In honor of my birthday on Monday and the fact that Yuko and I went to see Juno which is all about birth and parenting, I’m finally sitting down to write about a topic that in Bali was both miraculous and heartbreaking. Birth: an ever-present theme for us during our time in Ubud. Not only was our acupuncture clinic in Ubud hosted by a birthing clinic, Yayasan Bumi Sehat, but we were also staying in “The Ashram” which was, in essence, a dormitory for volunteers at Bumi Sehat (four midwife volunteers, a chiropractor, three acupuncturists, many mice, geckos, mosquitos and bats) and more volunteers living off site.

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–the upstairs dormitory and the kitchen/livingroom, a gecko (if you look closely you can see the wing of a flying termite in its mouth)
The midwife volunteers had traveled to Bali to be part of the highly dedicated and super-busy Bumi team. As a roommate I quickly became used to the middle-of-the-night phone call asking for the on-call volunteer midwife to head over across the street to the clinic.
Bumi Sehat (www.bumisehatbali.org) is an amazing birthing center, providing skilled midwives in a clean and caring environment, all free and open to any woman who needs support. The moms there may have been coming to the clinic all along for pre-natal visits, or they may show up by motor scooter at midnight with the baby on its way.
At Bumi there are two main birthing rooms, which open out onto a small courtyard with couches where the families and especially husbands wait during the sometimes long labor process. It was part of the backdrop when Dan or I went over to the Bumi office late at night to blog to see several dads-to-be sprawled on the green plastic couches—or sometimes snoozing on our acupuncture clinic tables—with a lone television broadcasting soccer games to the geckos and other open air inhabitants.
Dads getting ear acupuncture
My first day there I was providing post-partum moxa therapy to a recent mom who was sitting on one of those couches when I began to hear screams and cries coming from the adjacent room. Nobody seemed too concerned, except for one worried looking young guy who kept raising his gaze towards the room expectantly. Watching the midwives bustling in and out quickly confirmed that a birth was in progress, and towards the end of my 20-minute moxa treatment, the cries of a new life announced its presence to the world. That separation of a half-open window was the closest I had ever been to a live birth.The next day I was about to get a bunch closer.
Newborns and their happy families.


















