This is us!

Irene
Welcome to our True Midwifery school!

Jose and I met in 2008, when I had already been a midwife for over 6 years.

I had just trained as a nurse in Spain when in 1999 I moved to the UK to work as a nurse.

A year after I started my midwifery training in Birmingham, one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
After finishing my training my first job as a midwife was in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge.

Two years after I moved to Spain and started working at Gran Canaria Maternity Hospital, with 8000 births a year it’s one of the busiest hospitals in the country.
A couple of years after, I worked at Fuerteventura’s Hospital, with 700 births a year it was a big change, much more in tune with how I like to work, being able to give each woman a much more individualised care.

While I was in the Canary Islands, I started to work independently as a private midwife.

After meeting Jose (it was love at "negative numbers" sight as we were deeply in love with each other before we physically met),  I moved to Galicia, Spain’s best kept secret!
I worked independently there for 5 years, not only accompanying families but developing training for midwives to attend homebirths as this was not covered in the Spanish midwifery training.

Gaia was born in an undisturbed birth in 2010.

In 2013 Zoé followed her sister's steps.

A few months after, Jose decided to get trained in therapies that could help my work better, so with a toddler and a baby we left everything behind and went travelling in South East Asia where he trained in Aromatherapy, Balinese and pregnancy massage, Micet madura and Indian head massage.

While living in Bali one morning Jose told me. “I've sent your resume to a midwifery job in Bangladesh”.

A few weeks after, there we were.
The person who collected us at the airport welcomed us with a cargo vest, gave us a mobile phone and explained to us different codes from 1 to 5, the latter meaning evacuation of the country. We arrived at a difficult election time where we experienced the first lockdown of our lives (code 4).

After a couple of weeks in a hotel, we travelled to Sylhet, the city where my job would be based. A couple of weeks there and we entered in code 5.

An ambulance came to pick us up straight to the airport. We looked at countries where GIZ (my employer) had reproductive health projects and we were evacuated to Nepal.


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We spent a couple of months there, learning about the country with the biggest natural challenge to practice midwifery: the Himalayas.
A country where any mountain under 3000m is considered a hill!

Back to Bangladesh, we spent 1.5 years there helping them with the development of the midwifery training. While I was at work, Jose studied a Diploma in naturopathy from the University of Quebec and a BSc degree in “Alternative systems of Medicine” from Kolkata’s University.

He managed to finish 1 year of homeopathy in the Homeopathy school, UK and in one of our travels we went to Bangkok so he could study reflexology at Wat pho Thai traditional massage school.

After this, we travelled to Goa, India, where David Luján, a Traditional Chinese Medicine Master has one of his schools established. We spent 3 months there where Jose learnt and practised acupuncture 40h a week.

Back to Europe in 2015, I worked in a London Hospital and then at a couple of Universities teaching midwifery to students. Sr. Lecturer in Midwifery has been my last employment. Jose, who speaks 7 languages, started in a call centre and has just resigned as an operations manager in the leading company in customer care in the UK. We are both now fully dedicated to the creation of this school. We had booked a journey to Senegal for Easter 2020. We wanted to explore the country, look for a place to set base and open our International Midwifery School.

Our main idea was to create a space where professionals from anywhere could come, learn and share while at the same we’d be upskilling the local professionals while treating the locals free of cost. As the borders were shut, we decided to go to Mexico, learn from Mayan parteras… 

The world situation is so changeable at present that we are still looking for a right place where we can grow as a family while try to make the world a better place.
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