Eight years ago, I decided to go and volunteer in a maternity clinic in El Paso, Texas, right across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico.
Juarez
In 2010, Juarez was no longer the colorful tourist attraction it used to be. Years before then, it was a place people could go for a good time: fun-loving, slightly exotic people, cheap trinkets and good beer. But ten years ago, Juarez was one of the most dangerous places in the world. Drug cartels and common bandits took the law into their own hands and declared war on almost everyone. Violent crime was booming: murder, disappearances, and shooting sprees were common. A group of young people were shot and killed while watching a soccer game at a birthday party. No wonder Mexican women were coming across the border to have their babies in the relative peace of a maternity clinic in El Paso, Texas.
Midwives for Mexicans
It was a win-win deal: the babies got U.S. citizenship, affluent do-gooders like myself could gain experience, the mother got good midwifery care for a rock-bottom price, and the Texas gun laws, though lurid in the eyes of most Canadians, meant that the chance of getting shot in a gangland drive-by are lower than across the border. One woman had to decide whether to come across for her baby’s postpartum visit or to go to her husband’s funeral. He was shot the day she came up to have her baby. She decided to come for the postpartum. She said her husband had been an innocent bystander, but who knows. The original reason for the violence may have been drugs, but no one knows why the killing happened.
Getting There
My flight from Montreal to El Paso went through Chicago O’Hare, a bland, sprawling, badly laid-out airport. O’Hare was clean and bustling early in the morning. I especially liked the automatic saran-wrap toilet seat covers. Lo-fat triple choco smoothies were on sale at the breakfast counter. On the small propeller plane, the cowboy with a handlebar moustache got a seat next to a tourist lady, who politely engaged him in conversation. There was so much wax on his moustache you could have lit it on fire and it would have burned like a five-hour candle.
From my window on the plane I saw the city sitting at the edge of a straggly desert, surrounded by mountains; barren, rocky, and magnificent. I ventured out into the heat and felt like dancing. The sun cleared up all the Montreal autumn from my bones. The Mexican taxi driver was enthusiastic about Canada, and suggested it was a good place to live.
El Paso
On the drive in from the airport, El Paso appears to be full of tawdry car dealerships, McDonald's, Whataburgers, and dollar stores. Most houses are either for rent or for sale, except the large mansions up on the ridge overlooking the town. Downtown looks like Calgary, circa 1961. But the mountains surrounding the town, the blue skies, and the dry heat make up for all the eyesores, and white trash sleazy becomes genteel Southern decay. The Mexican influence is everywhere: from the numerous Taco shops to the sounds on the street, the faces passing by, and the friendliness that is not the usual sedated grizzly-bear feel of small-town American camaraderie but more a reserved and genuine cordiality. It is still America, and to a homegrown Canadian everything seems grotesquely super-sized. I went into a health food store the size of a Wal-Mart. How can I choose between forty-five different types of organic underarm deodorant?
Midwives are weird
The maternity clinic in El Paso was a few blocks from the border, on the service road of a busy highway, across from the rail yards. At any time of day or night, you could hear women moaning in labor, trains whistling, motorbikes racing, newborns squealing, and frazzled midwives yelling instructions to bemused interns. There was a brief time around three-thirty in the morning when there was a pause in the traffic, and the trains take a break, but by four o’clock everything was up and running again.
Midwives are strange creatures and tend to live inside. The place was dark and closed and mostly illuminated by electric lights. Going out to take the trash into the alley was wonderful. The air smelled hot. The bright sun hit the ground and my skin with a jolt which soon wore off as I walked back into the air-conditioned clinic.
Halloween
I’d been on shift since the early morning and I had twelve more hours to go until I had a day off. My day off would fall on the Day of the Dead, which I knew from Italy as a national holiday, a day of celebration and a day the living visit the cemetery and the dead visit the living. By six in the evening I was exhausted but exhilarated. I loved working with pregnant women and newborns. The clinic was empty now, the office staff had gone home and the place was quiet and slightly spooky. The secretary had been wearing skull earrings and there was an air of ill ease in the place. It is an entry point for some into the U.S.; for some it is the door between life and death, and for others that door never opens. We know that so we are always prepared. Whenever you are waiting for a birth, you are always waiting for the unexpected.
Birth
At nine pm the doorbell rang and we went to answer it. There was a black Silverado in the drive. A small woman stood on the steps supporting a larger woman who was obviously in labor. Her aunt carried the bags even though she was crippled from a childhood struggle with polio. Her body was shriveled, but she had obviously learned to use it – it wasn’t her niece who had driven the truck. An inner force twisted her body, and the process had distilled the joy that we usually store deep inside and brought it to the surface. Her face shone. Her eyes were black and she spoke with authority. I helped the woman to the bathroom and then we made a slow procession to the birthing room. The primary midwife was bustling and fussing with equipment. I focused on the birthing woman, who was speaking Spanish to her aunt, who translated to me. “She’s having the baby now!” That was clearly true. As we removed her pants, I lifted the baby and laid it on the woman’s chest. The baby was tiny and silvery, with a small tuft of black hair and perfect features.
By midnight it was time for them to leave. The aunt shouldered all the bags and told me she would need help with the baby’s car seat. She hobbled outside and packed up the truck. The new mother strapped the little girl into the car seat and I picked it up and carried it to the truck. The seat belt didn’t work properly but it didn’t matter; the aunt told me to stop fussing. They needed to drive for a couple of hours before they would be home. The baby would be fine.
Escape from Midwifery Boot Camp!
I cleaned up and soon enough no one would ever know that a baby had been born in the room just a few hours ago. Everything was clean and bright, waiting for the next one. I slept a little in the chair and by the morning I was ready to take a break. Within a couple of hours I found myself in a rented PT Cruiser driving down the highway on my way to the desert. I followed the road signs to White Sands, past the mountains, until the land was flat and bare and the vegetation was short and prickly. Tumbleweed rolled by and I couldn’t decide whether I was on the set of a spaghetti western or Road Runner. I kept the windows open and tried to find some music on the radio. All I could get was Vivaldi which didn’t fit the mood so I muted it and concentrated on the road.
But not well enough.
The road got narrower. What few vehicles there were seemed to be going very fast. I passed some road kill that looked foxy, and I realized the place was infested with coyotes. I passed a sign that looked vaguely military, but I didn’t take much notice. The asphalt ended and I saw a dusty sign in Arabic. Then a large dust cloud rose in the valley and I saw helicopters hovering above the car; I had stumbled into a military area, so I carefully turned and went back the way I had come.
Desert Bound
I was almost back in El Paso when I saw the sign to White Sands National Memorial, so I headed out and found myself back in the desert. Blue mountains rose in the distance. The land stretched for miles, hot and dry. The road ahead shone with the heat. The sky was crackling, the road was straight and I was hungry so I ate a banana and threw the peel onto the shiny road. I prayed for a gas station and I wondered what I would do if I ran out. I turned on the Vivaldi after all, and then found some Mexican love songs.
Finally in the distance I saw what looked like civilization, or something like it. As I rolled into town I saw a sign towering above the shacks that said “Outpost”. Beneath it were three fifties-style gas pumps. Behind the gas pumps there was a small table and two chairs. The chairs were occupied by two skinny men with raggedy grey hair and a few teeth. Of course they were in their fifties, like me. They were very friendly and one of them had a relative in Ontario. They assured me that White Sands was the place to see, “It’s one of the Seven Wonders of the World”. It would take me another hour or so. I filled the tank with gas and got back on the road.
The blue mountains got closer and became a wall of grey stone in the distance. I couldn’t see any white sand and I was wondering if this was all in vain. The desert started to change and the land became flatter. I followed a signpost and arrived at the adobe visitor center where tourists can fill up on trinkets and rent sleds to slide on the sands. I took the dune road into the sands and wasn’t impressed. I’ve seen dunes – on the Mediterranean, on the coast of the St Lawrence Seaway, in the Sinai, in the Sahara. Hah! White sand, scrubby bushes, dunes…
Albino Lizard
I turned a corner and suddenly I was in the mountains going skiing. The hills rose on either side of the road, white. The road was white. I stopped the car and climbed up the hill. At the top I looked around – hills and hills of snow, as far as I could see, all the way to the blue mountains that were back in the distance. I looked down at the sand. It was fine like baking powder and stuck to my legs. I sat down and wrote some words in the sand. The heat was dry and delicious. The sand was soft. I saw movement in the corner of my eye and I froze, thinking of snakes. A small bleached lizard walked in front of me, turned around, and stared at me with his little black eyes. His paws rested on the white sand in front of him and he blended in perfectly. He reminded me of the little silvery newborn I had seen a few hours before, in his place, gazing at me.
C and W
Hunger drew me back to the car and I started back, eating an apple and wishing I could stay. I drove away from the dunes and back onto the highway. The mountains seemed closer in the setting sun and I found some country music on the radio, singing about 9/11, patriotism, God, guns, and girls. I rolled down the windows and turned the music loud. Pickups were a theme on the road and on the radio. When I got back to town I got a ride to the clinic from the car rental agent. He told me about his fiancée. He takes her on a trip to a different place every year. Last year they went to Vancouver – it was too cold, for desert rats. Maybe Montreal next summer, he had heard it was a party town.
I went into the clinic. Two women were in labor. They would give birth during the night and drive back to Juarez in the morning. Later that morning, the woman I had assisted would come back to the clinic with her sister. The aunt didn’t come. I unwrapped the baby and she lay, perfect and silvery, her black eyes staring at me from a desert-like place.
