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We're sitting on the balé, a raised pavilion in the middle of a family compound in Mas, a woodcarver's village. Ibu ("mother") Ketut sits on the edge, legs spread over a cloth to soak up amniotic fluid. Robin received Ketut's first baby, a girl of six with scars on her legs from a cooking oil accident. Her brother-in-law worries about a dry birth because Ketut's waters broke. Robin puts her ear to Ketut's half-moon belly. The baby's fine.
Robin checks Ketut every half hour. Meanwhile, we rest under a Pokémon quilt. I'm too excited to sleep. This is my first birth, not counting my three sons, when my eyes were squeezed shut. Robin, a certified midwife, has caught hundreds of babies on both sides of the Pacific. She's never lost one, unless you count the baby who later died of an infection in a hospital in Bali. Robin lived here for six years with her husband Wil and their combined seven children, before fleeing a political upheaval.
"I'm a half-breed," she tells me, "caught between two worlds." Her mother is Chinese-Filipino, her American father boasts German, Irish, and Native American ancestors. Now she's torn between living in Bali, the Philippines, and the U.S.
I ask Robin how she started catching babies. "When two baby owls fell out of a coconut tree into my care, the villagers took it as an omen that I should become their new midwife." She volunteered in the hospital and government clinics. What she saw was appalling. Doctors used the same gloves to check half a dozen pregnant women. Syringes for injections were reused many times. Women were C-sectioned in exchange for the family rice fields. Babies were detained until the birth bill was paid in full, which could take weeks, with the mother allowed in only twice a day to breastfeed. Expensive TB medications to save a baby's life were sold on the black market by the nurses. That's when Robin conceived Yayasan Anak Bahagia, Happy Child Foundation, and started a free clinic in Nyuh Kuning, her home village.
Ibu Ketut is lying on her back on a woven tikar mat. Her bladder is full, but she ignores Robin's gentle suggestion to walk to the squat toilet in back of the compound. Robin practices "culturally sensitive" childbirth, so she doesn't insist. Ketut pees on Robin's sarong. Robin advises Ketut not to push now, then passes the time writing a short story based on a double suicide that happened shortly after we arrived. A young couple from Nyuh Kuning drank poison together on the beach at Gianyar, after a misunderstanding led to the girl's rejection by both families. "Bali is not all paradise," Robin remarks. Shrines are decorated with black and white checkered cloth, a reminder that there is no light without dark, no birth without death.
Squatting in a corner on the concrete floor, Robin checks Ketut with a flashlight. Her belly tightens. I note the time of the contraction on the birth chart, three minutes apart. Robin rubs a Doppler listening device across the hump until she picks up a faint sound: da-dut, da-dut, da-dut. I count the number of fetal heartbeats, 13 in 6 seconds, 130 per minute. "Normal," Robin comments. Ketut's mother-in-law holds the laboring woman's head propped against her bosom as she twists and moans. Other women come and go, one nursing a two-year-old. "Lagi, lagi," Robin urges with each contraction, "Again, again." Ketut mutters fretfully. Robin chuckles. "She says she's decided not to have the baby." "I can relate," I reply.
"I can see black hair," Robin announces. The baby's head hangs for a long minute between two worlds. Finally the head crowns. "Plahn, plahn," Robin cautions, "Slowly now." The head pops out, conical and impossibly huge between Ketut's legs. Halfway out, and stuck again. Robin deftly reaches in to gently extricate the slippery shoulder. The baby slides into her waiting hands. "I've had worse," she tells me later. "One in Fairfield took 19 minutes for the body to deliver. That baby is a miracle." There's a babble of excitement among the women, echoed by the men waiting outside. Ketut's second child is a boy, the desire of every Balinese family.
Robin dries the baby off as he lies on Ketut's belly, gently stimulating his blue skin so he will take his first breath. A few minutes later the placenta slides out in a white bag attached to a pulsing red and blue cord. Robin prefers "lotus birth," leaving the placenta attached until it drops off naturally. But she understands that Balinese believe the placenta is an angel that has sacrificed its life for the baby, and the men want to bury it as soon as possible. She delays, mopping up blood, weighing the baby in a portable sling scale, wrapping him in a clean blanket and cap she's brought, guiding him to his exhausted mother's breast for his first feeding. The father comes in, smoking a cigarette. He's waited long enough. Robin shows him where to cut the cord. "I'll do anything to repay you," he says. "Stop smoking," she demands. He agrees, and we hear later that he's kept his word. The baby's grandfather wraps the placenta in black and white cloth, and buries it in a coconut by the steps to the couple's room. Then a priestess performs a ceremony for mother, baby, and midwives, to purify the family compound from the spilling of blood.
It's half-dark when we return to Nyuh Kuning and open the gate of Pondok Frog, the village priest's compound where we're staying. Rin Tin doesn't bark. We're family now. Before we have a chance to take a bucket bath, we hear a motorbike pull up. Robin jerks open the door, which squeals like a dying pig. The Hindu priest's son is supporting a Muslim man with a bloody white scarf tied around his head. "He fell off his motorbike," Ketut Puja tells us. I hold the flashlight and swab blood while Robin stitches up the long gash on his scalp. "Try not to get any blood on you," she warns, "he may be hepatitis B positive." Pak ("father") Pika asks how he can repay Robin. His wife gets up before dawn to make jajan, rice cakes, which he sells to warungs for a few rupiah, to feed his three children. His day's profits were scattered when his motorbike slid on gravel. Robin tells him, "The only way you can pay me back is to teach your children to lend a helping hand to Muslims, Hindus, and Christians alike." Bali is an island of Hinduism in the midst of the largest Muslim nation in the world. Today, for the first time in this man's life, a Hindu man and a Christian woman rescued him without thought of repayment. Robin sends her patient home with a tube of Bactroban. She's brought a few tubes, which she hands out to villagers walking around with staph-infected wounds.
I've crawled back under my mosquito net to meditate. "Whooie!" Robin yells as she pours cold water over her head behind the half-wall separating the bedroom from the squat toilet. The carved double door screeches on its wooden pegs. Four-year-old Zhouie's face appears in the crack. "Lola, I'm hungry!" she calls, pushing half of the door open. It falls off with a crash. Grandma Lola appears, wrapped in a bright sarong. "Your mom's still asleep, Zhou Zhou?" Robin's three daughters, granddaughter, and two girlfriends share two rooms, four in one bed. Wil and the boys stayed behind in Fairfield to renovate their house. Robin takes Zhouie's hand, and they go off to cook scrambled eggs on the portable stove in the ant-, fruit fly-, and cat-infested kitchen. I prop up the door. A woman comes by balancing several bowls on her head with produce from the morning market. "Smell!" she commands, shoving half a dozen fish under Robin's nose. "Very fresh!"
As usual, a pregnant woman and her family arrive early for a prenatal exam on our red tile balé. Robin gently presses the woman's brown belly while men walk by on their way to the woodcarving shop in back. Ayu Putu is worried. She hasn't felt any movement in days. Robin gets out the Doppler. As soon as the mother hears the gentle tapping of the baby's heart and relaxes, the baby kicks. But now she has another worry. They have no money to pay for a hospital or government clinic birth. Robin offers to deliver the baby for free. The woman's family leaves half a dozen eggs and a brace of young coconuts.
Kadek's wife, Ibu Ketut, is putting together ceremonial offerings on the central balé. Ketut, which means "enough already," is the name given to every fourth-born, lower caste child in Bali, whether male or female. Women spend hours every week making offerings for each shrine in the family temple, the well, fire, workshop, sacred trees. We help for awhile, arranging flowers, rice, oil, and sandal powder in dozens of small, handwoven palm leaf trays. Ketut tells Robin she is very brave because she sometimes sleeps on our balé, and everyone knows ghosts wander around outside at night. Robin pays for fresh air with ant bites. "Why not sleep up there?" Ketut asks, pointing to the ornately carved and painted bed guarded by Garuda in one corner of the balé. "No way!" Robin retorts. "That's where they put you when you die."
We squeeze into a tiny jeep with nine people. Ida Bagus is taking the girls shopping. They want Robin to do the bargaining because she caught the sarong merchant's baby. "I don't have time for shopping!" Robin retorts in a burst of crankiness, "I'm going to Klungkung to help a woman who's having trouble nursing." Ibu Kadek lost her first-born last year, not uncommon in a country whose infant mortality rate has doubled since 1997 due to economic collapse. Her breasts are swollen and hard. Robin gives her homeopathic phytolacca and has her hold a puck-shaped object filled with crystals, minerals, and herbs. "Obat," she tells the woman, "medicine." Within minutes the mother's milk starts to flow. The puck is a healing device used to balance energy, given to Robin by the Gentle Wind Project. "I use whatever works," Robin says, "and magic really works in Bali."
Next we stop in Payogan, at the home of Robin's American friends who paid for her to come for their third baby. Gina's water broke at 3 a.m. on the night of a lunar eclipse. Robin was in Sangé, on the other side of the island, a four-hour drive. She had just caught Nyoman's baby at 1:30 a.m. Nyoman's husband begged her not to go back during the eclipse. Hindus believe it's a dangerous time to be out. But Robin had to reach Gina. She persuaded him to take her on his motorbike. Gina's labor was difficult, a tumor on her cervix. In the hospital, this would be an automatic C-section. With the help of Robin's physician friend Eden Fromberg, they successfully delivered the baby. Both the tumor and the baby were unexpected. Robin teaches natural family planning, in which women chart their symptoms of fertility and follow simple rules to avoid pregnancy. "It's very effective," she says, "unless you bend the rules." Gina admits she cheated, but they love Serena, their angelic baby girl. Now, two days later, Robin shows me the placenta, rubbed with fresh turmeric and rosemary to keep down the smell, and wrapped in a disposable diaper.
"My son Hanoman was born here," Robin tells me as we walk through the gate of a compound up the road where she lived for six years. "And Manik, Ibu Ketut's only son, died here a few months ago of TB." Robin has brought a special homeopathy to stop the tuberculosis epidemic. The boy's family gathers around us. Ibu Madé wears a neck scarf to hide the scar from a goiter operation, paid for by friends in Fairfield. Her retarded daughter, a result of her mother's epilepsy medication, prances wildly around like a large-eyed elf. Goiter is endemic in Bali, due to a lack of iodine. "The Foundation used to give the villagers iodized salt," Robin tells me, "but in Indonesia salt labeled iodized often is not." Ibu Wayan wears a cast. She broke her collarbone and wrist in a fall. "They say it was black magic," Robin translates, "doled out by someone nearby who doesn't like the old woman." Robin gives her some white magic: Arnica to speed healing, and Ibuprofen for pain. She opens a bottle of water, adds a few drops of TB homeopathy, writes "OBAT" on the label, and instructs each family member to drink some. Robin has written a book, with the help of local herbalists and healers, about the medicinal properties of native herbs, Obat Asli Bali: The Real Medicine of Bali, funded by an Earthwatch Grant in 1996.
We walk down the street, stopping every few yards to greet villagers. Robin hugs everyone, kisses the children, chats in Bahasa Indonesia, and calls "I love you" in English as we part. Then she tells me their story. "I caught that woman's baby in a car, they were driving around looking for me, and they named her Madé Mobile. That man's wife died of TB after childbirth, and he married her younger sister, a very Balinese thing to do. A doctor circumcised that old man, it got infected, and I saved his life with antibiotics. That man's wife left him with two girls after another man put a spell on her, but 25 years later he secretly paid for her cancer surgery." It takes us half an hour to walk half a block. Frank Wilson shows up, a tall Australian dressed in white from hair to shoes. Pak Frank runs the Meditation Center in Ubud, on the other side of the Monkey Forest. He's also the computer guru for Happy Child Foundation. They talk shop, and then he gives us a lift to Pengosekan in his white elephant Lincoln.
We are kneeling on the ground while Mangku Liyer performs a puja. Mangku Liyer is both a priest and a balian, a healer, or white magician. He invites us for the midday meal. Afterwards he shows us his spirit paintings of Balinese and Hindu deities, imbued with mantras. Then he reads the Lontar, the sacred books on palm leaves, for baby Serena. He says she has a double soul, rare for a girl. In Sanskrit he sounds out the names of her great-grandparents, John and Christian, who have chosen to come back together. Robin consults him about the black witch who is casting spells in her home village. He says he will disassemble the leyak, a demon hovering over Robin's house in Nyuh Kuning. He will also make her a protective amulet. We leave our offerings of black tea, red apples, pink rice cakes, and 10,000 rupiah, less than $1, but half a month's wages in Bali. Then we start the long walk back. Two women offer us rides on their motorbikes. We perch precariously, sidesaddle, in our sarongs. Robin gracefully balances her bowl on her head. I lean against my driver, clutching her around the waist. She is a single working mother whose husband deserted her when she became pregnant, a situation that is becoming more common in Bali.
Our printer, Ketut Widia, shows up with sample copies of our poetry books, published by Half Angel Press, another of Robin's creations. "Robin's Stretch Marks" and "As a Child in the Religion of Gratitude" are exquisite, printed on bamboo paper. She has won many awards for her poetry and been published in numerous literary magazines. Robin has also published Butterfly People, a novel in the genre of magical realism based on her family's history, and Angel Heirs, "an anthology of closely inspected ordinary events," with Margo Berdeshevsky. She has written many articles on childbirth, as well as two books. After the Baby's Birth has just been published in its second edition by Celestial Arts in Berkeley. The Natural Family Planning and Sexuality Handbook: A Lifestyle of Nonviolence, co-authored with Marie Zenack, will be published next year.
We are eating rice and spicy beans in the garden outside a small art gallery. Wayan Windia, director of Yayasan Anak Bahagia, has gathered people to discuss the future of Happy Child Foundation. There's the clinic to finish. What to do about the empty preschool? Most of the books in the children's library, the only one in Bali, were donated by Books Are Fun in Fairfield, but more are needed. Suastini, a girl from Robin's compound, needs money for nursing school. And where will Robin's family live while a new home is being built for them in Nyuh Kuning?
It's almost midnight. I am half-asleep under my net. Robin is telling me how Pak Win can't afford an email account, so she donated money from the sale of her popular Traveler's Journal, which sells like hot sambal in Bali. Now they can communicate when she goes back to Fairfield. The hand phone rings. A Canadian expat, estranged from her high-caste Balinese boyfriend, is in labor at her mother's house in Semniak, over an hour's drive away. We have to find our own transport. "She's asking for you," Robin tells me, stuffing a change of clothes in a bag.
