brazil is one of the few countries where traditional midwives still can assist homebirths. There are more than 60,000 traditional midwives still catching babies to this day. 

I founded a midwifery school (one of the first ones) here in 2021. There is no opportunity for traditional midwives to learn breech birth because one of the other trainers (from other workshops) wouldn't accept "lay midwives." I've been at many breech births myself, but am far from considering myself an expert. I wanted the best for my community! 

So here we went… a week after I started my online training with BWB, I got a call for a twin birth. Baby B slipped out breech, no time to think about it. Great! Two months after that, someone else found out I worked with breech and ask me to attend her homebirth. It was a perfect example of physiological breech birth, awesome baby tummy crunches and all. Even before the in-person training, I was so confident to attend and understand normal. We are expecting another set of twins and hopefully baby B will be breech. We as midwives came from a "Oh, if I see a foot I'll freak out" to "Yay, I hope it's breech" feeling on the subject. 

I heard about other midwives in the community who are much more confident attending breeches after the amazing practice sessions with Dr. Hayes. His kindness answering all of our questions (not every provider would be patient to answer simple anatomical or physiological questions) and the time he used to go through every detail to make sure we understood all the thought processes behind complications was amazing! We had midwives coming from all over Brazil and South America! I'm hoping this is one of many visits we will have from BWB!