Frontline Midwife: My Story of Survival and Keeping Others Safe

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I experience her writing as completely authentic - she has seen things that many of us will only ever hear or read about - but she maintains respect and compassion for the women and girls whose lives are made even more precarious as a result of senseless conflicts.

It’s only then she can see the other side of some of these rules and restrictions and the sense and reasons behind them. For me it resulted in a very important but hard to swallow book, and some serious reflection on my career goals.Women, from what I have seen, seem to be at the bottom of the pile – they don't have the ability to speak out.

I get the life moves swiftly on until somebody tosses a rock right in to the foundation of your good innocent time. Looking back, I am proud I stepped up and did it, but it was a really difficult time," Anna said, noting how the nation will be experiencing the impact of the pandemic on our mental health for a long time to come.Frontline Midwife is Kent's compassionate testament to the critical work of healthcare professionals around the world. At twenty-six years old, Anna Kent helped a woman deliver her baby in a tropical storm by the light of a headtorch. Whilst she has had a remarkable career, she also includes personal stories of her own struggles in relationships and pregnancy. For Anna's tale is a very personal one, and I don't want to share too much here in case you want to read it.

The author really bears her soul, and I imagine that writing this book must be quite must’ve been quite cathartic . Far from presenting herself as a ‘white saviour’ figure, the author is often paralysed by fear, and ever cautious of crossing the line from healthcare worker to moral redeemer. 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. I also admire how open Anna has been about her pregnancy and baby loss story, we need more of these truths out there to make this less of a taboo subject.

Then I read the blurb, realised it was something totally different but ended up wanting to read even more.

This book heads you so close to life and death with the thread of hope that numerous paragraphs will make you cry. What I didn’t think to expect was that it would be such a good book both for experienced aid workers and those who have not witnessed the contexts she has worked in.This book is about obstetrics, heroic women, humanitarian workers, appalling contexts, mental health, and Anna Kent. Frontline Midwife is Kent's compassionate testament to the critical work of healthcare professionals around the world. And the desire for a child is for many women so elemental to their lives and this doesn’t change whether you live in Nottingham or Sudan. Highlighting the side of aid work that you don't hear about: the pain, frustration, anger and trauma that these wonderful human beings go through was heartwrenching to read. There is a heartbreaking section in the was the end when she herself has to become the patient and has a baby with severe congenital abnormalities which needed to be induced prematurely.