Maternal Wealth Podcast - Own Your Birth

Charlotte Brielle: Bridging Cultural Narratives in Global Maternal Health with Wombs of the World

• Stephanie Theriault • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Uncover the transformative journey of Charlotte Brielle, the visionary founder and executive director of Wombs of the World. Charlotte's unique blend of anthropology, sociology, and passion for birth practices has sparked a global movement in maternal health. Her path from a curious child fascinated by birth to a full-spectrum doula has taken her across diverse cultural landscapes, from the vibrant communities in Costa Rica to the collaborative birth spaces of Asheville, North Carolina. By engaging with Charlotte's experiences, listeners will gain insights into the blend of traditional and modern birthing practices that empower women worldwide.

Experience the contrast between birthing practices in Tanzania and the United States as Charlotte shares compelling stories of resilience and community support in Tanzanian clinics. In these shared spaces, despite limited resources, the communal nature of childbirth shines through, offering a different perspective from the often-anxious environments seen in the U.S. Charlotte's work with Wombs of the World highlights how bridging cultural narratives can reshape maternal health experiences and outcomes, emphasizing the necessity for cultural competence and collaboration in this field.

Explore the systemic challenges and triumphs of revolutionizing global birth experiences with programs in Tanzania, Mexico, Ecuador, and South Africa. Charlotte discusses the critical issue of systemic racism and health disparities, particularly for Black American mothers, urging the birth work community to advocate for social justice. Wombs of the World not only connects birth workers with transformative experiences but also champions the preservation of traditional practices by linking passionate doulas with local experts. Join us in understanding how these immersive journeys cultivate a universal appreciation of birth that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers.

Music Credit
https://uppbeat.io/t/infraction/afro-cat
https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/mexicana
https://uppbeat.io/t/night-drift/paradiso
https://uppbeat.io/t/jeff-kaale/win
https://uppbeat.io/t/sonda/wakhe


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Maternal Wealth Podcast, a space for all things related to maternal health, pregnancy and beyond. I'm your host, stephanie Terrio. I am a labor and delivery nurse and a mother to three beautiful boys. Each week, we dive into inspiring stories and expert insights to remind us of the power that you hold in childbirth and motherhood. We're here to explore the joys, the challenges and the complexities of maternal health. Every mother's journey is unique and every story deserves to be told. Please note that this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always consult with your healthcare provider for medical guidance that is tailored to your specific needs. Are you ready? Let's get into it. Good morning and welcome to the Maternal Wealth Podcast.

Speaker 1:

Today, we are excited to welcome Charlotte Brielle. She is the founder and executive director of Wombs of the World. This is a global initiative that is dedicated to transforming maternal health by integrating modern birth practices with the preservation and the celebration of traditional birth cultures. Since 2018, wombs of the World has empowered birth workers across the globe through immersive programs in Tanzania, ecuador, south Africa and Mexico. Charlotte is a full-spectrum doula, a childbirth educator with a master's degree in maternal health, social work, as well as an undergraduate degree in anthropology and sociology. I'm excited for our listeners to hear more of this amazing movement created by Charlotte to intertwine the sanctity of birth across the globe. Let's welcome Charlotte.

Speaker 2:

Brielle, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you, and what a great introduction. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Charlotte, that introduction is so well deserved. I'm so excited to chat with you today. I would love to start by learning more about who was Charlotte before the wombs of the world.

Speaker 2:

I love that. What a great starting question. Well, charlotte has been. I have been really obsessed with babies since I was a baby. My family did not know where I came from. I was that kid that would be six years old and go to the park and end up coming home with a bunch of toddlers and wanting to feed them snacks and my mom would be like, do their parents know where they are? You know, so I've always had an affinity for, specifically, babies and you mentioned I got my undergrad in anthropology and sociology, was super interested in women's health, maternal health, and when I was 19, I went to Costa Rica and I was living on this organic farm.

Speaker 2:

I was woofing I don't know if for your listeners it's worldwide opportunities on organic farms. And so when I was 19, I was like, what if the world ends? I need to learn how to permaculture. So I was at this farm in Costa Rica and this woman was telling me her birth story and I remember being there like sitting on the floor eating my banana ice cream. And she is telling me her birth story via slam poetry and in her birth she had a drum circle and she had this amazing home birth and I just remember sitting on the floor and just having my mind blown of, like, wait, birth can be like this. And in her poem she talked about a doula. And after her poem I was like, what's a doula? And she told me and I knew right then. And there I was like, oh, I want to do that someday.

Speaker 2:

But I think, like a lot of doulas, I was under the impression that I needed to experience motherhood first, experience birth myself, before I would be able to share that space. And so I was patiently waiting, carolina in Asheville specifically, and I was working with my dad in the antique space. My dad is an antique dealer and I was working with him and I met this pregnant woman. She came into the store and my dad was like my daughter loves pregnant people and I was like, maybe we don't say that to people, dad, but she had just moved to Asheville from Berkeley, california, and she had been a doula out there and I was like, oh, I've always wanted to do that. And she's like, well, go do it. Go do it, because do it now, before you have kids, because once you have kids it's a whole lot harder to be on call. So that was my journey into birth work in a nutshell.

Speaker 1:

What did the transition look like for you into becoming a doula?

Speaker 2:

Well, luckily, I was at the time and this was in 2017. I was living in Asheville, north Carolina, and it is such a hub for birth workers. It's also a hub for any kind of healer. You know, I kind of joke of you. You throw a rock and you hit a yoga instructor, a Reiki master, a chiropractor and a doula all with the same stone, you know, and probably an astrologist mixed in there too.

Speaker 2:

It's a great place and I enrolled in a training and I remember sitting there my amazing instructor at the time, kama Wadak, was my instructor and I was just so mind blown in the way of like how is this not common knowledge? How is this not common knowledge? And I remember sitting there so excited about launching into my career as a doula and then also feeling in myself like I want to do what she's doing. I want to inspire this room, this room, about like, what is possible and what birth can be like and how birth can be healing, birth can be empowering, and not this depiction of you know what we've seen in the media for decades now of this emergency situation and you're rushed into the hospital and everybody's screaming and bam, a baby.

Speaker 1:

So you're a doula working in the United States. How did this transition into a global project?

Speaker 2:

Well, it actually started. The wombs of the world started created itself. It happened very quickly. So I did my training in September, in September of 2017. And there was another woman in my training who, like me, was a very avid traveler, had lived internationally and we were both seeking experience. And you can't just kind of show up at a hospital in the States and be like, hi, can I volunteer as a doula just to get some of that hands-on experience. And so she had connected with a Canadian midwife that was living in Tanzania through a random Google search so you know, shooting our shot. And this midwife in Tanzania was like come over here and I'll get you set up. And she and her husband at the time had this tourism company, so they were used to hosting people, not so much doulas wanting to work in a clinical setting, but they kind of held our hand in getting there and getting us set up with a homestay experience. So between my training and being in Tanzania, I had only attended one birth in the US. So I was a brand new baby doula and I do.

Speaker 2:

For the audience listening, I just want to be very intentional by saying that before going to Tanzania that first time, as I call myself a brand new baby doula.

Speaker 2:

I was so aware of my scope of practice and I was also so aware of the privilege of being a Western woman traveling to Tanzania and having these clinical doors open for me, like that's not something that we get to experience in the Western world.

Speaker 2:

And so I went into it with this tremendous amount of mindfulness of wanting to to just really respect my scope of practice, to support birth, to witness birth, to not overstep, to not pretend that I was anything that I wasn't. And I say that now because when we created Wombs of the World, those are also very intentional, because the clinics there don't know what doulas do. They don't know our scope of practice and so regularly when we're there and I know I'm jumping ahead, but when we're there we are the ones that have to respect our scope. So I ended up in Tanzania only a few months after that initial training and within 10 days, witnessed over 30 births and all kinds of birth breech birth, twin birth, stillbirth, cesarean birth I mean all kinds of birth. And I came home from that and I was like cool, I'm ready to get to work, let's do this.

Speaker 1:

We pause this episode for a quick message from our sponsor. At Maternal Wealth. We aim to ensure that you have access to the best and the most appropriate care. That's why we created a maternal healthcare provider database. Maternal health providers can easily create profiles to promote their services and business, helping to increase access for those seeking their care. This is a one-of-a-kind database that offers a new and exciting way for women to search for and find maternal health providers near them and tailored to their specific needs. Profiles feature badges that highlight various services, such as TODAC-friendly practices, all-female practices, lgbtqai plus inclusivity, language options, access to vaginal breach services and, more Additionally, be sure to check out our Not your Average Birth course. In this course, I discuss the variations that exist in hospital practices based on policies, staffing and budgets, all of which can directly affect your birth experience and outcome. What does birth look like for the woman of Tanzania?

Speaker 2:

So the clinic at the time that I was volunteering in is a local government funded hospital, and so it had no bells or whistles to it, and one of my takeaways at the time and I always have to kind of travel back in time because now I've been so many times I have a hard time remembering that initial feeling. So okay, so the layout of the clinics, and so this doesn't just apply to this one All the clinics I've ever visited there all have this similar setup where there's one big communal room that's the labor room and also the postpartum room, and oftentimes these clinics kind of have their postpartum rooms divvied up between cesarean recovery and vaginal recovery, but the people that are in the vaginal recovery area they also are laboring in that room. So there's one big room and in that that room there are usually like maybe 15 beds, and so that means that there's 15 moms and 15 babies in that room at all times, unless it's slow, and then there's less, or if there's more, they sometimes will put two moms in one bed. So there's very, very little resources, and then when a mom is like feeling like she's maybe ready to push, or if she gets checked and she's and she's past the eight centimeter mark, they keep her in a different room and that's the pushing room, and that room does not have the community feel that the other room does. And so the labor room in the postpartum room is full of family members and it's mostly women and I love that, I love this sense of community and you don't know like which grandmother belongs to which baby, because they're all helping everybody out. And there's, you know, the grandmothers outside that are trading chickens for the soup that they're making in the communal kitchen, which is essentially just like a room that has a fire pit in it and they bring their own pots and pans and it just has this really amazing community feel. And also there's no resources. This particular clinic doesn't even have running water. You know you want to take that postpartum shower. You can't, you have to wait until you're home.

Speaker 2:

So really just stripping away any of the resources that we would be used to in birth and you get these women and they show up with so much courage and strength and they have such a different approach to the mental headspace of birth because, just because the narrative around birth is so different. So I feel like in the US, from my observation as a birth worker there's. We have so much mental anxiety before giving birth, there's so much, and pregnant people get so much unsolicited advice all the time and then these women like they show up in the birth. So once they go back to that pushing room and in the backspace they are very much alone. Sometimes, if someone's needed a mom can be back there with them, but most of the time they're alone and the nursing staff is firm and sometimes that's really hard for us to witness just how harsh things can be and also how outdated things can be. So there's also routine protocol in those clinics that we would consider outdated. For instance, they are all birthing on their backs, knees bent, holding on to their ankles. That is the position that they are to birth in and routine episiotomies another example of just things that are routine protocol. So when we're there as participants with Wombs of the World, we're really good at being like oh no, no, she's doing great. How about we just put her on her side? You know, we've like learned ways of communicating really effective strategies for birth and that's like the magic of what doulas do we get to do that?

Speaker 2:

I'm getting ahead of myself and wanting to tell you more about the programs, but did that answer your question? Yes, you did, thank you. Who is generally attending the two days to go back to Tanzania? And there are a few nurses that are amazing, like labor and delivery nurse midwives, and they hold it down. But besides that, there's this really healthy rotation that comes through, which is a good and a bad thing because, as we know, some people are so passionate about birth and some labor and delivery nurses are amazing and others are not, and they lack patients, like everywhere, or they're burnt out or they're traumatized, like everywhere. And then there are also OBs, because these clinics do offer cesareans and they have, I would say, comparable cesarean rates to the US. Oh, wow, really. That surprises me. Yeah, like a 30, 40% cesarean rates to the US. Oh, wow, really.

Speaker 1:

That surprises me. Yeah, like a 30, 40 percent cesarean rate. All right, so you go to Tanzania. You have an amazing experience. You get back to the US. What's next?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So at the time you were asking me like, who was Charlotte before all this got started, at the time I knew I was actually really deep into my Peace Corps application. I think it was my like seventh time applying, not just backing out. Always I'm like I'll probably do this, I'll probably do this. And I was deep in that process because I was really not passionate about the antique world that my father is super passionate about. No-transcript. I didn't want to just give the contact information of the clinic because I didn't know who those strangers off of Instagram were and I didn't know if they would show up in a respectful way in the space, if they would respect their scope of practice, if they would be culturally competent. I didn't know who they were. I didn't want to just blindly connect them to the clinic and my experience. That first time those 10 days that I was there in 2018, I was so traumatized I had no one to decompress it with. I didn't know who to ask questions to. There was so much I saw that I didn't understand yet. And still, every time I'm there, I see things and I'm like I bet that there is a reason as to why this is happening and I just don't know it yet. So that was the initial idea of well, okay, I don't want to send them there and not, and for them not to feel supported, and I also don't want to send them there like and not know who or how they're going to show up. So let's, let's curate it.

Speaker 2:

And the first iteration of it was in the following year. A year later we went back and it. Over the course of that year of prepping, it blew up so much online, which was very unexpected. Initially it was just going to be like a project and I bring some friends there, but the executive director at the time of Doula Canada, shaughnessy King, got wind of us and she posted about it in a private doula group and overnight we had dozens of Canadian applicants and all of a sudden it was like, oh, this is a thing, okay, let's create an LLC, let's open a bank account, let's get a website. Like it all unfolded really, really naturally. And so that first year January of 2019, I was there for seven weeks and hosted three different groups of doulas and it was such a mistake. It was way too much, way too fast. But it was also amazing. And so many of those birth workers from that initial trip in 2019 are core team members for us, so it was definitely the right call.

Speaker 2:

But that's how it started. And then once, once Wombs of the World, like once the name had stuck and once I had the domain name and once everything was rolling I was like OK, well, where else? You know it's called Wombs of the World, where else can I go? I did a semester abroad in high school, in Ecuador, and I reached back out to my Spanish teacher and I was like hey, juan, I'm doing this maternal health project. Do you have any connections? And he was like I sure do. My cousin works at the hospital in Otavalo where I used to live as a, as a 16 year old, and I was likewife, and that's how our Ecuador program got started.

Speaker 1:

So it all unfolded very naturally For the doulas for the birth workers who sign up with Wombs of the World to have an experience with you in the hosting countries Ecuador, south Africa, mexico, tanzania. What kind of experience should they expect to have?

Speaker 2:

I can give you a little bit of the overview. We currently have these four different programs Our Tanzania program, mexico and Ecuador programs are all 10 nights, 11 days, and we're groups of between like 8 and 12. 8 is our max for Tanzania and 12 is our max for Ecuador, and the trips each one is very different. So the Tanzania program is the only program where we offer the hands-on clinical experience, and so it's a really really great opportunity for either new doulas like at the time myself, you know just really eager to witness birth, really eager to support birth. That's a great energy to bring to the space, and it's also an amazing opportunity for super experienced birth workers that want to shake up their journey in this field and really want to step out of their comfort zone and witness birth in a totally different context. Additionally to the actual clinical days, we're staying in a beautiful house, we spend a day with a group of Maasai women learning about their traditional home birthing techniques and like herbal medicine, and then, because we're flying all the way to Tanzania, we have to go on an amazing safari. It's like you can't go all the way there and not go on a safari. So there's those elements of travel and tourism that are weaved in Versus our Mexico and our Ecuador program do not have that hands-on clinical work and those trips are much more focused on shadowing indigenous midwives and learning about traditional birth practices, exactly how you were introducing me at the beginning, of kind of blending this super ancient yet seemingly cutting-edge technology into modern birth.

Speaker 2:

So those trips are very different, because Ecuador and Mexico are very different, but they both have a lot of workshops, a lot of time with these indigenous traditional midwives and learning these techniques, like learning rebozo techniques, learning belly binding, like learning you know how to feel for a fetus in utero, learning those things directly from these sources. And those trips involve a lot of ceremony and homestays. Our Ecuador program is very immersive in the community. We all stay within a community and our Mexico experience we stay like in the heart of Oaxaca at a hotel altogether. So they definitely have a different flavor to them, but there is no hands-on birth work, it's all workshop oriented.

Speaker 2:

And then, of course, anywhere that we go, it's a group of doulas from around the world coming together and so, in terms of like, what can you expect and what are my participants experiencing? They're experiencing 10 days of being able to just geek out about these things that we are so passionate about. And it's truly introspective too, because I'm sure, as you know and if any of you listening, are connected to your womb, womb work is deep and introspective and generational, and so when we have the opportunity to connect to our wombs, to feel our wombs, to have a friend feel our womb, to have it then adjusted, to then be wrapped up and experience what that feels like, it's really powerful medicine that we then get to take home and share with our respective communities.

Speaker 1:

This concept of womb work resonates so deeply with me. Thank you for bringing that up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my pleasure. And because we often get labor and delivery nurses on our trip and that's your background, right? Yes, it is, and the feedback that I get from them is like they're just so burnt out by the system especially. I love labor and delivery nurses because thank you first of all, thank you no-transcript delivery nurses get to come on our trips. They get to reconnect with the purpose of why? Because the hospital bureaucracy can just beat that out of you. And then you get to connect with doulas, who are just so excited about birth, you know. And so then you get to go home and go back to work with a little bit of a different lens. Whether you come to Tanzania or you're hanging out with the midwives in Ecuador, you get to go home and see your hospital system differently.

Speaker 1:

You wrote culture is dynamic, yet birth is universal, and that speaks to what you're saying right now, which is so deep. For example, when I'm at work and I have a patient and we are from two different cultures, two different countries, we speak two different languages, and this patient may have another woman with her at bedside. Myself, as a labor and delivery nurse, as a mother, I feel that we can communicate by looking at each other. There is this universal understanding, communication between women post-birth, and that is the universal understanding of birth.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, we've all been born, every single person. I feel like it's the most uniting thing that there is.

Speaker 1:

I agree with you a hundred percent and it's so nice to hear that you're doing this work to really take us women who are in birth work and integrating different cultural practices, and just getting back to the core of what birth is.

Speaker 2:

Birth is powerful, birth is transcending and everyone deserves to experience that, regardless of who you are, where you come from, what language you speak absolutely, and I feel like if you follow me on instagram, I use the word revolutionize a lot because I truly feel as though I I mean I feel it all the time on our trips that these birth workers from around the world get to come together and, first of all, like I think that this is the first time, I mean for the last couple of decades but where women can travel like this, where we get together, we're from all these different walks of life, I mean the diversity of the Wombs of the World. Participants. People ask me that all the time, like who is your traveler? We've had as young as 19,. As old as 72. We have over 15 countries represented in our travelers. I'm leaving in two days. We're a group of eight from five different countries.

Speaker 2:

I mean it's super, super diverse and we get to come together and we get to have these super profound conversations about these systems and how they differ in different places and the narratives around birth in these different countries and not just countries, but across the span of the United States there's so many differences and there's so much generational trauma that is tied into birth and we get to have these conversations where we dream about what birth could be about the importance of our work and when we come together in that capacity, I sit there all the time and I have these out-of-body experiences similar to when I'm in a birth room, and I have this out-of-body experience of like, oh my gosh, birth is so cool. But I have this in those conversations of like this is revolutionary. This is how revolutions happen, when passionate people come together and have these super constructive conversations that are uncomfortable and that get to the root of things and that dismantle and deconstruct and then, from that understanding, we can build a new. But we can't do that on our own and we can't do that if we don't see the whole picture. So I'm really a big fan.

Speaker 2:

Thank you to all of the travelers that have been on our trips. I love you.

Speaker 1:

What would you say to the woman in the United States if they've been pregnant, are pregnant, if they presented to you the question why the revolution? What's going on? Why do we need a revolution when it comes to birth?

Speaker 2:

That is a beautiful question.

Speaker 2:

Well, first of all I'd say hi, congratulations, hope you're feeling okay.

Speaker 2:

I feel as though birth has the power of being so healing, and that is never the word that's associated with birth, and I see a lot of birth workers now that are using the language of empowered birth or, you know, language of like your body is built to do this, things like that.

Speaker 2:

The truth that I see consistently when I have the opportunity, especially to connect with indigenous communities that have preserved birth outside of the Western medicalized system, is that birth is a ceremony and birth is the journey from maiden to mother.

Speaker 2:

And we need this revolution because if mothers all over the world were honored and not forgotten, because so often in our systems we like, we revere the pregnant goddess and we revere the maiden and then, like, the mother is born and she is forgotten, she is irrelevant in the you know, the social discourse but if we honor the mother and we bring that reverence to this transition, to this super, super fragile time, and if she can then fully show up for her family, like we know and this is where my you know, like my little clinical brain turns on the importance of nurturing kids in those first few years of life impacts their lifelong social, emotional health, and if we can nurture these moms and care for these moms so that they can care for everybody else like, that is the revolution, and that is why my mission is to improve global maternal health outcomes by uplifting, educating, connecting birth workers, because birth workers are the foot soldiers in this revolution.

Speaker 1:

A few years ago I was in midwifery school and I can remember learning. There was a statistic coming out from the UN saying Black American women are more likely to survive their birth if they give birth in Rwanda. I know Tanzania, south Africa, rwanda are three different countries. But with your experience as an American woman going over to Africa and witnessing birth and your experience of witnessing birth in the United States, what is the difference? Why is this disparity happening to women of color in the United States?

Speaker 2:

Well, that is a very loaded question and one that I would love to fully geek out on, and to understand the racial disparity in birth in the US, we have to zoom back outa couple hundred years to look at the systems in place and part of that study that you were mentioning. In terms of the chances of surviving are higher if you birth in Rwanda. It's a similar study of, if you're with the Times, rwanda, it's a similar study of, if you're with the Times. It's a pretty well-known statistic that Black American women are three to four times more likely of dying due to childbirth-related complications than their white counterparts. However, african immigrant women so women who have been born and raised in Africa and moved to the US, they have the same birth rates and outcomes as white women. And so the bigger picture there, I think, is the long-term impact of racism, not only on the actual body of women that have been raised in the United States with constant microaggression, with constantly raised cortisol levels, and then they go into a medical system that has been designed on their backs. You know, like the so-called like father of gynecology. He experimented on enslaved Black women, on Arnica, lucy and Betsy, and that's the foundation of modern day obstetrics.

Speaker 2:

And then you fast forward from there to the turn of the 20th century when birth went from being a home event to a hospital event and all of these black granny midwives that had been caring for all of the families everywhere were all of a sudden told you bring nothing to the for African-American women like died so quickly with with this change from home to hospital medical information and like we still have these super outdated beliefs in the medical systems.

Speaker 2:

You know these like completely false, ungrounded things. But that route back to those early studies that were so, so, so racist and things like, for instance, black women don't feel pain the same way as white women, like that is absolute BS. But there are so many studies that show, and even like interviewing, like current enrolled students, medical students who have that belief, like that is such a deeply rooted belief. And so if you combine these outdated medical beliefs with the mistrust of the medical system, with Black women often not being believed and then with a lifetime of like weathering and racism on their bodies, you know how that impacts their hormone, their cortisol, their adrenaline in the birth room. Then I think that all of those different systems in place is what's contributing to the death of African-American women in birth compared to if you look at the maternal morbidity rates in, say, africa, it's way more linked to lack of resource versus like the whole bigger system at play. That was a very social work answer for you. Clearly, I have thought I've written a lot of papers about this.

Speaker 1:

As a birth worker, speaking as a white woman working in birth work. How can we help, how can we make a positive change? How can we change these statistics, change these numbers so that our sisters and our counterparts are not dying in childbirth here in the United States?

Speaker 2:

Mm, I wish that I did have a very straightforward answer. Obviously, it's a much bigger system at play. But back to the revolution. I think that, as white women in birth work, it's so important that we understand this bigger picture. It's so important that you know when I'm constantly talking about how birth is political. Birth is political, birth work is social justice work, and I have you know. And then I'll meet a fellow white doula who's just like but no, it's not like I don't want to get political, and I have you know. And then I'll meet a fellow white doula who's just like, but no, it's not like I don't want to get political. And it's like you're, you're in the space and the birth has been made political.

Speaker 2:

And so like, first and foremost, just educating yourself on these systems, like learning about the foundation of obstetrics, learning about the granny midwives, learning about these, these huge systemic changes that happened and why you know. Like reading the articles you read, the headline of Black women are dying at three to four times the rate of white women. Like understanding, really breaking down why that is happening. And then, any time you have the opportunity to advocate, do it and whether that's advocating where you're correcting someone who's making some kind of like you know, like you hear somebody say, well, black women don't feel pain. It's like, no, you correct them. Like you don't stand for that kind of ignorance. And that is part of our mission and that's why we're advocates and that's why, by being a birth worker, you just default into being a social justice advocate, because it's like we share the same goal. We want healthier birth outcomes for everybody, for everybody. But when systems have been built on the back of enslaved Black women and that's the foundation of obstetrics oof, there's a whole lot we need to deconstruct.

Speaker 2:

And then that ties back into so much of the work of Whom's of the World is that so much of this traditional Indigenous knowledge in the US has been lost and in other places it's dying out so quickly. And so we're traveling to these countries and handing the mic over to these midwives that have been so consistently pushed aside and like this overall global hierarchy of knowledge of like the West knows best and you have nothing to teach us. It's like no, no, no, when it comes to birth, y'all have been preserving these practices for so many generations. And an example in Ecuador, the region that we travel to, they have a 90% vaginal birth rate and it's because these midwives especially in this particular community that's supported by traditional midwives these midwives are accustomed to adjusting babies in utero from the get-go, like from the first trimester they've got hands on baby and they're making sure that baby is head down.

Speaker 2:

I was listening to your previous episode about vaginal breech birth and they wait until 36 weeks to get hands on baby and it's so painful to try to move baby. Versus in that particular culture, they have hands on baby from the get-go and they have. It's beautiful. And I have videos on the Instagram showing how these traditional midwives are adjusting. You know a baby at 20 weeks and a baby at 26 weeks and a baby at 31 weeks, but all of those babies are head down. It's brilliant. So that was a very long way of saying please be educated and be an advocate and speak up when you see injustice in Ecuador are they caring for women within their community or for the larger population of Ecuador.

Speaker 2:

They are mostly community midwives, so supporting the women in their respective communities. The region that we go to with our groups is Northern Ecuador. It's called Inmambura that's like the province that it's in and we go to a particular small town within that province. But there are a lot of traditional midwives in this community, in this province, and these traditional midwives have never been paid for their work and they are just supporting. You know, it's generational knowledge and so you know. Maybe a daughter was accompanying her mom at birth when she was a kid and that's how she started learning. But we were recently talking to one of the elders, who's in her 80s now and she's oh, mama anita, she's so lovely and she said that it was her own healing journey that made her a midwife, that it was her birth experiences that gave her the curiosity to learn about her own womb and her own birth, and then she's been sharing that with women in her community ever since and for many generations. All of the births took place with these women in homes, and similar to what happened in the US 120-ish years ago when it went from home to hospital. There's a whole lot of that happening all over the world and, like, in some instances, western medicine is amazing Thank you for saving lives but in other instances, home birth can be a very, very safe option, and so what I see from the midwives that we work with is that they do offer home births, they do work with women and do home births, but they also have built relationships with the clinics in the community and so if they do need to have a transfer situation, or if a mom is more comfortable birthing at the hospital, she still has all of her follow-up with the community midwife, like with one of our midwives, and then her postpartum support with the community midwife that goes to her house, but she might birth at the hospital.

Speaker 2:

And then these hospitals in northern Ecuador, the one I again, if you go on Instagram, I have a video of this, but there's a birth room at the hospital in Otavalo. So I was telling you how I was walking around looking for my friend's cousin and we ended up getting a tour and then we ended up going back there. So I've been there. I spent quite to the clinic because there's a huge mistrust, of course, between, like the indigenous people and and like Western, what they call occidental medicine. So they're not so keen on going to the hospital.

Speaker 2:

So they designed this birth room that's supposed to kind of mimic an indigenous home and it's a big room and it's low lighting and they've got painting on the wall and they've got squat bars on the wall with a mattress, and then in the middle of the room they have a big rope hanging and a birthing stool underneath it, on top of the mattress, and they've got birthing balls and they've got music and it's just like.

Speaker 2:

It's a vibe Like this is, this is where to birth, this is how to birth, no extreme overhead lighting. I love seeing OBs catching babies on their stomach, like you know, because these women are on like deep, deep squats on the floor, and so the entirety of the region, I think, has done a whole lot to support the indigenous women, because it's a mostly indigenous population and just creating safer birth outcomes. And so they that particular hospital has blended like they have a resident traditional midwife that works there full-time, and then they also allow traditional midwives to accompany moms essentially as their doula, like what we would consider the scope of practice of a doula?

Speaker 1:

Do you find that many of the women who come and experience Wombs of the World take the ancestral wisdom that they're learning and bring it back into their birth work in their home countries?

Speaker 2:

It's a conversation that we have regularly on our trips is the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, and so I think that, off the bat, the fact that they're investing and traveling all the way there and spending the time and learning directly from the source and having it be shared with so much blessing is great permission to use it. But the thing that we mostly talk about is like, okay, you're going to take this home because, yes, my intention for them is like add more tools to your toolbox. You know, be really pumped about what you're learning and you want to share it. So, whether that's a postpartum closing of the bones or a rebozo adjustment in like late pregnancy to ease pain, you know things along those lines, I want for them to go home and be able to practice that, and part of that practice is sharing where the knowledge comes from and honoring our teachers and honoring their teachers and like the entire lineage of this knowledge. So that is, yeah, that's like a core theme of Wounds of the World. Is that conversation?

Speaker 2:

And there's an elder there that we meet with in Ecuador.

Speaker 2:

His name is Taitai Oscar and he's like an amazing healer in the community, very, very powerful man, and he told us this story about how, for many generations, they had to hide all of their seeds of knowledge because, as you know, colonizers were coming in and changing their way of life.

Speaker 2:

They had to hide all of their seeds of knowledge because, as colonizers were coming in and changing their way of life, they had to protect this knowledge, this traditional generational wisdom that had been passed down, and they took all of those seeds and they hid them away.

Speaker 2:

And now, in the era of globalization, where kids are no longer learning the mother tongues of their grandparents for instance, like the region in Ecuador, they speak Quechua they're no longer learning Quechua, they're speaking Spanish and they're learning English because of how the world is changing, that Tai Tai Oscar told us that now, in order to protect those seeds, we have to share them and they have to be planted and flourish in other countries and other places, and that's how we're going to keep the knowledge alive. And I just thought that that was such a beautiful way of looking at it, and also I felt like it was him granting us permission and granting me, for instance, in this moment, permission to share that story with you, like nowadays, in 2025, in order to preserve these traditional teachings that are dying out with this generation of elder healers around the world. We have to learn it and we have to preserve it.

Speaker 1:

Hearing that provokes so much emotion. It's so beautiful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I get really excited talking about this and then I talk really fast and my mom's always like breathe, breathe when you talk and I'm like, no, please, there's so much more.

Speaker 2:

And I was mentioning this earlier too. I say this jokingly and also so seriously to all of my participants my goal for them when they come on a trip is I want for them to be on that plane going home feeling so fired up to get to work. They have so many new tools and not only are we learning from the midwives and the workshops, but we're learning from each other, because you get 10 days just geeking out and so you're hearing stories and you're swapping. I mean, I love it on day nine of a trip when I watch them swapping their breastfeeding PowerPoints, Like that's. You know, that's so magical for me. So I want them on that plane home feeling so pumped to get to work and to support moms and to change their system and to revolutionize maternal health. And then I also want them to be completely heartbroken that the trip is over and that they have to come on the next one.

Speaker 1:

All right. So we've talked about Ecuador, we talked about Tanzania. I want to hear more about Mexico. For those who might be interested in going to Mexico, what would an experience with Wombs of the World look like for them?

Speaker 2:

Our Mexico program is our newest program. We do have a few spots left for the trip that's going in May this year. So if you are a birth worker listening or just a super maternal health enthusiast, check it out. Wombsoftheworldcom slash Mexico. The program starts in Mexico City and we spend the first three nights in Mexico City and then we all travel to Oaxaca together and a difference between the I was mentioning earlier like a huge difference between the Ecuador and the Mexico program is that it's Mexico Like. Mexico is just like. I feel as though when I think back to the last trip I was on there there's just so much dancing and joy and laughter and Mexico is huge and it has such a diverse population and so many like flavors and cultures and different indigenous populations all weaved into one country. So we go specifically to Oaxaca to learn from that particular lineage and we have a few different.

Speaker 2:

So in Ecuador we are working with the same mother-daughter like midwife duo and in Mexico we have, I think, about four different sets of teachers. One of them is another mother-daughter, but the mother is renowned. She's almost I mean she might be 87 by now. She was 86 last time I saw her. I don't know when her birthday is, but she's 86. Her name is Doña Keta. She's had books published about her. She's just amazing. She has been to so many births and she has trained so many generations of midwives after her, and her daughter specializes in healing trauma either before or after birth. So she mostly focuses on on like victims of sexual trauma and how birth can exacerbate that, the that trauma for them in motherhood. So really amazing duo there.

Speaker 2:

But since Doña Keta is in her 80s, she's not the one that's teaching us our hands-on practices, and so for that we have another traditional indigenous midwife named Paterayu, and Yu is spelled Y-U and she is younger, she's like in her 40s, she's a young mom and like her. You know, one of my takeaways from her is that before you find your womb you have to dance, like you have to dance to release the womb, and so we're doing these like 30 minute, essentially like twerk workshops, just like getting our womb in a nice central place and loosening up the ligaments. And that is not the vibe in Ecuador Very different, very different vibes. And so Partera Yu is one of our teachers and she's the one that teaches us about bravo techniques and abdominal massage and closing of the bones and she's also a healer. They're all amazing healers. And then we have another set of women that are traditional midwives as well and they kind of bring the ceremonial component to the trip. So we do sweat lodges with them and we have cow ceremony and we learn about the like Mastico astrology. So we get like our astrological charts read but it's a totally different kind of astrology from what we might be used to and we stay in the heart of Oaxaca City and so we have these workshops during the day and then in the evening we have on every single Wombs of the World trip. We eat amazing food, so we have like an amazing dinner, but then if you as the participant want to go out and experience Oaxaca with the music and the rooftops and the mezcal, this is the only trip that gives you that kind of opportunity, because all of our other programs were staying kind of in the middle of nowhere and there's definitely nothing to do at the end of the day. So Mexico's fun.

Speaker 2:

I can't leave out South Africa now that the other three have been so painted. The South Africa program is the first trip that's in collaboration with someone else who has designed the entire trip. Her name is Matsila Monseyi and she is talk about revolutionary. She is, wow, a powerhouse. Her background she's like a mother of grown children and when she was young she started as a nurse midwife in South Africa and over the years has done tremendous work against violence. And in more recent years she got her PhD in indigenous midwifery of South Africa, and so she traveled all over South Africa documenting indigenous birth practices and at the end of it, when she was getting her doctorate, she was like I don't want this information to just sit on a shelf, I should create something and bring people here. Echoing that exact sentiment I was sharing about TyTy Oscar like.

Speaker 2:

The way to preserve this now is to share it. You know, at a different time the way to preserve it was to hide it. Now the way to preserve it is to share it. And so she has put together this incredible 12-day itinerary where we travel all over a particular like we start in Johannesburg and then we're traveling almost the entire time and we end back up in Johannesburg. So we meet with a variety of different midwives, a variety of different schools of thought, and then also are blending in the beauty of South Africa and, again, similar to Tanzania, we can't go all the way there without going on a game drive or a safari and experiencing the local food, the local markets. There's just the local culture. And so Mozilla is my partner in this and we have our first trip. I haven't been before, but we have our first trip coming up in April and I think it's going to be really amazing.

Speaker 1:

What's next for Charlotte, brielle and Wombs of the World?

Speaker 2:

Oh, there's so many things I've been jokingly talking about, how I have so many different pots cooking and I'm doing everything to avoid a kitchen fire. What I'm currently working on is essentially a full spectrum doula training. I feel as though wombs of the world is very uniquely positioned to bring a global narrative to the conversation around birth, and also, really one of my biggest passions about doula work is how entrepreneurial it is, and so really just wanting to get like I was saying earlier, like just getting more foot soldiers in this revolution, getting more like the goal is to get more birth workers actually supporting moms, and so that is something I'm currently working on. I recently released two courses. One is a childbirth education course. It's called Preparing for Parenthood and it's essentially my like love letter as a doula to all the expectant parents, and it weaves in wisdom from the participants on our trips, like from the doulas I've had the opportunity to spend time with. It has insights from the over 100 births I've attended insight as, like the social worker that I am, you know. So it's full of insight. And then the other program I recently launched is called the Doula Launchpad and the idea for that is like okay, you finish your three-day doula training. Now what are you supposed to do? So? The Doula Launchpad has all of the essentials that you need to get started, from contracts to childbirth education, powerpoints to how to build your website, how to hack AI to help you as a doula. You know there's all kinds of tutorials in there, so those essentially audience.

Speaker 2:

If those sell, we can do so much we can we can. The proceeds from that are going directly to our foundation, and our foundation, the Wombs of the World Foundation, is buying neonatal equipment for the clinics in Tanzania. It is supporting a traditional midwifery school in Ecuador. It is providing scholarships to global birth workers. For instance, recently we supported a woman in Tanzania to become trained in sonography so that she can operate the portable ultrasound machine for the mobile clinic that we're working on so that more women in rural villages can get better health care. And we can't do any of this without more engagement and people buying the courses and signing up for trips and, you know, becoming sponsors. So I'm just trying to trying to do a lot, lots of pots cooking, but it's happening because I get the opportunity every single day to connect with really passionate birth workers all over the place. And again, I know, when we come together, magic happens, so I'm just trusting the ride.

Speaker 1:

And I think the ride for you has just begun. What you're doing is amazing. I'm honored that you have taken the time to sit and chat with me and share your stories, share your truth. Thank you so much. Any of the listeners who want to learn more about Charlotte Brielle and the wombs of the world, I will leave all the information with the release of this podcast episode.

Speaker 2:

I just want to thank you, stephanie. I want to thank you for creating this kind of space to have these conversations, for wanting to contribute to the story so that your listeners, whether they're pregnant people or they're birth workers, feel like they have more tools to do this. Thank you so much for creating this kind of opportunity and platform. And if you're a birth worker, praise you, keep it up. And if you're a birth worker, praise you keep it up. And if you're a mom, listening praise you.

Speaker 1:

keep it up. Thank you for listening. Be sure to check out our social media. All links are provided in the episode description. We're excited to have you here. Please give us a follow If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on the show. Reach out to us via email at info at maternalwealthcom. And remember stay healthy, embrace your power, and you got this.