June, 2012

I met Samira Atash and her daughter at my local park in New York City last summer. Coincidentally, I had met her mother-in-law in the neighborhood several years earlier. When we met, Samira shared some of her history with me. She had been born in Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous places to give birth in the world, where one in 11 women will die due to complications during pregnancy or childbirth

In December 2011, we attended the TED Women conference in Washington, DC. If you haven’t heard of TED—it's basically brain candy. You go into an auditorium, are asked to turn all phones off, and sit back to just listen and learn. You are treated to a series of speakers who present on a wide range of topics.

Innovative filmmakers Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore launched the feature-length documentary film, “Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives,” at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival on June 14, and will be screening the film until June 24. This documentary celebrates the life and work of Ina May Gaskin, a world-renown midwife, who founded and is the current director of the Farm Midwifery Center in Summertown, Tennessee. Ina May began delivering babies of friends and family, and taught herself midwifery skills from the ground up. She created a community called “The Farm,” in which she developed a natural model of care for women and their babies that changed the generation’s views of institutionalized childbirth.

About a year after I became a mom, I got a call from my childhood best friend who now lives in Atlanta. She wanted to connect me with her Aunt who had a friend who worked at CARE, and asked if I would be interested in meeting with them to learn about the work they were doing to address extreme poverty. Of course I knew of CARE. I had always noted their presence in my travels to some of the more remote and impoverished corners of the world, and my mother had long been a supporter as well.