Life, new life.

 I’m pretty confident that I know what I want to do for the rest of my life. Tonight Jessica and I helped deliver a baby in the back seat of a car.
 I was playing on the floor of our house with some of the kids when Jess ran in the room and told me to hurry up and get in the car with her and Mxolisi. She didn’t tell me until we were on the way that we were going to take a girl to the hospital to have a baby. Her friend Nolile was already in the car with us, along with her 3 month old baby, and when we picked up seventeen year old Nondogozo she was in heavy labor. The whole ride to town she was panting and grimacing, but no hardcore screaming like you’d expect from someone on the verge of childbirth. It was a decently long drive and when we got there we had to stop about four times to get money for the hospital fees and to get oil for the car. All the while Nondogozo is having more and more contractions and is trying to manually push the baby’s emerging head back up the birth canal. She’s laying on Jessica’s lap in the backseat, her friend is sitting right next to her coaching her, and I’m in the front seat holding the baby trying to figure out what exactly we were going to do. It seemed like Nolile and Mxolisi didn’t really understand that we didn’t have time to be making all these stops, the baby was coming fast. So we pulled over outside a medical clinic, opened the back door, Mxolisi took the baby, and we spread out blankets and plastic bags underneath Nondogozo. The head was already visible, and in a few short minutes the baby was completely out. At this point a nurse rushed over, wiped the baby off, and started tending to Nondogozo. Before I really regained my senses Nolile handed me the minute old baby girl.
 I can’t even begin to describe what I was feeling. I was holding brand new life. Brand new life that was just born in the back of PG’s car. It was incredible. To think that that baby was taking her first breaths, her first looks at the world, feeling human touch for the first time, tasting her first air, feeling her first wind, and all of this in my arms. I prayed over her. She has a lot to overcome already. Her mom is a 17 year old prostitute and wasn’t exactly overly concerned about her. Somehow though, I couldn’t be entirely heartbroken for her. The miricle of life is just too profound to evoke much anything but joy. That, and the fact that my head was still spinning with shock that we had just casually delivered a baby. No one around us seemed interested at all, like it happened everyday. Which I suppose it kind of does, Mxolisi told us it wasn’t uncommon.
 I’ve been thinking about being an OB-GYN for a while now. I just love babies so much that it only makes sense. But I wasn’t sure if I could do that everyday. Like maybe seeing it all the time would take away the magic. But after tonight, I think it’s safe to say that that could never get old. It’s absolutely the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.