Nursing and midwifery students crowd around to observe as midwives help a woman deliver a baby. (Photo: Jenny Asarnow)
Erin Curtiss is a midwife in Seattle. She is 34 years old, has sharp blue eyes and a raunchy sense of humor. She lives with her two young sons and her girlfriend. Erin, who runs her own home birth business, recently learned of an American nonprofit organization called Midwives for Haiti. She found it on Facebook. ... She traveled to a little city called Hinche, in Haiti’s Central Plateau. She came to volunteer at the public hospital, where patients are crammed into long rooms with no electricity, and where the windows and doors are open to the air – and the mosquitoes and flies and lizards that come through. Back home, Erin only deals with uncomplicated pregnancies, but here, women have extremely high blood pressure, anemia, even cholera. These are the sickest patients she has ever seen, and the hospital staff doesn’t seem to have enough time for anyone. Erin came here mostly to train midwives, but now that she sees how much needs to get done, she wants to do more. So she makes a generous offer. She’ll work the night shift, when there are fewer midwives on staff. ...
The trumped up charges against Revok have reeked of suspicion ever since his arrest. From nabbing Revok in the first place for a parole violation and not a new crime, to the exorbitant $320,000 bail, to be sentenced to half a year in jail a day after the arrest, the whole thing seemed like there was something bigger going on. The LAPD were clearly looking for someone to make an example of doing graffiti outside MOCA. But when they hadn't made an arrest on the streets after the first week, they wanted a high profile name to take down. There was probably a short list of high profile arrests, so short, there was probably only one name on it--Revok. Read more after the jump!...