Midwife delivers amid chaos of Colombia jungle river
ISLA MONO: Reaching out a weathered hand, Marciana Caycedo prods the smooth round bellies of the mothers-to-be, feeling for their baby’s outline inside the taut skin as they line up at her home.
In time, she will deliver those babies, into a world where families are big but food, medicine and even water are in short supply.
For Caycedo is the only midwife on Isla Mono, a small island marooned in the middle of the wide brown San Juan river, on Colombia’s remote and rainy Pacific coast.
“The first baby that I brought into the world was the last of my mother’s, the youngest of my 23 brothers and sisters,” says Caycedo in her simple wooden house, light streaming through the wall’s ill-fitting boards.
Now 60, she has been through 17 pregnancies of her own.
She has mice in her house. They trot along its wooden beams as she bends to examine a small 17-yearold who thinks she is eight months pregnant.
Caycedo feels the small mound of her abdomen: “It’s a boy,” she says.
“You’re anemic,” she tells the girl. “Even if you don’t like it, you’re going to have to eat lentils and carrots.”
Which poses a challenge on Isla Mono, where practically nothing edible grows on the sandy soil, apart from coconuts and taro.
“I want to stop because it’s very hard but... the people tell me I have to continue,” said Caycedo, who earns US$28 (RM116) a birth – even if sometimes it means braving a tropical storm in the dead of night.
At her side is Durley Maya Salazar, a 33-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist, who is making an unanticipated visit to the island.
Salazar works with a hospital ship, the San Raffaele, that roams the coast. Fortuitously for locals, it’s here only because it ran aground on a sandbank.
Medical specialists aboard decided to see what good they could do for the neglected locals, while the ship waits for a rising tide.
The gynaecologist and the local midwife exchange tips. Caycedo tells her about using strong coffee and salt to stop post-partum bleeding, and local plant extracts to ease mothers’ anxieties.
Salazar is relieved to discover Caycedo rejects the folk method of shocking a baby into taking its first breath: by introducing the head of a little chick into the newborn’s anus.
The baby is meant to cry out and fill its lungs.
The medics are neither surprised nor encouraged by what they find. There are stagnant cesspools, malarial mosquitoes and the ever-present odor of open latrines.
Huge blue plastic drums await the next downpour, providing vital water. Isla Mono has none, and depends on the skies for its drinking water.
Chemical residue from cocaine production in the nearby forests, and run-off from clandestine gold mining, are responsible for much of the pollution.
“The situation is critical. It is such an isolated place that many people do not even know that Isla Mono exists,” says Copete. — AFP