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The midwife called to BRAZIL!
As Call The Midwife’s Chummy heads to Africa, the real-life tale of poisonous snakes and 2ft rats endured by a midwife in the Amazon Basin
Snakes alive! When a young Roman Catholic nun- midwife left her London convent in November 1974 to deliver babies in the Brazilian jungle, she thought that rampant mala r ia, no running water and only a few hours of electricity every day would be her main challenges. But Josephine Harney had reckoned without the 20 varieties of poisonous snake lurking in the undergrowth when she rushed to night births guided by torch-bearing natives armed only with sticks.
There was no question of wearing nun’s robes in the jungle, so she ditched the habit and hung a simple cross round her neck to identify herself. ‘I’d always wear boots or long socks with trousers tucked inside them so the snakes couldn’t slither up my leg,’ remembers Galway-born Josie, who was on call 24 hours a day in the remote northeastern community of Godofredo Viana in the Amazon Basin. ‘I was terrified of them and we saw a lot of them. It was always a worry I would get bitten on the way to a birth, but luckily I never did.’ However, she did once contract salmonella – it lasted three weeks and she lost a stone in weight.
She was equally terrified of the 2ftlong black rats that scuttled across the rafters of her bedroom, which had no ceiling, in the spartan Mission House she shared with two teaching nuns. ‘Once a rat got caught in a trap we’d put high up on the wall and fell on the end of my bed; fortunately I had a mosquito net over me, but I was so scared the sister next door had to take it outside on a shovel to bury it,’ she recalls with a shudder. And we thought the midwives in the hit BBC1 drama Call The Midwife had problems.
Like Miranda Har t’s character Chummy in the show, who we saw set off for Sierra Leone with her husband Peter to become a missionary midwife among the poor last week, Josephine, known as Josie, volunteered to go to Brazil on behalf of her Londonbased Order, the Sisters Of The Holy Family. After nursing in south London, Josie took a midwifery course at St Thomas’ Hospital before leaving for the coastal state of Maranhao at the age of 30, where the nuns had opened a new mission and the indigenous Brazilians, many of them illiterate, worked as fishermen and farmers. ‘I wanted to give a few years of my life in one of the world’s poorest places,’ explains Josie, ‘and there was a desperate need there.’
She became known to the locals as the ‘White Sister’, since the two other Mis- sion House sisters were Brazilian, and set up the first health programme there by giving out vitamins and teaching the mothers basic hygiene. Until her arrival, untrained native midwives had delivered the babies in such unsanitary conditions that there was a high death rate. In her three years there, with only one local girl to help her, Josie didn’t lose a single mother or baby in childbirth despite a chronic shortage of medicines and painkillers. ‘There was just a small medical centre with very basic facilities,’ she explains. ‘We collected water from the well in the yard for drinking, showers – everything. But the people were so lovely and I made some friends for life there.’
It certainly made up for the primitive conditions. Because people slept in hammocks in their mud huts, babies had to be delivered on the floor with planks of wood used as makeshift birthing tables. ‘So I’d be delivering a baby on my knees, and working with kerosene lamps since they only had a few hours of electricity every evening. It made giving the mother stitches after the birth very difficult.’
In September 1977 she had to return home to Galway when her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and her mother needed Josie’s help to look after him. Within six months he was dead. Yet Josie comforts herself with the thought that, although her parents had been reluctant to let their only daughter go to Brazil, ‘afterwards I was there with them when they needed me most.’
Following her father’s death, Josie went back to London to work as a nun-midwife at Guy’s Hospital before running her own convent. She’s now partly retired and living near Knock in the west of Ireland. But she’s left her own special legacy in her beloved jungle, with many of the Brazilians christening their baby girls Josephine so that the White Sister’s name lives on.
Maureen Paton Call The Midwife, Sundays, 8pm, BBC1.