Traditional Birth Attendants

All last week with work I had to get up super early and be at work by 7am, as everyday we drove out to a Sarajeka, a village an hour’s drive outside Asmara. In Sarajeka NUEW was organizing a 6d participatory workshop for traditional birth attendants. My job in Sarajeka was to film and document the workshops. A Danish NGO has funded this training and has requested the workshops be captured on film, so they provided us a budget to produce the film, and yours truly is responsible for the finished product. Its a little tricky filming as the workshops are completely in Tigrinya, so knowing what exactly to capture has been a little tough. In any case, next week, after we film the same workshop held this week in Tsada Christian, one of my colleagues will be working with me to go through the footage, to translate and assist me to select the best scenes for our 10 minute video report. From what I understand of the workshops they seem pretty interesting. The first couple days are spent discussing women’s reproductive health topics: pregnancy, child birth, and delivery. The women are asked to do role play and act out scenarios they have experienced in their work as traditional birth attendants (midwives). The next couple days they discussed in detail STDs, HIV/AIDS, and contraceptives. Finally on the last day they went over the male and female anatomy and discussed the consequences of FGM (female genital cutting) a widely practiced tradition in most villages throughout Eritrea.