A Walk to Beautiful

Matt and I were looking forward to seeing this movie, but we had an even better time than we expected. The movie was well-done and heartbreaking, though ultimately uplifting. There were speakers there who had actually worked at the fistula hospital, and there was a prizewinning photo exhibit about the organization called Trail of Tears. Local Ethiopian restaurants had donated tons of food, and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fairfax has a beautiful sanctuary, lined with old timbers and with huge, round windows that look out to the woods and sky beyond. We were touched by the movie and the stories told by people there, and I was struck by the poverty and despair faced by the women whose stories were told. It occurred to me for the millionth time that it isn't that the world lacks resources, it just lacks equitable distribution of them. Case in point: these women are dying for lack of a lifesaving Cesarean while, ironically, women in the United States have to fight for the eroding right NOT to have Cesareans that aren't medically indicated. In the same way that I sometimes wish we could box up all the wasted food from US tables and send it over to people who really need it, I wish we could mail them our extra Cesareans, too.

A little more background on obstetric fistula: the condition is caused when a woman or young girl (because they are often married between the ages of five and ten) goes into labor, but the baby is too big to successfully navigate the pelvis, most often because the girls are small, weak, and malnourished, with poorly developed bones. Eventually, the baby generally dies, and the pressure of the baby's head up against the pelvic bones erodes soft tissue between the birth canal and either the bladder or the rectum (or both), leaving a hole that results in the constant leakage of urine and/or feces. This makes them complete social outcasts in their community, and the vast majority of their husbands simply move in with someone else. Some girls eventually do give birth to the dead baby on their own; others describe finally getting to a hospital and having to have it removed "in pieces." Because of the advent of Cesarean--but, more importantly, the improvements in nutrition and the delay of childbearing past the childhood and very early teenage years--it's a condition that has disappeared from developed nations, and most doctors in those countries aren't even trained in how to repair them.

We were impressed by the work of the Fistula Foundation for many reasons, not the least of which because it helps train doctors from all over in how to successfully repair fistulas, and selects girls to be trained as local midwives(!), but also because it seizes on the convalescent period of the women after their surgeries to train the women themselves. They're often taught to read and write, they spend long hours in conversation with each other, and they help out however they can--helping clean the hospital or tend to other, newer patients. It's amazing to see the transformation from downtrodden to joyful, and it's amazing to think that aside from basic human decency, this isn't the product of any kind of psychotherapy--just the realization that they aren't alone in their problems, and that somebody in the world cares for them. Someone in the film also points out that these women would likely die before they would allow their daughters to be given away as child brides, making them agents of change in their communities. It is the hope of the Fistula Foundation that the condition will eventually be eradicated; the Fistula Hospitals would then become centers of prevention, well-equipped maternity hospitals where fistula could be prevented by providing necessary Cesareans.

I'm also continually amazed at the resilience and generosity of women who have themselves been so poorly mistreated. One of the women, 17-year-old Wubete (whose sweet face and childish voice make her seem half her age), had had several failed fistula surgeries already after a prolonged labor at 13 had left her with a dead baby and a constant urine leak, and refused to go back to her village, where she knew she would be an outcast and nobody would care for her. Instead, she went to work at Grace Village, and orphanage for children whose parents have died of AIDS. Rather than accept a life of begging and mistreatment, or end it herself prematurely, she chose to devote herself to others even less fortunate than she. Some of the final images of the film are of her shining face as she cares for orphaned children, and she exclaims happily, "I love them."

In other words, this is an organization that truly saves and changes lives. We're hoping to sponsor a couple of surgeries a year from here on out (each one costs just over $400, or $37.50 a month if you choose to spread it out over a year), in the hopes of giving these suffering women and grieving mothers a second chance at life.