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. “A striking book about life and death, love and loss, and birth and healing. Kimble-Haas loses her husband to pancreatic cancer and, unmoored by grief, joins Doctors Without Borders and takes her midwifery skills to Sudan. There, the work stimulates waves of grief and healing, creating a rhythm of recovery. Readers will be enriched by joining her on this epic adventure.” —Theresa Brown, RN, New York Times best-selling author of The Shift and Healing Sheila Kimble-Haas , a nurse practitioner and midwife trained at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent her career caring for marginalized communities—from Native American reservations to Arctic villages to African nations through humanitarian work. After more than ten years in France, she returned to New Mexico, where the desert’s stark beauty, a community of friends, and enough solitude inspired her to put her stories on the page. But her restless spirit is calling her back to France, carrying the desert’s lessons and a renewed hunger for the journey ahead.