Love's Labor
"The first time, very very first time I see that, I'm scared," Hassanatu admits, remembering her earliest experiences with birth work. "Lots of, you know, the blood and the baby..." Her voice trails off, but her hands keep moving, demonstrating how she positions mothers now, how she guides new life into the world.
Her journey began in the doorways of birth rooms, watching her mother and grandmother work. "Go pick this leaf for me," they would tell her. "Go and boil it quickly." She learned by gathering water, grinding herbs, absorbing wisdom drop by drop. But the real teaching came the day her mother forced her to stay when she wanted to run.
"By the time I said I want to go and use the bathroom, then the lady delivered on my end," she recalls. "I wanted to run, to go out, and my mother shouted at me, 'Go inside!' " She was shaking with fear, but that moment changed everything. "Even me, I don't have the mind to stand where women are delivering. I don't want to see that because it's too..." She shakes her head, still remembering that first overwhelming feeling.
Now at forty-two, her hands carry forward her grandmother's knowing. When a laboring woman comes to her, she understands the sacred work of waiting. "Don't rush her," she explains. "Because any single time, that will take it easy. But if you rush, maybe the baby falls. Maybe the baby will deform if you force her. So you have to take time."
Her own first pregnancy taught her the mystery of women's bodies. "Number one experience, my belly, six months, stomach flat," she remembers. Even with the vomiting, the weakness, she couldn't believe she was carrying life. "I was knocking my belly – ah, something is, eh, big is, big there, I don't believe. Something is shaking. The baby was shaking, for me to know that I am here."
But perhaps her most powerful story is about Anna, the three-year-old daughter she's raising – a child born to a mentally ill woman on the street. When she heard the woman's labor cries, Hassanatu didn't hesitate. She brought her inside, used her knowledge to safely deliver the baby. When the mother disappeared afterward, Hassanatu made a choice that would reshape both their lives.
"She stays on the street," she says simply of the mother. "Shouting, shouting." But Hassanatu knew what to do. "God just make it perfect," she says. The delivery was clean, safe. "As soon as she delivered, she washed." And since that December day three years ago, Anna has been hers.
Her methods blend practical skill with deep intuition. She tests with lime water, watches for signs, knows exactly how to check a woman's progress. "If the time is not yet, this finger go in," she demonstrates. "He nearly comes here before they touch the baby head. Then they will tell the person, 'Wait, wait, wait, be patient. Your time will come.'"
She's particularly careful with the afterbirth, using traditional methods passed down through generations. "Like we in Africa," she explains, showing how they use a rice spoon to help bring the placenta – pressing it against a woman's throat to trigger the body's natural expulsion reflexes. Every tool is sterilized, every razor blade boiled "to pull the tetanus."
When asked why she does this work, her answer comes straight from the heart: "Because I'm a woman. For help. I'm a woman." She knows when cases are beyond her scope and doesn't hesitate to send women to the hospital when needed. "In the case where you see serious, you will take her to hospital."
Her reward comes in the faces of the babies she's helped bring into the world, in the women who name their children after her, in little Anna's smile. She's living proof that sometimes the greatest acts of love come wrapped in the simplest packages – a clean razor blade, a careful hand, a heart open enough to say: this child needs me, and I am here.