Waiting for the Kick

After heartbreak in Pennsylvania, a forty-five-year-old widow journeys to Sudan’s war zone, where a chaotic maternity ward teaches her a new kind of strength—and becomes her path to healing. When Sheila’s husband died, grief didn’t just visit—it swallowed her whole. She didn’t want casseroles or kind words. She wanted out. Broken and carrying a battered rucksack, she joined a humanitarian mission in war-torn South Sudan, where gunfire drove her under delivery-room tables and days blurred as she triaged mothers and children ravaged by tropical disease. But even the pulse of the frantic mission could not strip away her sorrow until she heard the ululation of the Sudanese women: a fierce, haunting cry, to celebrate life, to exorcise sorrow, and to rip the past from the body to make space for the now. Waiting for the Kick: A Midwife’s Grief and Rebirth in Africa recounts Sheila Kimble Haas’s journey from a home thick with loss in America to the edge of the world, where she delivers babies in mud-walled clinics, navigates tribal customs and civil unrest, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with women whose strength redefined survival. This powerful memoir of loss, reckoning, and unexpected transformation is both a tribute to the unbreakable spirit of women and the story of a midwife who discovered that healing begins not in comfort, but in surrender.