Global citizenship
Durango woman leads life of international charity

Linda Barnes, Durangoan, nurse-midwife and foreign aid worker, sits atop a pile of hand-tied Afghan rugs from her private collection, earlier this week. Barnes is sponsoring a rug sale May 12 and 13, at 3055 E. Fourth Ave. in Durango, to benefit the Afghan Midwives Association. More than 100 hand-dyed rugs of all sizes, including everything from small prayer rugs and lengthy runners to large carpets and kilims, will be available for purchase./Photo by David Halterman

by Jules Masterjohn

Imagine that every two years, each of us packed two duffle bags containing everything we owned and relocated to a new country. What a different world we would inhabit as truly global citizens. Durango resident Linda Barnes spent much of her early adulthood living just such a lifestyle: her passports from the last 40 years bear the visas from 20 countries and five continents.

Barnes began her world discovery in the ’60s, when travel to other countries was safer, inexpensive and commonplace. “It is so important to see how people in other countries live and to live like they do,” she told me. “Spending time living among the common people in a developing country is a most profound education.”

Her perspective comes from years of experience working abroad in parts of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and inner cities in the United States. Much of her travel has been through her association with The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), established in 1962 in Chicago. Still functioning today, the private, not-for-profit social-change organization “promotes positive change in communities, organizations and individual lives in the U.S. and around the world by helping people find their own solutions to problems and the means to implement those solutions,” according to its website, www.ica-usa.org.

Barnes became involved with the organization in 1966, and worked primarily with inner city youths on the west side of Chicago. “I remember taking groups of grade school kids across town to Lake Michigan and most of them had never seen the lake before, even though it was only a mile away.” Barnes helped establish preschools in the area, among the first of the Head Start programs in the country. “ICA had a belief in the importance of education from the ‘cradle to the grave,’” she said.

The organization also attempted to identify the political, economic and cultural problems of communities and build a plan to help the citizens address these issues at the grassroots level. Often the effects were far-reaching. “We called them ‘demonstration projects,’ and they really helped many people around the world see beyond their own local issues to an understanding of global interconnectedness,” she said. “I believe quite a few people changed their self-image from ‘victim’ to being empowered by localized participatory action.”

Barnes continued her grassroots organizing with the ICA, while raising three sons in Nairobi, Kenya. By day, she traveled into the city to work as an office manager for the largest British law firm in Nairobi. During those years, all ICA workers lived communally, sharing money, living quarters, and child rearing responsibilities. As such, Barnes’ high-paying job enabled the community work and provided funding for ICA staff to travel to other projects around the globe. For nearly 15 years, Barnes was based in the outskirts of Nairobi as an ICA community member. “I was lucky to be able to spend a significant part of my adult life in other parts of the world, it changed my life … forever.”

She returned to the ICA headquarters in Chicago with her children in 1981 where, at the age of 40, she decided she wanted to be in a position to give back. “I had been given so much and had so many opportunities. I realized I needed a practical skill and one that the world needed.”

University in nursing and midwifery, Barnes worked at Bellevue Hospital as a certified nurse-midwife on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “I immediately fell in love with New York and Bellevue,” she said. “It was like being in a third world country, I felt right at home. Walking down the entrance hall of the hospital, I could see people from all over the world walking in the doors. Bellevue was the ‘family doctor’ to the indigent of New York City. We provided extraordinary care to people who had nothing.” For her and many other health-care professionals, working at Bellevue was a “heart choice” rather than a professional or economic one.

In 1999, with thoughts of retirement on her mind, Barnes moved to Durango to be near family. However, she didn’t stay settled for long. A year after arriving, she took a position to train midwives in Kosovo. “I hardly knew where Kosovo was at the time,” she recalled. “But I knew working in an immediate post-conflict environment would be a whole new experience. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has a profound effect on every aspect of a person’s life and work. I think many aid workers don’t realize how difficult it is to rebuild civil society under those circumstances.”

She found herself abroad again, beginning in 2004, working at Rábia Balkhi Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan – a country where the health-care infrastructure has largely been destroyed by 25 years of war. Afghanistan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, and when the mother dies, often the baby does. According to Barnes, women in the United States rarely die from post-partum complications, such as hemorrhaging, which kills women every day in Afghanistan. Social customs, politics and poverty contribute to the dangerous conditions for pregnant women and newborns in the countrIn addition to training midwives, Barnes also was involved in re-establishing the Afghan Midwives Association (AMA), which provides mentoring and professional support to midwives. Recently the AMA was accepted as a member of the International Confederation of Midwives, the organization that represents professional midwives worldwide. This is an important, confidence-building step for the association and Afghan midwives, in a country where 92 percent of all births take place outside the hospital and usually without a skilled birth attendant.

These successes are bittersweet for Barnes, who believes she will not be returning to Afghanistan anytime soon. The Taliban’s reassertion of power and the overall reduction of international support for reconstruction have increased the security risks for foreign aid workers.

Ever vigilant in her efforts to support her colleagues in Afghanistan, she is sponsoring a rug sale to benefit the Afghan Midwives Association. More than 100 hand-woven and hand-tied Afghan rugs from her private collection, which includes everything from small prayer rugs and lengthy runners to large carpets and kilims, will be on sale. •

The Rug Sale will be held Sat., May 12, 9a.m. - 2 p.m. and Sun., May 13, from 1 - 4 p.m. (Rain date: Sat., May 19, from 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.) at 3055 E. Fourth Ave. For information or other viewing, contact Linda Barnes at 759-4239 or Lrbarnes@frontier.net.