The Other Side of the World

In a desperate last-ditch attempt to procrastinate before my midwifery-knowledge-and-prac exam tomorrow, I started persuing my own profile just now. That the # of hits is above 400, combined with the fact that yesterday I got a resounding endorsement of my favourite meal [apparently transplant coordinators also like weird green concoctions] makes me wonder who is reading this?

Leave your name cryptically if you must, but let me know.

(if only to aid the procrastination attempts - inarguably a worthy cause)

and hey, thanks for reading. . .

If it’s just my favourite green bowl and I sitting down to dinner, hardly anything else can makes me as consistently happy as this:

fry 1/2 an onion gently in some olive oil
add in 1 small can tomatoes [or 1/2 can tomato paste, or 4-5 chopped tomatoes, etc]
bring to a boil
add any or none of:
a few mushrooms, sliced
fresh chopped parsely
and
salt to taste, or a spoonfull of stock powder
let boil for 5 minutes longer
add an entire bunch of one or combination, finely chopped:
kale
swiss chard/silver beet
pea greens
spinach (a bit much all on its own)
collards
etc
let cook for a minute

reduce heat
throw in 4-5 finely chopped/smashed cloves of garlic

put on the lid, take off heat and leave for 10 minutes

good with a bit of smoky hot sauce on top. . . .

and I suppose if you must you could eat it over rice or pasta.

I have, at times, eaten just this for days on end.
obsessive?

I’ve been getting strange flashbacks to my arrival here, I think because the weather is painstakingly heating up to the sort of mild, breezy summer it was when I first arrived. It’s sort of hard to tell exactly, because there’s no frostbite to sear off under the sun, but my greatest clue is that it smells like that crazy, bold loneliness I remember so acutely. Except I’m not crazily lonely anymore, thank goodness.

I’ve put so many solid, plodding-along hours of bum time in my swively black desk chair this week that I feel quite unlike myself during exams. Read: calm rather than hysterically twitching and writhing under the strain of a thousand neuroses. It sort of feels like tiptoeing around myself. Dare I say, that if this calmness continues, exams might not be so bad anymore?

Do I detect some maturity in my scholastic approach?

*shudder*

Anyway, I have spent the morning ditzily purchasing supplies at every possible grocery outlet in town so that I can make spaghetti tomorrow (hey, it’s not my fault that I need to buy organic pasta because the thought of fields of wheat getting doused in chemicals constricts my brain after watching a documentary on birth defects the other night, alone and petrified in the dark). So I think my point is - tomorrow, my tendency to burn everything in an impatient indifference notwithstanding, - it’ll smell like home.

Which is probably good because I need a reminder -
25 days is it?

As Mr. Buble put it so succintly over the PA at groceteria numero quattro today -
I’m going hoooooooooooooooooooooome!

just for the record, I don’t actually live in a green barn - it just happens to be in my backyard

Remember that chicken sandwich of some enormity I mentioned the other day? All credit due to intoxicating invention of the camera phone.

Sometimes its very easy to get your head stuck in a book. Which isn’t always a bad thing (says she of the childhood spent 99% thusly).
Only, it is truly important to raise your head and let the rest of the whole wide world pour in as well.
Which is what I spent this week doing at the New Zealand College of Midwives conference down in the South Island (yes, more unfortunate plane trips. I have outcapacitied myself this year, I’m afraid).
Despite the fact that I am unashamedly not the schmoozing-at-large-events type, it was the perfect peek into the world that I, as a midwifery student, as a young & future midwife, am inheriting.
(my spine trickles up and down my back as I write that)

My professors & preceptor midwife greeted me joyously and supportively as we passed in the convention centre halls - welcoming me to their sacred professional space. And if there was any doubt that this profession is uniquely fixated around some incredible sense of awe with life, it has all been displaced in a wave of deeply moved tears expressed by some 600 midwives, students, and the people that uphold us.

From ecstatic hormones (that actually make so much more sense when you see them playing out on a woman’s face in 3rd stage* than when you’re trying to memorize their bizarrely spelled epithets from a textbook) to stories of relationships with birthing families that spanned decades, the progressive, woman-centered, open-minded and hands-off messages being brought forward made me fall in love with New Zealand midwifery culture all over again.

And apparently I’m not the only one that think this way - the woman I went to suck the brains of at the MSF table said “oh MSF always wants the kiwi midwives; they are always the best”.

But I think the most important words spoken:

When midwives are strong, women are strong

and the loving, yet firm reminder that one day I must be their defender too. guardian of birth.

What humility under which I become woman.

and simultaneously
with woman.

*3rd stage is the delivery of the placenta/afterbirth

to Christchurch. Back Tomorrow.

Left my last barista shift stuffed with an enourmous chicken sandwich (encompassing the entire life span of the chicken really, as the chef managed to ram in an egg as well), enough lattes to last me an average year of personal caffeine consumption, a very dirty black cafe apron, a red rose and a unicorn card. Apparently I appeared to them to be a unicorn type of girl. People’s interpretations of me never fail to amuse.

Memorable moments from eight months of carrying 3 coffees at once to the lovely kiwis (if only because I feel the need to monumentalize the end of another service industry era) *-

“How are you today?”
“a flat white.”

“excuse me, we’re having a bet about whether or not you’re Canadian. If I win, I get this peanut slab. So are you?”
(he gave me the chocolate bar he won)

“I’m from Canada”
“but where are you *really* from?”

“what are you studying?”
“midwifery”
“are you CRAZY?!”

“why aren’t you married yet? you really should be married!”
[15 minutes later he was asked by the manager to leave for grabbing my bum. twice. he was around 50. he was not intoxicated.]

“the artichokes are missing from my meal!”
“the ones right there on your plate ma’am?”
“those are artichokes?”
“yes.”

“where is the almond tart I ordered for my father?!”
“it’s coming; I actually only have two hands”
[the elderly man at the table laughed heartily for the next 3o seconds while his annoyed daughter glared after me]

“you are our particular favourite waitress”

“thank you ever so much”

In truth, I complain just as heartily as every sane waitress. But in the end, when it comes down to it -

thank you too.

* I won’t actually quote any of the amusing lines from the staff at the restaurant because it would instantly rocket the content of this blog to an x-rating. and I have my squeaky clean image to maintain after all

New Zealand quintessentially captures the heart of the small because almost everything herein is on a microcosmic scale. Much like my family owning a 6 pound dog, here we have our tiny little desert, situated about 2 hours north of this town. And yes, there is snow on that mountain. A miniscule dusting, to be sure, but all things relative, it is a perfect amount.

Exams are looming up over the delicate heads of the cherry trees blooming here, and therefore a veritable desert of joy looms concurrently. It will be gloomy, densely packed with bristly discomfort and inescapable, but also small enough to mercifully zoom through quickly. Sensing the metaphor yet?

Today in class we reflected on our year - one of my favourite (pregnant!) classmates sat belly-rounded with an enormous flower draping over her head like a crown and read us a list of our names with reasons why we inspired her. I was touched (to the core of my little pre-menstrual heart) as she mentioned things about me that I aspire to (and lately have felt tragically off the mark with).

Quietly intelligent
and natural

May I quietly, intelligently, and naturally make this last little desert crossing with speed, grace and perhaps, if I may be so greedy with life’s resources, sanity.

After all, I only need a little of it, n’est-ce pas?

Here is my sweet cousin Sam sporting a precision haircut gifted to him by his mad-skillz-with-sharp-objects-yours-truly (please excuse my gloating: I successfully, read: painlessly, did some more venipuncture and injecting today). I hope the familia back in Oz are not too incensed that he lost some length during his two week visit over the Tasman sea. Anyway, that may offer yet another explanation as to where I have strayed to lately.

We’ve reached a crunchy time of the school year - one of those moments I contemplate self-flagellation for not taking more accurate notes during the last 60 hours of sleepy-eyed early morning lectures and then desist, because the pile of paper on my desk is threaening to fall over and flagellate me all on its own.

But! This also means the end is near - that I am nearly 1/3 of the way to being a midwife. Ask me what I know about women, child-bearing, birth and life and the enormity of that gapingly empty space will engulf us both as well as the three neighbouring postal codes. Ask me what I have learned, and the spilling over of honey-suckling-sweet exhilaration will waft like a funeral’s worth of lotus up the Mekong.

Pre-dawn walks to the hospital where one is faced with the incomprehensible swirl of life-death-life-life-life-life and love and pain mingling like the New Zealand meterological habit of sun-drenched rain makes me metaphorically drippy.

Also tired.

so, back to the paper conquering;

so that I’ll be back next year.

so that no-one can ever say -

. . . don’t be so reckless