And it was true, international cooperation was an environment to which I had always felt similar both in personal and professional terms: so was the departure easy for me? Not at all, it represented everything I had imagined for my future and I was afraid not to wait for the expectations I had for myself.
I came to Ampefy like this: enthusiastic but fearful, with a great desire to do but just as much to make mistakes and with that need for confirmation that at 25 is so normal but at the same time sabotaging. But it's all in your head, you arrive in Ampefy, a town in the center of Madagascar with 15,000 inhabitants, you walk down the street where people speak a language you don't understand, avocados as if it were raining, they call you 'vazaha' (a foreigner) all the time and you look at everything thinking 'this is now my home'. And if you allow your head to think so, your eyes get used to it, your habits change, and nothing seems more strange but only different.
The challenges in professional terms are many, I am a midwife and I am in a context in which women generally give birth at home, do not have prenatal visits and have a birth rate that is four times the Italian one.
Doing your job in a country with low resources is not easy: sometimes it's stimulating, sometimes it's demoralizing but it's very clear to me how, beyond any difficulty, it's first and foremost necessary.
I don't think I can yet rationally take stock of this incredible experience: there are too many things I'm learning, the bonds I'm creating and the gratitude to Change and myself for giving me the opportunity to be here.
“Human rights must belong to all men, otherwise call them privileges” -Gino Strada
