It's a simple but huge word.
It is the first word that welcomed me, here in this wonderful land.
Six months ago I was leaving for an experience that would change my life.
Six months ago I was saying goodbye to my family waiting for what would have been the first step of a very long journey that lasted two days, or eleven months, or perhaps a lifetime.
With two suitcases full of dreams, expectations, anxieties and fear, but also a great desire to do, learn, know and discover.
With the desire to free myself from my superstructures and preconceptions, to throw myself into new things, to live.
Who would have thought, I'm not sure, that it would turn into all this.
In friendship, love, experiences, projects. That everything so foreign to me would become my routine, my comfort zone, something that I now love so much. Including my companions: three strong and beautiful souls that have accompanied me since that day, at the same pace.
Tongasoa For me it's the beginning, it's what holds together everything I live.
It is the word that I received and that I now return through my hands.
It is the word that I pronounce every time a new life is born, to welcome it into this world.
Every birth is different, every encounter is different, every day is different.
Sometimes I get lost in the adrenaline of giving birth, leaving out what is the true essence of what I do. The woman, the listening, the attention, the bond, the accompanying. The shared breath, the hands, the sweat, the fatigue, the pain, the labor. The exact moment when the woman lets herself go, trusts you, allows herself to be exhausted, shakes your hand very tightly, places her head on your chest.
Hands are everything, hands that shake, that hold you tight, hands that welcome tiny hands.
There is impotence in the face of life that makes room between two legs and there is that sense of omnipotence when you pull that life out, which lasts only a moment, because after all, we midwives, are only spectators of the miracle.
So I thank this work, the children, the women who become mothers, the colleagues.
I thank life.
And I thank Madagascar for giving me new friends, a family and new eyes to see so many beautiful things.
And because every day, after all, he still tells me: Tongasoa.
