By Grayson Hester
Reproductive health care and its practitioners are as old as the land and as storied as the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. Midwives, those who assist in childbirth, occupy a crucial—if not predictably overlooked—role in both the Biblical narrative and in the overarching story of humanity.
During the birth of Tamar’s sons, it was the midwives who caught the fact that the twins’ birth order was switched—thanks in no small part to their resourcefulness in attaching a crimson thread to Zerah’s arm. That thread, figuratively speaking, runs from ancient Israel to modern-day Togo, where people like Dela grasp it and continue the life-giving, revelatory work it has come to symbolize.
“When I become a midwife, I wish to come and share my knowledge with the workers here,” Dela said. The “here” she speaks of is Mission Chretienne Pour Le Développement Communautaire Au Togo (MCDC), or Christian Mission for the Community Development of Togo, a ministry providing affordable, accessible and compassionate healthcare.
Founded by a local Togolese pastor, Hammer, this clinic sits in the small town of Vogan, about 30 miles north of the West African country’s capital, Lomé. Vogan’s small size can, at times, serve to compound the poverty nearly 81 percent of the country’s rural population experiences. Healthcare, if available, is rarely sufficient. As far as midwifery is concerned, one out of every eight Togolese children will not live to see their fifth birthday.
It is into this context that Karen Alford, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel who has medically cared for refugees and those facing poverty for nearly two decades, is called. And it is among people like Dela that she lives and works and is, in true CBF fashion, ministered to as much as she ministers.
“Dela—she’s from our local church. She’s young. She’s incredibly bright,” Alford said. The church is among a few critical structures that Hammer and his wife constructed, along with the aforementioned clinic and a school. While none of these places can overcome the sheer enormity of the need left in the wake of European colonialism, they can do the holy work of helping one person, lending purpose to one life, at a time.
And in the footsteps of a Jesus who traveled light and claimed only 12 followers to his name, it is precisely this individual-based, small-scale ministry to which we are directed, the fruits of which are borne in dignity conferred and relationships restored.
“When I first came, Dela had only been there for a few months. She was just an assistant who would hand us things. We were teaching her and she was learning,” Alford said. “Now she’s one of my best practitioners.”
Ironically, Dela did not arrive with a career in mind. She first discovered this clinical passion— or it discovered her—at the church. In a right-place right-time moment, the life Dela had led up to that point converged with the possibility of a life she probably could never have imagined. It came to her, as the Gospels tell us often happens, in the form of attending to those experiencing illness.
“I was raised by my grandmother. It came to pass that she was sick when I was in secondary school, and we didn’t have money to take her to the hospital,” Dela said. “One day, I was invited to this church by a friend of mine. I enjoyed the worship so I decided to stay here and become a member.”
But it was Hammer’s ministry of radical presence that truly elevated this coincidence to the realm of kismet, of, perhaps, divine intervention. “The pastor paid a visit to me and saw my grandmother paralyzed, lying in the bed,” she said. From there, Hammer introduced Dela and her grandmother to a group of nurses who showed the two of them unconditional love and care. And it was this seemingly inconsequential, ordinary act of pastoral care that instilled in Dela the desire to become a midwife.
While, according to Alford, Dela possesses the skill and tenacity enough to become anything she would want to be, it is this specific aspect of healthcare to which she feels led. “I’m teaching her what I know about examining patients,” Alford said. “We’re really hoping to send her to midwifery school, and then maybe she’ll be the one that can help us open a birthing center and get that program started; maybe; we’ll see.”
The “mid” in “midwife” could refer as much to the mechanics of their job as it does the theological implications. They stand in the middle of life and death, birth and spirit; they draw their breath in life’s thin moments, the liminal spaces where the membrane between here and hereafter loses its opacity and the unseeable can be, for a brief moment, perceived. They exist a ”mid” the duality so many of us spend our entire lives trying to avoid.
It is beautiful, brave work. And, given her experiences with her grandmother and her tutelage with Alford, Dela is more than prepared to take it on. “When I see people crying who, after the treatment, leave with joy and relief, it encourages and motivates me every day to come to be of service,” Dela said. “Why not become a midwife in this clinic if the clinic has a delivery room? I would like to work with this clinic in its development.”
And in aiding a clinic in its development, she is assisting in her own spiritual growth. The seemingly mundane work of healing and helping takes on spiritual gravity—no longer just about mending wounds, but transforming lives. Namely, Dela’s.
“God is going to do new things in my life…unbelievable things.”