watched oprah yesterday. i was shocked and touched by the story of women in Ethopia shunned and immobolized with a condition called fistula.

"Imagine a little girl...one of the unfortunate five percent of all the women in the world that get into obstructive labor…She doesn't know when she starts her labor, nor do the village women know... They encourage her (to push) day after day after day. After five days she delivers a stillborn baby. The only reason she can deliver is because the baby inside the mother gets smaller when it's dead, and she can push out a dead baby.

"But she wakes up to a worse horror: Finding her bed soaked in urine and sometimes bowel content as well. All of that pushing has created that hole…so everything is coming out, without any control." The odor of the nearly constant drip of urine and waste remains. The young woman is often shunned by her husband, and sent to back home to her parents. Dr. Hamlin says the women are then shunned by their families.

"The father says, 'Let us build a house for her to live in, a little room somewhere on our family plot.' So they put her into a little shed, and there she will stay for the rest of her life, unless she can be cured. She's ruined, a beautiful girl...with no hope of being cured."

"Their condition is called obstetric fistula, a hole caused by loss of tissue between the vagina and bladder and/or rectum. It used to happen to women in the United States; today it affects more than two million women in the developing world. And when it happens, it ruins a life."

"To meet only one of these mothers is to be profoundly moved. Mourning the stillbirth of their only baby, incontinent of urine, ashamed of their offensiveness, often spurned by their husbands, homeless, unemployable except in the fields, they endure, they exist, without friends, without hope. They bear their sorrows in silent shame. Their miseries, untreated, are utterly lonely and lifelong."

~Drs. Reginald and Catherine Hamlin, 1974

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