The following is an excerpt from my in-person interview with Dona Enriqueta featured in the documentary book Women Healers of the World to inspire you:

Little Enriqueta Contreras was born into a family of seven children in the 5,000-foot-high region of Rancho Tabla of the ancient Zapotec culture, a village known today as Benito Juarez, Oaxaca, Mexico. When Enriqueta was only seven years old—and her father had been dead four years—her mother made mysterious arrangements with a local childless couple, and Enriqueta was delivered, unceremoniously, to their doorstep. Abandoned by her family, she served this new couple as a daughter, but they suffered from alcoholism and thus neglected her. Instead of housing and feeding the child, they forced Enriqueta to work as a goatherd, sending her out into the open pastures distant from the village, without food, shelter or protection.

Enriqueta lived in these wild goat lands for two full years. Had she been a weaker child, she would have died, but Enriqueta was nothing if not resilient. She tended the goats and followed them, observing what they ate, and in this way she fed herself from berries and herbs in the wild.

It was during this time that Enriqueta helped a nanny goat give birth, a formative act that led to her future calling nine years later, when she found herself with her family again and helped her sister during childbirth.

There seems to be something dangerous about Enriqueta today—something that causes unease in many typical physicians and government officials. It could be her demanding and fierce demeanor, because she stands firm with great resolve and can be intimidating. It could be her success, because she has flourished where lesser people have failed. It could also be that she has adopted a profession that threatens the establishment: she is a midwife. By following her calling, Doña Enriqueta (Grandmother, or Doni Queta, as she is fondly known) has suffered the pressures of a society that devalues women’s desires to advance themselves professionally, and the consequences of this pursuit have been tangible: Enriqueta has lost blood, she has been attacked, she has even been fired upon. While caring for her youngest daughter, she “felt bullets whizzing by my head.” This was in El Punto, when a faction of social services entered the town, divided the community, and literally did drive bys, taking pot shots at her. 

When I met with Dona Queta, she and her translator, friend and biographer Mary Margaret Navar were both wearing the bright colorful clothing and scarves of Dona’s native Oaxaca. Dona’s face was firm and unforgiving, and she looked about her with the ferocity of her Zapotec ancestors—until Mary Margaret slapped her on the knee and cracked a joke, and Dona permitted herself to smile. She gazed at me with a look that asked if I could possibly understand what she has gone through in her life, and she spoke passionately. “I have fallen,” Enriqueta says, “but I lift myself. But thank God you see me, I’m here today, because I have to complete my mission in life to help people heal. My children were my goal, I wanted the best for them. I was mother and father to my children. Thank god my children love me, they respect me, they take care of me. Because I did the best that I could for them, for their best interest.”

Enriqueta raised her children (after delivering three of them completely alone and without assistance) to be able to pursue their own dreams—a luxury Enriqueta had to fight for. “I didn’t want them to repeat the same fate,” she recalls.

After surviving years in the wilderness as a goatherd, reuniting with her family only to be forced to submit to an arranged marriage, then escaping bullets as well as government pressure to step down, Enriqueta has finally achieved success: she is a world-renowned midwife, herbalist, lecturer and teacher who has the enviable record of facilitating more than 2,000 births in 60 years without losing a single mother or baby during childbirth. It has been hard-won, but then again, Enriqueta is a Zapotec.

To read more about Dona Enriqueta and the other 21 amazing women healers I interviewed, see the book Women Healers of the World, available here, now celebrating its 10-year publication anniversary.