Ibu Robin a guerrilla midwife

On her way out from the restaurant in Ubud, the blonde young woman stops at my table, smiling. I’m wearing my Bumi Sehat T-shirt, the one with the big beautiful logo of a birthing mother, and every time I’m wearing it women either smile or talk to me. ”I’m a midwife from California” she says ”are you a volunteer at Bumi Sehat? Isn’t it such a beautiful place? Aren’t they doing a great job?”.

Bumi Sehat is a birthing centre that gives free-care and free-prenatal assistance to poor Indonesian women, the warm attention that its logo draws from locals and westerners is the evidence of how much well known Bumi Sehat is around Ubud.

The driving force behind the clinic is CNN Hero for 2011 Ibu Robin Lim, a Philipino- American midwife who’s been living in Ubud since 1993 together with her large family of eight children and a husband. A very energetic woman on her 50s, Robin is also a poet and a writer. A restless campaigner, she regularly tours Europe and The States talking on gentle birth and advocating infant human rights. Passionate and devoted to her cause, Robin is a woman firmly grounded on her mission to bring peace in the world fostering gentle and healthy births, one baby at a time. “One baby at a time” to Ibu Robin means to guarantee to each woman and child a birth free of trauma. A loving birth will ensure the grow of a loving family and a loving new human being. For her achievements in Indonesia (since 2004 tsunami, there’s been another Bumi Sehat birthing centre in Aceh, Sumatra) Ibu Robin received Alexander Langer International Peace Award in 2006  and also she was the recipient  of the first Birthkeeper’s Award in 2012 

 Ibu Robin’s Secret

First a girl has a daughter, a being born when a sparrow and a sea turtle mate impossibly.   […] As the girl rolls her baby in autumn leaves, dioxins kills babies in Italy. Boats full of refugees are sunk by governments. […]A slow revolution and six more babies woke her up to the truth, that she cannot protect her seven children or the owls, unless she takes the yellow dress her Filipino grandmother offers her in a dream.       Ibu Robin’s poem “You ask how a midwife is made”

The secret behind Ibu Robin’s accomplishments as a birth keeper is a very simple yet powerful one. It was embedded in her soul at a very young age, Robin says at 11 years old, when her Philippino grandma didn’t let her go with the U.S. Army‘s helicopter from their little mountain hamlet in The Philippines, to the military base in the plain where her American father worked, to get proper treatment from a massive kidney stone infection. Robin was totally scared to separate from her mother’s world in the mountain to fly to a place unknown to her, away from daily walks with grandma searching for herbs and swimming into mountain streams. Robin’s grandma kidnapped her from her parents, hid her in a shack and taught Robin her first life-long lesson: “Never trust the white men medicine. They’ll cook you, they’ll catch you up and they’ll kill you.” In The Philippines, Robin’s grandma was a hilot, a midwife and also a herbalist. Once in the shack, she fed the granddaughter with herbal teas, took the heir of the corn from her garden instructing Robin: ”Corn is woman, you boil it and it’ll heal you” and eventually healed the granddaughter. She must have been a very special woman and very dear to Robin: “Grandma got pregnant for the first time at 13 years old and breastfed her first child against e reluctant father who threatened her; she waited the night to come and hit the husband to kick him out”.

As a teenager, Robin migrated with the family to the U.S., her father’s home country and soon enough showed everybody to be the worthy descendant of such a lineage of strong women in refusing, at 16 y.o. a vaginal check to a gynaecologist who was supposed to prescribe her a birth-control pill. Here comes the second life-long lesson taught by grandma: “Your body is your temple, never trust anyone to come inside without your permission”. Robin believes that grandmother placed under her skin as a child what the Philippine people call the antin-antin: “Like the grain of sand inside the oyster that grows into a pearl, it forces you to embrace your life-long passion. No matter what I do, I wouldn’t feel comfortable unless I dedicate myself to building peace in the way I’m doing now. If I have to set a beginning point in the past, for what I am now, I guess it all started 38 years ago. I was a teenager mother, and I was poor in the U.S.A with no insurance, living in a 6mx25m trailer-house. We were people virtually at the end of the road in California, I rode my bicycle to school pregnant, and instead of panicking for being poor and uninsured, I started meeting midwives, young, inexperienced, junior midwives training with doctors or training as nurses at hospital, and then one day I said: ‘You know what? I’m not going to hospital because how many times did I go there and saw mothers standing in front of the window, wearing their robe just after childbirth, bleeding and crying, watching their babies on the other side of the glass in plastic boxes!’ This to me seemed totally unnatural especially since my grandma was a hilot who gave birth to ten children at home, and everybody I knew in my village was born at home and there wasn’t any need for hospital in our mountain village, then. In the end, my daughter was born safely at home and the birthing was as gentle and as loving as it can be”.

The setup of a birth centre on Bali

As soon as Robin moved on Bali with her husband and their six children in 1992, she got pregnant with Mike, her last son, and very soon realised that there was very little adequate healthcare on the island. Again, Robin’s personal story push her to taking charge: very sadly, Robin’s younger sister Christine died of heart complication during the last weeks of her pregnancy, due also to her doctor negligence, being her underprivileged. Since Ubud was then a very unsafe environment for pregnant women, together with other Balinese women, Robin started a sort of facility at her home which eventually, thanks to the involvement and support of other bodies, led to the foundation of the birthing centre Bumi Sehat “Healthy mother-earth”! 

Women’s and children rights are human rights

Robin is very committed to the belief that we can build peace; we can make the world a sustainable place if we protect the rights of our youngest citizens: “Researches say that all our capacity to love and trust is set at birth. Is not the first 18 months as they used to say, we now know that is the very first hour of life, is the actual birth and is about how the mother has been treated in pregnancy, how she’s been fed and nourished, because also love is a nutrient, also support is a nutrient, trust and safety are nutrients. Those are the elements that make people become the next peace builder or not”.

She is very much involved in advocating Children Human Rights and the cause is campaigning now is delaying the clamping and cutting of the umbilical cord thus allowing the intake of cord-blood- that sums up to one-third of the total blood- in new-born babies:” At Bumi Sehat we have received nearly 7,000 babies safely into the world, in high-risk, low resource settings. All of them enjoyed delayed umbilical cord clamping and cutting. Normally we wait 3 hours before doing anything with the Babies’ umbilical cords. Our MotherBabies enjoy a breastfeeding rate of 100% upon discharge from all of our three Childbirth centres, in Indonesia and the Philippines. We attribute the success of mothers to breastfeed to the bright, enthusiastic way in which babies, born at our birth centres, bond wide-eyed, and go directly to the breast to self-attach and feed. Babies who are compromised by new-born anaemia, caused by the immediate or early clamping and cutting of their umbilical cords, are withered in comparison, and have more difficulty finding the energy required to self-attach and robustly feed at Mother’s breasts”.

Her biggest dream now is to find a way to get some  donation land where to lay a teak house that somebody has recently donated: “That is going to be a very big thing, a women’s shelter for single mothers with no support, or women fleeing an abusive spouse, but it'll be also a research centre collecting data from all over the world about pregnancy and birthing- like the one that has been carried on in Italy under the leadership of gynaecologist Niccolò Giovannini who collected questionnaires of 7000 women.

The aim of the research is to promote the model of gentle birth worldwide.

Fiorella Connie Carollo