No, really.

When I named my baby Artemis Esther, I expected to have to answer a few questions.

For example, “Did your husband mind giving your baby a Greek name?” To which I would answer cheerfully, “Actually, Artemis was also the name of a famous Persian woman, an admiral in Xerxes’ navy, described in Herodotus as being exceptionally intelligent and brave. It means ’speaker of the truth’ in old Iranian. So it’s really a Persian and western name.”

Or perhaps, “Didn’t you think it might be too strong a name, the goddess of fertility?” To which I would reply, “I’m sure she will grow into it in her own way.”

Or maybe, “It’s so unusual- won’t she be teased?” To which I would reply, “There are lots of unusual names nowadays. We wanted a strong, meaningful name, not something average.”

Even, if, perchance, I were to run into a Iranophile, “What is it with the women of Xerxes?”. To which I would reply, “It was just a happy coincidence- my mother’s middle name is Esther.”

I didn’t expect:

“Arte-what?”
“Oh, how old is he?”
“Armistice?”
“Isn’t that a man’s name?”
“How do you spell that?”

One lady at the pediatrician’s couldn’t even read it. “Ar… ar… ar…” Just imagine the trouble she’d have with the word “phonetic”. “Artemis,” I completed, unable to completely mask my disgust.

I first learned about Greek deities in the seventh grade. I realize that I was more interested in classics than the average pupil (I eventually minored in classics), but we did have to memorize the gods and goddesses so you’d think it would be vaguely familiar to most people. 40% of the population is supposed to have a college degree- did none of these people study Western civilization? Plato? Herodotus? Plutarch? Nothing???

There is not a single male historical figure named Artemis. Some people in the United States may have taken this up as a man’s name, and I can understand that if it was an educated choice (fertility and hunting being equally masculine and feminine), but I refuse to accept that the name can be turned into a man’s name just like that. In popular works of art, whenever a man is named Artemis, the original goddess is referred to and it is explained how it is that a man came to have a woman’s name.

It got to the point that when I was in The Body Shop and a young sales assistant came up to me and asked whether that wasn’t the god with the wings on his feet, I was actually impressed. “That was Hermes, and Artemis is the goddess of fertility, hunting, midwives, and so on, but you’re close,” I replied. I didn’t even bother with the Persian Artemis for whom she is really named. I didn’t want to confuse or discourage someone who was so nearly on the right track. As it was I think she thought I said the god with winged sandals was named Herpes, because she blushed.

Artemis is still a name in use in the Persian community, and is common enough in Greece. All the Persians and Europeans I spoke to- especially the French and Italians- thought it sounded like a lovely woman’s name.

It was never my intention to give my daughter a name that nobody had ever heard of, or that sounded like a man’s name, or that sounded foreign. I thought I was giving her a name that appears in the Bible, Herodotus, and countless plays, articles, movies, games and stories, the name of one of the great woman heroes in Persia and a quintessentially feminine goddess, an Indo-European name that would be at least as recognizeable as Athena or Demeter.

But it just goes to show that you can never underestimate how poorly educated most Americans are.

Almost forgot- some shout-outs to deserving blogs:

Thanks to all who link to me and thus, all the other bloggers in the humanitarian sphere.

My husband is back in Afghanistan and I recently picked up a book about Afghanistan. My mother bought it some time ago and recently finished it. I don’t know whether her buying it had anything to do with my being there.

The book is The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. The guy spends his vacations walking around Asian countries and this book is about his walk from Herat to Kabul in early 2002.

The first thing that struck me when reading the book is how poorly Afghans come off. Although many reviewers did not seem to notice this (though the New York Times reviewer sort of did), I think that most Afghans, if they were to read the book, would call Mr. Stewart a liar.

Of course, they would be wrong. It was difficult for me to read all the hypocrisy (”Muslims are the most hospitable people; We are the most hospitable Muslims; now give me money to buy the dry crust of bread I am serving you…”) again since most of the time I was there I worked hard to block it out. When there, I constantly echoed the Afghans’ own mantra: Afghanistan is an extremely hospitable country, Afghanistan is an extremely hospitable country…

I repeated this although I was invited to about 10 times fewer homes in my two years there than my time in Russia and Tajikistan. A number of times I found myself, like Mr. Stewart, invoking Muslim hospitality in order to get the most modest concession (e.g. letting us drive through a village where we had sponsored a project) out of people. And unlike Stewart, I usually had something to offer and never came with a weapon.

I never entered a house in the former Soviet Union without having food shoved into my hands. I never left a Tajik home without food in my hands or in my stomach. In Tajikistan, if you refuse food, they give you something to walk out the door with, and will trick you into taking it if you refuse.

One suspects that many of the readers of The Places in Between will not understand the extent to which Stewart’s narrative condemns the Afghans he met, because they do not know what is the real tradition of Asian hospitality. They may not know that in Russia, where millions still live without land, electricity, or even more than $1.50 per day, that if you enter the house of a poor person, you risk plunging him into starvation because he really will give you his last piece of bread. If you so much look at someone’s coat, he will give it to you. They may not know that when Stewart comments on being refused entry to a house, he is basically condemning the owner of the house to hell- since hospitality is a must in the Muslim tradition.

Of course, part of it is Stewart’s fault. Rather than relying on strangers and normal people, poor people, he is forced by the situation and his own approach to rely on commanders and their lackeys- not the most generous or hospitable Afghans. He uses the old-fashioned tradition of getting letters of authority to go from one area to the next, so that he is always under someone’s protection.

In Afghanistan, this means he was always under some warlord’s protection. When you deal with butchers and mafia men, you have to expect to be surrounded by nasty people.

Whether he could have made it one kilometer on his own is another question, but I suspect that it is possible if only just. And I’m certain that if he had, he would have encountered an entirely different country- perhaps one full of people like the guards who begged him to stay with them when their master was out, who I’m sure would have fried him their last eggs, and borrowed money to feed him fresh bread.

I am sure of this because though I was invited into few houses, those people showed amazing kindness and generosity. And I was treated to the remnants of Asian hospitality at least once… when I complimented a colleague on her scarf, and she gave it to me, against all insistence and persuasion to make her keep it. It almost reminded me of Russia…

If I were a photographer, or actually if I could take pictures at all- and the readers of this blog know better than anyone that I cannot- I would have loved to do what Christopher Herwig does. I love his pictures how he chooses his subjects.

Now he’s got two new photobooks at his website, www.herwigphoto.com.

One is on Soviet bus stops. How cool is that? Go watch the preview and if you like it, consider buying the books.

And to Christopher: our next request is Soviet tile murals.

With a precious, healthy (tfoo, tfoo, tfoo) baby to call our own, I think my husband and I consider ourselves the most blessed people on the planet. Compared to this, nothing else seems remotely lucky. However, if anything is to seem fortunate again, I’d start with having had the chance to get prenatal care in three different countries. That was interesting.

I’ll skip France, though I was quite happy there, and focus on the differences between the Soviet-Eurasian model of OB-Gyn care and the American one. Leaving aside the enormous need for funding, exodus of professionals to the West, and other post-perestroika / shock-therapy problems, which are obviously not a planned or integral part of their system, I prefer the former more.

I had planned to have my baby in France because of their excellent health care system. It might not seem so to the people living there, but in fact, they have some of the best health statistics in the world on nearly all counts. It’s also possible to pay cash for health services and to buy insurance for one year. However, because I was travelling, I failed to register at a hospital in time and later found out I needed to be present in person with my declaration of pregnancy, which I couldn’t do until far too late.

I didn’t want to have my baby in Tajikistan, with its dearth of emergency services (though prenatal care in the city can be quite good). I wanted to be around family, too, but knew it would be hard for my mother to come to Tajikistan.

When I decided I was going to have to have my baby in the U.S., my first thoughts were of cesarean sections (the rate of which is around 25% nationwide and even higher in some areas), drugs, and labour accelerants / inducers, which are used in abundance. I hate taking processed drugs and foods and I hate hospitals and doctors’ offices even more, so this sounded terrible to me.

There is a small but dedicated tribe of people that use homeopathic medicine, eat organic, and have their babies at home or in birth houses. According to the only source I could find, this is about 1% of the population. My husband, who is very supportive and open-minded, agreed to a homebirth he found out that we could get real medical care at home (”your health is the priority”), and that my mother also thought a home birth would be a good idea. So we went for it.

In Tajikistan, babies are born in “maternity homes”, as in the rest of the former USSR and many other European and Asian countries. They are rarely born in hospitals- this is only the case if the mother or baby is already ill. A maternity home is like a birth house, which is solely dedicated to mothers having babies and recovering. Babies are delivered by akusherki (from the French “accoucher“) or midwives, but OBGyns are present in the building and there are facilities available for medical interventions such as vacuum deliveries and c-sections, just in case. The rate of c-sections, however, is lower than the U.S.’s in nearly every other country in the whole world, and the same goes for Tajikistan.

My OBGyn in Tajikistan advised me to have two ultrasounds- one at 12 weeks and one at 25 weeks. She said the ultrasound was still a relatively new procedure (like in the U.S. it’s only been used for healthy pregnancies for about 20 years) and that there could be unknown, though obviously subtle, risks. We discussed my diet, avoiding stress, and each visit she weighed me, measured my abdomen and uterus using a tape measure and her hands, and determined the baby’s position through asking me about it’s kicks (in North America this is called “baby mapping”). She used a special wooden stethoscope to listen to my baby’s heartbeat and took my blood pressure, asked about swelling, bowel movements, and discomforts. If all was going well, she sent me off happily. Though I measured small in the abdomen throughout my pregnancy, she said this was common among smaller, first time mothers. “Your uterus doesn’t stretch as fast,” she explained, “but for future babies you’ll get bigger.”

We met once per month, and would have met once every two weeks from 30 weeks on and then once per week for the last month, had I not left the country.

For our last appointment, when I was 28 weeks pregnant, she recommended a general checkup with a terapevt (”therapeutic specialist”, or general practitioner whose job it is to do put together information from all the specialists) and with two other specialists, the eye doctor and a last ultrasound. After they gave me a clean bill of health, she signed off that I was in good health to fly as of that date.

Had I delivered in Tajikistan, I would have gone to the central or second maternity house and been offered pain medication. Had I refused, they would not have given me any. I might have been given oxytocin to speed up labour if I’d been behind (as it turns out in my case this is not likely to have happened because by the time it got strong enough to go to the hospital, the baby was already halfway down the birth canal). Forceps and c-sections are rarely used.

Most women in Tajikistan no longer receive this standard of care, because they are so poor and the socialist programmes are too underfunded. It remains, however, the maternity care standard on paper, and what the tiny middle class does get when they pay a bit more for it. Nearly all women in the cities get some form of follow-up.

It seems to me typical that here in the U.S. we should be polarized into two extremes- the overly medical, litigation-driven model of care in which a doctor specializing in surgery (c-sections) and pathology delivers the baby, and a small movement of very independent people who chose to have their babies at home without immediate access to pain medication, and without doctors nearby, in which a woman with only two or three years’ medical training (but much more experience) is delivering the baby.

Whereas in the former USSR they managed to keep some balance- birth is considered healthy, a woman’s rite of passage and a joy to be facilitated by another experienced woman. But they also made sure that the latest medical advances were available to women. Since experienced midwives and accouchers were in charge, these were taken advantage of only when all the other techniques, developed over centuries across Asia, didn’t work.

In the U.S., we have to choose: 25% chance of surgery, or your home.

Ah, the joys of living in the richest country in the world.

I had my baby! And she is a girl!

We decided to have the baby at home to keep her safe and away from drugs and doctors who don’t know how to get babies out without cutting open your stomach or cutting the most sensitive part of the female body open. The midwives were absolutely beautiful and they really know how to help someone push a baby out.

I was assisted by my dear husband and mother.

I promise this will not turn into a baby blog, though, so the next post will be about homebirths and the different way people have babies in the U.S. and Tajikistan, and what my relatives think about my coming to America and paying thousands of dollars to have my baby in a house instead of in a birth center.

*For the uninitiated- babies lose weight in the first days because they poop out all of their poop from their time in the womb.