India part II

Mrs Mohini Bai Gameti and Mrs Shanta Bai Gameti, in Udaipur, India.

India doesn’t give you time to adjust, it hits you all at once. The heat, the colors, the noise, the beauty, the chaos, the smells and life happening everywhere around you at once. And somehow, in all of that, I thought it would be easy to find women willing to share their stories. Stories that carry pain, strength, culture, and generations of silence.

And doing that in a country where I don’t speak the language? Where I know no one ? Where everything works through someone who knows someone’s cousin who knows someone who might be able to help . . .

It’s much harder and much slower then I anticipated it to be, and more expensive too.

But then… someone says yes, someone helps me. And suddenly doors open. They invite me in, into their homes, their stories, their memories, and my oh my these are just the most magical connection.

Last week in Rajasthan was like that. Sitting cross-legged on the floor with two women who once worked as Dhai which describes an indegenous midwife, they never received any official training, I felt something shift inside me. They helped bring hundreds of babies into this world, without machines, without protocols, without colleagues and without pay. Just hands, breath, and presence. Midwives have always struggled. We’ve always held life in our hands while fighting for our own existence. By the women and families we serve, we are deeply respected. They know how hard, how intense, how emotional our work is. They know what it means to show up at any hour, to hold a body together, to stay calm when everyone panics.

But as a society? It’s like we’re invisible.

So many countries still don’t see us as worth paying properly, worth proper education, worth safe working conditions. We carry generations of unseen labor. Centuries of being essential and yet treated as optional.

Here in India, most women give birth in hospitals now. But listening to these midwives, I kept thinking about the years, the decades, when the infrastructure wasn’t there. When birth happened on dusty roads, in small rooms, on doorsteps. And for so many women it still does, because access isn’t “equal” just because a hospital exists somewhere on a map.

It’s hard to wrap my head around it. How midwives have been holding communities together since forever, quietly, skillfully, relentlessly, and still have to fight to be seen.

They shared their personal stories with me how they got married at the age of 13 and 15, their jounrey and how they got into assisting women to help them give birth. "I look at their bellybuttons and I can tell if it's time for the Baby to come now or in the next days" one of them told me. They shared Birth stories with me that get under your skin. Like this one:

"It was late at night when I heard a knock on my door"

“When I opened the door,” the midwife told me,“ there was blood everywhere. She was shaking. The baby was crying. And I knew immediately, I had to act fast” The woman had been on her way to the hospital with her husband.

Labor moved too fast and she gave birth on the side of the road the baby came healthy, but the placenta didn’t. They both dropped to their knees on the ground, right there on her doorstep in the darkness. No equipment. No light except a small lamp. Just her hands.Her knowledge. Her instinct.

She held the uterus from outside. She massaged, pressed, supported. She did everything she knew to help the placenta come out.

And finally, it did.

She tied the cord with a simple thread. Cut it. And the bleeding slowly stopped.

“Sometimes,” she said,“it’s just two women kneeling in the night, covered in blood, a newborn hanging over a shoulder, and nothing to protect it except a small piece of cloth. And you just… do what you know. You save who you can.”

What struck me the most wasn’t the story itself, but how normal it seemed to her. How these situations were simply part of her reality. No glory. No heroism. Just women showing up for women.

And listening to their stories, as a midwife, as a woman, as a human, something in me broke open and settled at the same time.

This is why I’m here. This is why Born to Rise matters.

Because through visual storytelling, when a story touches us, we don’t forget it. It leaves a mark, it makes us want to do better. To understand more. To question what we’ve accepted as “normal". To see each other more clearly.

Here in India, so much is still taken as fate, arranged marriages as a sign of respect to your family, girls expected to serve, women carrying entire households without being asked if they want to, freedom a word with many meanings, but never taken for granted.

It’s heavy. It’s unfair. And yet the women I meet hold a strength that feels ancient.

They rise. Over and over again.

And I think: this is what needs to be documented. Not the statistics. Not the headlines. But the lives. The moments. The stories that would disappear if no one asked.

So yes, it’s hard. It’s overwhelming. It’s more to take in then I thought. But the stories I’m trusted with…they make my struggle dissapear.

And I hope, when you read this, you feel even a fraction of what I feel, that These stories matter. These women matter. And we need to listen.