Reclaiming Roots: How Cultural Traditions Are Healing Modern Black Maternal Care with Kimberly Porter-Ukeje & Shafia Monroe

Featuring Mama Shafia Monroe & Kimberly Porter-Ukeje

Host: Ali Buchanan · A podcast by Community Doula Alliance

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Ali Buchanan (00:06) Hello, welcome to the Doula Debrief Podcast, everyone. This is your host, Ali Buchanan, and today we are doing a deep dive into a conversation that is so close to our heart — deeply vital, and really shaping the future of birth work.

Joining us today is Kimberly Porter, the powerhouse founder and CEO of the Community Doula Alliance, a nonprofit organization doing incredible on-the-ground work here in Portland to uplift families, help birth workers create sustainable careers, and expand the diversity of the workforce.

And we are also so excited and honored to welcome a true legend in the birth world, Shafia Monroe, affectionately known as Mama Shafia.

Mama Shafia is a renowned midwife; author of Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing; and the founder of ICTC, which in 2002 launched the first Black doula training in the nation and has since trained over 5,000 doulas worldwide.

For over 40 years, she has been a tireless champion for improving infant and maternal health outcomes in the Black community — and a proud mama of seven.

So we are so excited to have this talk, and let’s just get into it. Kimberly, Mama Shafia — welcome to the show. How are we doing today?

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (01:26) Great. Thanks for having us. I’m really excited about having the two of us together. It’ll be a rich conversation. It will be.

Mama Shafia (01:33) It will be.

Ali Buchanan (01:35) Great. So thank you again. And, you know, let’s just kind of get right into the history. Mama Shafia, I’d love to hear how you started out with training doulas in Portland and beyond.

Mama Shafia (01:50) Well, I am a home birth midwife first and foremost — a traditional midwife — and I was running the nonprofit International Center for Traditional Childbearing. And I kept hearing the word “doula,” which was not a familiar word to me. This is in 2000. Hearing the word doula, doula, doula, I finally looked it up and learned what it was. I learned that it was made, at that time, for supporting middle-class white American women.

It meant “slave women,” and basically it was what I saw historically that Black women had already done — without having that name, without being paid. I said, well, let me flip this over and get this into my community, so that Black women can take the benefit of being a doula. The other part about it was that it’s a fast track to direct services — because being a midwife, which is my preference, it takes a lot longer to be a midwife. So this is a good step that we can do,

whether you want to be a midwife or not. But also, the other exciting part is that we do a survey with our trainings. When we’re through, we have a survey. At intake — do you want to be a midwife? No. At the end — do you want to be a midwife? At least one-fourth say they want to be a midwife. So that’s one way to build capacity for more Black midwives. But again, it also means that more Black women will understand what doula work is and how to work with midwives. So it’s a double benefit. That’s how I got started, in 2002,

and I’ve been on the road now 24 years. Nonstop — never took a break, not through COVID, nothing. We just have continued training. So, yeah, it’s nice.

Ali Buchanan (03:24) And you mentioned you’re about to go back to Michigan, right? You just have another group.

Mama Shafia (03:29) Yes.

Ali Buchanan (03:31) And how many do you train every year?

Mama Shafia (03:37) Maybe 80 to 100. Already it’s going to be 80 — but just Michigan, because 42, plus we just got through training 10, and before that we trained 15. So, yeah.

Ali Buchanan (03:51) That’s amazing. Kimberly, tell us about how you got started as a doula and your experience training under Mama Shafia.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (04:01) I kind of came into this work because I’m an MSW — I’m a clinical social worker, I’m a psychotherapist — so my work has mainly been in mental health. I used to be a parole officer, and I pivoted to, like, no, I want to do something softer. So that’s why I came to Oregon.

And so I knew about maternal health, and I knew about the inequities and things like that. And at that time I was working at the Black Parent Initiative — I was the director of the home visiting program. And a person named Charles McGee introduced me to Mama Shafia; they paid for my training. And I went over to ICTC and became trained, I think, in 2014. And then that opened up my eyes in a whole different way in terms of, like, birth work, right? Like, my experiences with birth — I didn’t know what I didn’t know. When I had my two kids — a son, and a 21-year-old daughter — birth was perfect. Both of them had no problems. And I thought everybody had that type of experience, right? I didn’t know that it was an issue, especially with my people — with women, Black women.

So I went over there to ICTC and just had a — just a spiritual experience. And I also trained with some South African Zulu doulas. I’ve always been into African culture, African history, African traditions, all of my life. Even here — growing up in Virginia, I was a little baby of the Black Panther Party. I’ve always been Black, Black, right? But then I wanted more of a spiritual, cultural understanding of birth work. And that’s what I got from ICTC, from Mama Shafia. That’s where I got it from. And I had never heard of a doula either, until ICTC.

And that’s when I started realizing — I knew about all the other stuff, the outcomes and the inequities and, you know, maternal health, stuff like that. I knew that part of it. But how do we fix this? You know, that was how I came into the work — not so much as practicing as a doula, but understanding the landscape of birth work. And that’s why you see us here today. I’ve had some births — I’ve had probably six, you know, but not a lot. I’ve had enough to know what to do, and enough to know I need somebody else to do it. And I need to help other people have a pathway and a profession, to be able to do what they do — what we’ve always done. We’ve birthed the world, the country. Black women have always birthed everybody, and not gotten compensated for it. Okay? Right. So, yeah, that’s how I came into this work — but it was really because Mama Shafia opened my eyes up into, like, wow, I really need to know this type of information, and how to help my community better.

Mama Shafia (06:31) Now, like we said — you knew about the disparities, but the part that I feel is important, that we brought in through ICTC, was the positive part. It’s not always “woe is me.” Here are solutions. We have a culture. We’ve always done this well. What happened? What’s happening now? I think that was the part that, at that time, most people were not talking about. So what happens is that racism came in. They took the Black midwife. They disfigured the family. A whole bunch of things happened. But I’m glad that through — you know, Kimberly, myself, and other organizations around the country — we’re bringing it back. So it’s a good thing.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (07:05) And I want to say also, a lot of things came up at ICTC — with me, with Mama Shafia. It really made me go talk back to my elders. Like, my grandmother right now — 98 years old. I was talking to her, you know, 20 years ago, and I was like, “Grandma, Mom, this and that,” and all this stuff that they just took for granted. And we just all did — like the bonding, and the putting the nickel or quarter on the belly. We did that.

Mama Shafia (07:29) So that’s —

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (07:30) Yeah. I started talking to Mama Shafia, and it opened up. I was able to talk more to my family — my mothers and my grandmothers — about stuff that they did in Georgia. That was no big deal. Nobody talked about it. It was no practice. It wasn’t a class. It was passed down. Right.

Mama Shafia (07:44) From lifestyle.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (07:45) Yeah. It was just everything — you did that. And I’m just like, wow, we did all that stuff. And that’s where it came up to me, and I shared that with Mama Shafia. I was like, “Did you —” You’d say, “Yeah, yeah.” I was like, wow. So it just opened up a lot about really celebrating me — and being Black too, a woman — and what… It wasn’t just about birthing a baby. Like, you do go to the hospital, you go through childbirth classes, and you go to Lamaze. I did all that. But it’s like — what does this mean, to be a Black wife, to be a Black mom? You know? So Mama Shafia opened my eyes up in a way that’s uncomfortable. I can’t — there’s no words to put to the wisdom I learned from that class.

Mama Shafia (08:23) Thank you.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (08:25) You’re welcome.

Ali Buchanan (08:27) What are some of, like, the biggest changes that both of you have seen over the years — and in the different regions that you’ve been exposed to — of caring for Black birthing people, even the birth workers, with the systems now? What are those changes that you’ve seen?

Mama Shafia (08:48) I’m going to say, really, what Kimberly said — I see that more of the trainings around the country are being more culturally conscious. They’re adding in, you know, tradition, taking the time to learn. But before, people were just training — I want to say, real — just like this training from what mainstream was. There were no personalizations like this. This is what the books said; we’re just going to do it this way. And it wasn’t working for us. I think now, definitely now, I’m hearing more and more people using different words. They’re calling her “birth sister,” or “birth friend.”

They change the language. They’re going back, talking to their elders. They know it’s not just about birth — it’s really about family and community. They’re expanding their concept. I feel that women are working closer together. That myth that Black women can’t work together is not true. We work very well together; we want to work together. Our men are present and caring, so a lot of those myths have been debunked in these trainings. I see the system listening differently and better,

you know, to what we say that we need. And, you know, if they don’t support us, then we have coalition to actually put pressure to get them to come forward. I think the Momnibus Act is a big deal, you know — with a Black senator to put this whole national movement to recognize maternal care based on the issues of Black family health. And definitely breastfeeding has increased. We’re going back. It’s full circle.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (10:09) I agree. I think that it now is seen as a role, a title. I mean, even though we’ve been doing it for a long time, I think in our country — we like titles, right? We like designations, like “doula.” We’ve been doing it. We’ve been doing doula-ing. We’ve been doing that. But not that word, “doula.” But it’s the same kind of thing. A doula’s kind of an auntie — a trained auntie kind of a thing. So we’ve been doing that. And so I think that now — and if we look at it globally —

people recognize that designation of birth work. Birth work, right? Because I think before — I mean, no doubt about it, there’s still people just training mass doulas. But then they come over to us and we have to retrain them. Okay? So that’s one thing. And they don’t have the core skills to really understand terminology, like medical terminology. They’re just there for comfort. But it is about the intellectual side of birth. What are the doctors doing? Are you understanding the language? Are you translating the language, so that our people can understand? And so that’s what I notice, again — instead of interpreters, because some of those interpreters don’t understand birth work either. They’re just an interpreter of the language. They’re not an interpreter of birth. And so that’s happening too. And another thing is: because we are Black, we speak English. Yeah — but there’s a different thing when we’re talking. I’m talking to a Black mom, I’m saying, “Girl, they about to cut you, girl.” Right?

Mama Shafia (11:31) Exactly.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (11:31) I mean, we both speak English, but that doctor may come and say, “You need a cesarean,” and they’re like, “What?” You know? Or whatever. And some of the African ones — Kimberly, “They’re gonna cut me?” Yes, they’re gonna cut you. Right? So Black doulas have to translate — in English, right? You know — to understand.

Mama Shafia (11:46) It’s all English. Right. Exactly.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (11:49) Exactly. So it’s a lot. So I see that shift. I still see — it now is recognized as a profession. I think this country understands that we do have inequities, and that Black women are dying at birth, you know, and it could be prevented. So I do think there’s an awareness — more, if you want to look at it from a public health lens. It’s definitely more of an awareness. But I think that, on the ground, doulas are ready to do the work.

And they’re ready to be a liaison between the hospital and the families. Right.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (12:22) That’s right. See, that’s the biggest change, I think, for me.

Mama Shafia (12:25) And the other big change is that they’re getting paid now, in 12 states. So now we have women who — because, again, this whole doula thing was created for white middle-class women who could afford to pay cash, and we were left out of it. And so now — not that every Black woman’s on Medicaid, but still, Medicaid is 65% of the nation’s payment insurance types. And now we have Black doulas that actually work in their community and don’t have to work two jobs to try to help someone in between. So that’s a huge difference.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (12:55) Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why I created CDA — that whole payment part, that we’re gonna talk about. That’s huge for me. I feel like everybody should have it, and everybody should be comfortable. I’ve always been around successful middle-class Black people my whole life, right? And so I always hear a narrative that we are not educated, that our fathers are not in the home, and all that kind of stuff. That’s not a truth. That is not my truth.

Mama Shafia (13:15) That’s right. My dad was there my whole lifetime.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (13:18) Yeah, my dad — yeah. My dad just left this earth in 2023. So, you know, I was with him. And so that part of it changes the narrative — that part of what that looks like in the Black family, in the Black male birth space, and people getting paid. But then — it was only dominated by white women; most of you only could have a doula if you could pay. So that put a lot of the white

doulas in the scope of only having clients that could pay. Now it can be through Medicaid — that part. But I also worked on — because there’s the other ones, like I said, the ones that live out, not my side of town, that work in Intel and Nike, that see Providence or Kaiser. So we at CDA have gotten a relationship with not only the Medicaid side, but the other side — the ones with insurance.

Mama Shafia (14:03) Insurance. Exactly.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (14:05) So then it opens it up for more Black women, right? Not just the ones that want Medicaid or things like that, but the other ones that also probably couldn’t afford it — maybe don’t want to pay 4,000. So what we’re doing is, we’re more competitive. We’re in the game, right? CDA is pretty competitive with other, predominantly white, private doula organizations. And our people, our doulas, don’t have to go over there. They can come over to CDA, and they can experience their culture. They can eat their food, and it can be compensated.

And so that is the biggest part that I’ve really worked for. I don’t play checkers, I play chess. And so — this game has been dominated by white women and white doulas, and we’ve changed the whole paradigm: that we are as intelligent, we can have the infrastructure, we are trained, you know, through ICTC. We don’t need all that. We can be over here and do our own thing and save our own community. Because the other —

Mama Shafia (14:57) Exactly.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (14:58) — worked. It has killed our babies. You know, it hasn’t worked. But this is a strategy that we know is working, and that doulas can be compensated for. And they can feel pride when they go to the hospital. They are a Black doula. They are certified as much as the other doulas that are out there.

Mama Shafia (15:14) And more trained. Highly trained.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (15:16) Yes, yes, absolutely. I agree.

Mama Shafia (15:19) Yeah. And I’m going to say too, Ali — what was different with ICTC: we were the first organization to combine the birth and the postpartum as one. We’ve always had — that’s why we call it the full circle. It was never — you’re either a birth doula, or you’re postpartum. Two different things. In our community, we want continuity of care. Why would I have you for my birth and have Mary for my postpartum? We already know you — it doesn’t even make sense. But because we use the legacy of the 20th-century African American midwife,

who provided comprehensive care — we used that model. So our doulas were always trained to provide full scope, anywhere in the pregnancy: whether you’re pregnant, in labor, birth, postpartum, breastfeeding, newborn care — all that was included. So I think that was a model that was not — now everyone’s doing that model, but we started doing that, and have always done that. And that makes a difference. And I think that’s — this is what you’re saying, Kimberly — that’s what makes us different, you know, because our doulas walk out ready to help the mother anywhere

in her reproductive cycle, including her partner, you know? Yeah. And debunking those myths — yeah, our fathers. In fact, they did a study, just recently, that the most engaged father in the country is the African American father. They’re more prone for potty training, all this great stuff — but we heard they were all in jail or absent. To say “your baby’s father” is really an insulting thing, you know? So it’s just — you, right? No, my husband’s right here.

You know, no — granddad’s over there. So, yeah, just letting people know that we’re just regular, like everybody else.

Ali Buchanan (16:48) Right. And it’s really interesting too, because it’s not only that you have the technical side — you have the ability to serve families, to have a business, to really step into birth work — but it’s also the one thing I think that separates CDA, the ICTC doulas, like, full-circle doulas: that they are bringing in their cultural experience. It’s that one piece, I think, that will always stand out.

And I think that’s something that has been successfully reclaimed. And I know you talk about that in your book too, Mama Shafia. What would you say is one tradition that — if a new birth worker was coming in and saying, “I want to do something different” — what would you say is one of the most important traditions to reclaim?

Mama Shafia (17:41) I would say the belly wrapping, because that’s the physiological and emotional support. When you wrap — after you have the baby, your uterus is all open and it’s moving, and it takes six weeks to shrink, and it’s a hollow organ. Now, the wrapping gives the mother a center. That’s it — they feel centered, they feel grounded again, they tell me. It also makes the bleeding different. It supports the recti muscles to heal again. It creates warmth.

It helps reduce involution pain for the cesarean section. I’m like, oh my God — “If I wrap a mom, this is my third cesarean section, I feel so different.” And not only that, they’ll say, “I tried the one from Amazon, I tried the one from the doctor, but it didn’t work,” because that is that elastic. And we use an African cloth — cotton. We pick cotton, we own that. So we’re gonna use cotton cloth. I feel that that’s one thing. We always did that too. I don’t know if your grandmother told you, but we always wrapped.

Women were clothed, and then they told us not to do it in the ’30s. So women then started putting on girdles, trying to — we still tried to do it by using the girdle, and then it just disappeared. We just stopped doing it entirely. So that has been a real important component that I see happening across the nation, where doulas are saying that “my mom just loved this” — the moms, they love us. I would say that’s definitely something I think that doulas, for African American families, they should reintroduce that tradition that we used to do historically, and bring it back.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (19:04) No — I remember now, I’m thinking about it. My brother’s two years younger than me — and there was the mama of the neighborhood, right? Her name was Rachel. And I remember her wrapping my mom up when she would drop us off. She would wrap her up. Yeah. And I noticed she was a mother in the neighborhood; she would have other young women come over. And I remember sitting in there watching her wrap people, and I was like, “Why is she wrapping?” But I just sat there and watched.

I remember her cooking stuff for the people — the women that would come pregnant, and they would come to her.

Mama Shafia (19:34) I’d love to know her. What a blessing to have that in your memory.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (19:37) Yeah, I had that in my memory.

Mama Shafia (19:39) I love how we can see that we were always in this work. You know, we can remember things — like your grandmother, the community. Even when I do my introduction, I say, “Who’s a biological mother? Who’s a community mother?” And that community mother in your neighborhood, who just took care of everyone — she was a doula. She’s probably a midwife from down South who just couldn’t practice, carrying on that root and healing work that we do.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (19:59) Yeah. Yeah. We always had that in our community, you know — down South and everything. There was always that head mother. Everybody knew that mother — go to their house, pray… they would pray for us, they would do whatever, they’d touch the kids. It was something that — it was work. But we did it. We just put the little thing on our belly. Probably African things that we were doing, that we brought over here to America, that we were just —

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (20:21) We just took for granted. And everybody just — “that’s my mama, that’s your mom, they’re going over there for that, you need to do that.” And then we just went over there and did it. We didn’t think — it was just cultural.

Mama Shafia (20:32) That’s right. We trusted what our parents said to us. You know, we trusted our elders, and we respect them and trust them. I think that’s the big thing too that our trainings bring forth. I know Africa is definitely about respecting our elders. This country definitely has… everything has to be, you know, 25 and under to be something. Either you’re 25, or you have to have your baby at 38. This whole weird thing happened in this country. And I think, for us, reminding us to go — if you have elders, go to them.

What we’re talking about — sometimes you might be fortunate, you might hear that this ain’t new. We’ve been doing this; you just never asked. Yeah.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (21:10) Yeah.

Mama Shafia (21:12) And that validates what I say. It’s like — you know what, my grandmother said that to me, Miss Shafia. So it’s like, now I got a backup. I’m not making this up. Everything’s not in the book, but a lot is. But when you tell somebody that, and then they say “my mother told me,” or, as you mentioned here, “I remember my community seeing this” — like, we’ve always done this.

And so it’s really full circle. We’re going back to Sankofa. We’re going back to fetch it, because it worked.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (21:35) Mm-hmm. And that’s why I like the beauty of your book, Mama Shafia — that you are actually capturing it. A lot of our story, just in general, but in the birth space — you’re actually capturing all those stories that we’re talking about now. Because before, we were just oral. Like, it would just be — she told her, and we just knew it, right? But nobody wrote it down. It was just — you knew it. It just passed down from generation to generation. And the richness, I think, for us as African Americans here in this country, is that we have that past history indoctrinated in our brain. It’s there. And it would be good if we can get it out. So the fact that you actually encapsulated it into a book — so you can share it out to people, and hopefully the younger generation will carry it with them, and your legacy can continue.

Mama Shafia (22:22) Thank you. I hope so. I hope that that book is on every kitchen table. As Erykah Badu said, on the talk we had — she said, “This is the postpartum Bible.” We have a template. You can pull anything you want out of it. But you may not do everything. Maybe it’s just — you’re anemic. And that’s the big issue: anemia, because of fibroids and heavy bleeding, that — in life, we just suffer quietly. But there’s a solution. We can eat a certain way. They didn’t know that.

In fact, I didn’t know that liver had more iron than beef. I always thought it was beef. But when I did the research, liver has the highest amount, and second is goat. And pork is last. I had no idea. Or — what, buttermilk? Do you drink a lot of buttermilk in Georgia? Do you think people drink buttermilk in Georgia?

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (23:03) We did drink a lot of buttermilk. A lot of natural butter.

Mama Shafia (23:07) Yeah. Buttermilk is a drink that we always had. You know, they fermented the butter, and the leftover would be a milk — so they call it buttermilk. So it’s kind of fermented. That’s where kefir and yogurt came from. But as African Americans, we stopped drinking it. When I researched it — it helps you sleep, it has an amino acid in it for relaxation, it helps lower the blood pressure, it’s high in calcium. But, you know, we hear a lot about food, because we only hear about the Mediterranean diet. We don’t hear about the African American diet.

Our diet has been villainized. “Oh, it’s going to give you diabetes and hypertension.” But that’s not our real diet. Our real diet was greens and beans, and liquids and water, and peaches. We weren’t eating a bunch of fried pork rinds — that was a delicacy, it wasn’t an everyday thing. So I just wanted to bring back that our diet is a very healthy diet. You know, my granddad lived to be 102, my uncle 104, my aunt 103, my other aunt — we all live old, and they all have the same thing: buttermilk, greens, butter beans, turnips,

beets, pickled watermelon rinds. They ate really good. The Delany sisters lived to be 100, with all the vegetables. Go to our house — you know, coleslaw, cauliflower, greens, it’d be beets, you know, carrot salad — like, boy, all these vegetables. Like, I just wanted some meat!

Ali Buchanan (24:20) We had a lot of roots. It was also, like, yuca — and you would have the caldo, like the broths, right? That you could just smell in the household. And that was always — it was just so warm and healing.

Mama Shafia (24:34) It wasn’t tacos every day! All we see is tacos — “y’all just eat tacos, right? No vegetables.” That’s not the truth.

Ali Buchanan (24:41) Yep.

Ali Buchanan (24:43) And so — okay, we’ll wrap this up, because you have been around 40 years doing this, Mama Shafia. Why now? Why did you decide to bring this book into the world today?

Mama Shafia (24:58) Well, it’s been a long labor — okay, I’ll put it in birth talk. I had a gestation, and I carried it as a dream from 2015. I found my diary — I actually keep a lot of journals, I journal a lot — and I was flipping through some of them. I like to go back and say, “Oh, wow.” 2015 — “I’m going to write a book on postpartum care.” That’s what I said. And then, you know, I lived my life, doing what I’m doing, as I mentioned — raising children and traveling around the world, doing political,

birth justice work, so that we could be where we are today, with all the different things that are happening around the country that have improved. But then, you know, I’m teaching these trainings all the time, and I’m doing this information in the classroom. Like, “Well, where can I find this?” “Oh, actually, you can’t. It’s inside me. I only can give it to you when I’m doing a class.” So it’s like — I need to get this available, so that everybody can access it. Whether you take my class or not, you can get this book, you can read it.

And then we have the whole maternal health thing. So I just said, you know what? I’m going to write this book. And then my daughter said, “Well, get a publisher.” I contacted another writer — his name is Michael Twitty. His book is called The Cooking Gene; he has this amazing book on the history of Black foodways. And I just love what he wrote. So I hit him up on Instagram. He actually replied back. And he had the proposals — so, anyway, I did all that.

And they accepted it. So once they accepted it — it was 2023 that they accepted it — and I was supposed to have it done in a year. And my oldest son passed away, unexpectedly, so I threw everything off. Of course, they gave me more time. So I finished it last year. My mantra is that I’m divinely guided, I’m truly blessed, I’m living my success. Right now — it wasn’t time.

It wasn’t time for me to write it. But the time is now, with all the maternal mortality out, with the fourth trimester, and with the Black movement — Black Lives Matter around birth. It was just time for us to say, “Hey, we have a culture around postpartum care.” I could have written about pregnancy care. I could have written about a lot of that. I could have written about African American breastfeeding, or African American parenting — which might be my next book. But it was the postpartum part that called to me.

Ali Buchanan (27:05) I’m excited. I feel like this is a book series — we’ve got Black breastfeeding, we’ve got all these coming through. We got a series coming out. I love it.

Mama Shafia (27:11) We do, we do, we do. I read a lot of books — I’m enjoying it. My library’s full, that’s why I keep saying I gotta get another bookshelf. So, yeah.

Ali Buchanan (27:23) How about some wise words — some wisdom to share — for future birth workers out there, or new doulas? What would you like to share with them going forward?

Mama Shafia (27:35) I would say that your work is important. Live your best self in the work that you do. You know, come in to empower the family — don’t come in to be the expert. You’re the expert only to guide them, so that they know what to do. Mothers know how to have babies. We’re a support system; we’re not the experts. So be humble in the work, and empower the family. Because when we’re through helping, they’re still there. So we need to give them tools, so that when I’m not around, they can manage and navigate the healthcare system, and society at large —

being a new mom, being a parent. Yeah. And use humor — I love to laugh with that person.

Ali Buchanan (28:13) Get that oxytocin going! How about you, Kimberly — leave us some wise words before we head out.

Kimberly Porter-Ukeje (28:19) If we’re talking about Black women — be true to yourself, be your authentic self. Always have radical candor. Be authentic. Be proud in who you are and where you come from, and understand your history and your legacy — of how rich and strong we are as Black women. And then, in terms of doula work — continue to do the work. Like, go to trainings, like ICTC. Go to those types of trainings to get that foundational, cultural understanding of the history of birth work.

And then, also, work toward getting paid. Work toward getting compensated. I mean — it’s great and fine that you have that cultural understanding, but I’ve seen a lot of doulas that have that experience, but they don’t know how to move forward. And so they end up doing something else. And so now — I know, for CDA, we’ve created a pathway for you to be able to bring your people in, to do the things that you’re doing.

Our doulas are mothers too. And so they need to care for their families. So I wanted to have a ripple effect. I’m very big about, you know, putting your chest out — like I said, I was a little kid at the Black Panther Party, so I’m starting out radical from the gate, from birth. Okay? My parents are very conscious of Blackness, and my dad was in the Vietnam War. I know what it’s like to be Black, and be down South.

And so I want us to be able to stand proud in these spaces that we’re in — the hospital, or wherever we’re at — and be proud as a Black doula. ICTC doula — stand proud. Always be proud, never be ashamed. Always have pride, as a Black woman and a Black doula, in this space. Those are my words. That’s right.

Ali Buchanan (29:45) Love it.

Mama Shafia (29:46) Please get the book, because the book is going to give you that culture. It’s going to give you those techniques. It’s going to give you history. It’s going to give you things that you can pull from, to make a difference in a new family’s life. They just had a baby — we don’t have to suffer because we had a baby. There’s so many things that we can do. I love the part at the end: how to ask questions of the medical team, to make sure that you don’t become a statistic.

So — I don’t want to blame the victim at all, but just: how do we learn how to ask the right questions?

Ali Buchanan (30:18) Yes. And where can we get the book, Mama Shafia?

Mama Shafia (30:22) Amazon, Goodreads — any bookstore. Or you can also get it from my website, at shafiamonroe.com.

Ali Buchanan (30:32) Okay — well, thank you so much, Kimberly, Mama Shafia. What a wonderful conversation, this was fabulous. And so, thank you again, everybody. Make sure you check out the book. And if you need community, come on over to Community Doula Alliance. Thanks, everybody!