Frontline Midwife: My Story of Survival and Keeping Others Safe

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The other quote is in a section towards the end, where the author is trying to reconcile her experience of working in first world countries with all the difficulties and dangerous women faced getting pregnant and delivering compared to her own difficult experiences of childbirth in the UK. This book heads you so close to life and death with the thread of hope that numerous paragraphs will make you cry.

Kent exhibits a powerful sense of insight and self-reflection throughout the book, which more than once spills over into undue self-criticism. Not only showing the joys, but shedding light into the politics of refugees, the challenges associated with healthcare in lower resource countries, as well as the personal sacrifices of this admirable path. I can tell that Anna put a lot of thought into telling them in a dignified way and used detail when it was necessary. I recently finished Anna’s book and can honestly say it is one of the best and profoundly important midwifery memoir and illuminating world view book with regards to health care, in particular midwifery that I have ever read. Anna has a lot to cope with from the different culture, religions of those she is treating, their customs, superstitions, as well as the medical conditions and lack of medical supplies too.There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. She speaks of the coping and/or destructive ways in which she and others around her use to get through these experiences. I was an outreach nurse, in a place that had seen 50 years of civil war, covering a geographical area of Belgium. Extremely eye opening and while a difficult read at times it was thoughtful and did justice to important lives and stories.

Summing up this is an emotive memoir about a young woman becoming an aid worker, revealing what it is like for women giving birth in different areas of the world. Indeed, when reading the opening chapter describing Kent's comfortable life in the UK and her preparation for her first ‘mission’, I did at first have a sense of foreboding that the book may present an uncomfortable dynamic between healthcare provider and recipient. Gives a first hand account of the challenges, courage and personal toll of providing healthcare in conflict zones, whilst documenting the personal stories of those living there. All because Anna is nursing in war-torn and poor countries where resources are minimal and what we might see as simple complications in the UK can be fatal in those conditions.At age thirty she would be responsible for the female health of 30,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In this book, along with her own journey, Anna has also written the story of those women who sometimes suffer from malnutrition at home, and sometimes due to lack of medicines, they put their child's life in danger as well. In Frontline Midwife, Kent shares her extraordinary experiences as a nurse, midwife and mother, illuminating the lives of women that are irreparably affected by compromised access to healthcare. Anna Kent not only lays bare her own struggles and losses but those of the pregnant women and babies she cares for in some of the world's most deprived places. Anna goes from being confident in what she has to do, to being in a panic she will never cope and wanting to head right back home, to ultimately not wanting to go home.