Shahzadi

In the Tehsil of Gandakha in District Jaffarabad, Shahzadi serves a population of over 4,000 as their only access to affordable and safe deliveries. She has been serving them for two decades now. Before her, it was her mother, and her mother before her. Before each delivery, she makes sure to visit her mother’s grave and prays for her. Shahzadi is determined to continue what is now a dying practice, as she plans on teaching everything she knows to her daughter. She now plans on enrolling her daughter at the nearest public health school in Larkana, Sindh, as it will mean job security for her.

Unlike standard OB/GYN practices, midwifery is not just care limited to the delivery and focuses on building community. Often, Shahzadi delivers the baby and stays for another two to three days to provide postpartum care to the mother, does chores around the house, counsels her through breastfeeding, and takes care of her child as she recovers. With each delivery, she becomes an integral part of families and remains their support system for their reproductive health needs for the rest of their lives. For many women who do not have maternal figures, Shahzadi is their mother as she teaches them everything from how to swaddle their babies to sometimes teaching them the basics of menstrual hygiene.

As a habit, she visits the children she delivers because she believes there is no other joy as pure. When she holds them in her hands, it is with the love and care that goes beyond blood relations. She massages their faces, sings lullabies, and taps their backs to sleep. When she is with them, the world disappears.

Unlike other midwives, Shahzadi is also skilled at animal deliveries. In an area where animals are the primary form of asset, she feels proud to be trusted with them. In her own household, with two disabled sons, she takes care of the animals, keeping them fed and healthy, and tries to ensure that her family is well-fed. This year, she lost 90% of her livestock to the catastrophic floods that ravaged both Sindh and Balochistan. Here she stands with a goat that needed an emergency delivery because its kids died in utero, likely due to contaminated water.

In her own household, almost every child was born in her arms, a fact that is a running joke between her and everyone who knows her. In an area where patriarchy is extremely dominant, she is respected as if she were a man because her strength and resilience are known to all. With these hands, she delivered babies on a canal bank surrounded by floodwater during the monsoons of 2022. Shahzadi felt that after 2010, she didn’t think it could get any worse until she had two pregnant daughters-in-law of her own, her elderly sisters, their pregnant daughters-in-law, and an army of toddlers carrying their possessions on their heads as they walked to safer ground.

Every week, she sits down next to her stone mortar and pestle and begins grinding a myriad of local herbs and plants. She mixes them according to recipes that have been crafted and passed on since the last 200 years. Finally, she makes them into packets with pieces of newspaper tied with string. As she does her job, she continues to keep indigenous practices alive, be it in neo-natal care or post-partum care. She provides them to the women she takes care of to aid in lactation, pain relief, and to ward off infection.

While midwifery is her primary occupation, it does not pay enough for a living, because she does it voluntarily. The community tries to give her anything they can, but one of her principles is to never ask for money because that is not why she provides her service. Her family, like many others, practices tenant farming for a local landowner. As the floodwater washed away the winter harvest, it left behind a layer of contaminated soil, which the wheat crop is too sensitive for. Here Shahzadi stands in the mustard crop her family sowed to pay off their farming loan. Like most people in her village, her family does not own any land, which means even her home could be taken away should the landowner decide to make them move.

Despite her ancestors being buried here for the past 200 years, she is unable to call this place her own. Living among the complexities of land ownership, caste and class inequalities, and economic insecurity as a female head of household, she still continues to be an important member of hundreds of communities who see her as their lifeline. She believes that this makes her work nothing less than a sacred duty. She begins the work with ablution and in the name of God and ends it with an offering in His name.

“Shazadi” was declared one of the winning photo essays of the Her Story Competition - Women Who Dare - a collaboration between Dawn Images and Shirkat Gah - Women’s Resource Centre.