Visions For the Future

I am ever expanding and transforming. It is the simplest desire for my life. In that expansion and transformation, I hope to offer the world healing. I am pursuing my dream of becoming a certified professional midwife. It is the way I see myself doing direct action in the lives of women and my community. I hope to move onto opening a holistic women’s health and birthing clinic in the Caribbean while traveling to New York City to collaborate with healers and birthworkers. I believe that the world has become frighteningly medicalized and in the same breath, disconnected from compassionate care. Western medicine has given way to us forgetting that we are psychosomatic beings whose thoughts and emotions show up as disease in our bodies. In becoming a traditional midwife, I will encourage women of color to shift their view of birth from a pathological situation to be treated to a normal event to be honored and supported through.

I plan to go on to becoming certified as a life coach and spiritual adviser so that I can have the tools to assess and support a woman in her journey to wholeness. In opening a clinic dedicated to not only holistic health but also the integration of necessary modern technologies, the innate wisdom that women have can be at the forefront of healing. The clinic would also be a meeting place for women to form sister circles and receive support in other areas of her life. Eventually, I want to become a leader in setting up holistic health clinics in the most impoverished places in the world. I want to learn how to put pressure on local, federal and global governments to fund these clinics, with the stipulation that the women in the community have an instrumental voice in its establishment. Furthermore, I want to move into training women in communities to be self-sustained and tap into their inner healer so that there are more midwives and other holistic healers that are native to the locations.

My heart is shared by the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, Central and South America and Afro-descendant people in New York City. My family is from the Dominican Republic and ended up in the Bronx where I was born. It is my hope to contribute to both worlds. I am interested in not only the health care part but also would like to educate young women in elementary school, high school and college on their reproductive health. Additionally, I would like to use my workshop facilitation abilities to develop empowerment programs that weave female health with dismantling internalized oppression for women of color. My vision for Afro-descendant women is that we collectively shed the shackles of self-hatred and change our communities profoundly. From my own experience, providing health care is not enough if the woman does not feel supported or empowered in her body. The psychological traumas suffered act as barriers to demanding what a woman needs for her life; my work then is to heal the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual parts of a woman so she may be whole.

I want to be a Voice of Our Future Correspondent so that I can be challenged to refine the way I communicate my vision. Having a mentor and a community supporting me would give me feedback and ideas as to how to use my voice to empower Afro-descendant women. I tend to be very academic in the way I write, and my hope is that being a part of this training will help my writing be more accessible. At the moment, most of my work is done online. I want to gain more tools to take my empowerment work to another level. Additionally, I want to expand my network so I can make relationships with other women who are also helping transform reproductive and childbirth for underrepresented women.