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Womanhood: Our common bond

This Web only Speakout has not been edited.

Jessica Cuthbertson

Published July 26, 2008 at 6 a.m.

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Meet Wubete.

She is small for seventeen, with large round eyes that pierce your soul. She is young and beautiful, by any culture’s standards. She has a soft high-pitched voice that sounds like something between a melody and weeping. Upon first glance she could be any teenager growing up in rural Ethiopia.

But Wubete is not just a teenager. She is alone, ostracized, and desperate. She thinks often of death, something that sounds welcoming when compared to her present existence. An early marriage and her small physical stature have stolen her childhood and replaced it with a despair that is incomprehensible.

Wubete is one of the many thousands of faces of fistula.

Recently, PBS aired a NOVA special entitled “A Walk to Beautiful,” a documentary that interconnects the stories of three fistula patients to create a picture of the psychological and physical horrors faced by some 100,000 women in rural villages across Ethiopia. Women like Ayehu, Almaz, and Wubete, whose stories are featured in the film, find themselves social outcasts as victims of the vaginal injury known as obstetric fistula. Their bodies, underdeveloped from a childhood and adolescence of malnourishment, endure hours of painful childbirth that generally result in stillborn babies. After experiencing this horror they awaken to the realization that for them the nightmare is just beginning: the child they were hoping for has been replaced with a physical hole, or fistula, between their internal organs and the outside world. They can no longer perform the basic human function of controlling waste (both urine and/or fecal) output. Left leaking, undignified and in agony, their smell and condition relegates them to sheds and makeshift huts apart from their family’s dwellings. Falling miserably short of the cultural expectations for women, to be productive wives and nurturing mothers, the fistula victims are shunned from village society and communal life.

The sole hope for such women in this condition is the will and knowledge to gather the financial and physical resources it takes to travel to Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. Since 1974 Dr. Catherine Hamlin has devoted her life to curing fistulas and surgically and psychologically restoring women to a productive life. For a mere $450, doctors can repair 93% of cases at the hospital founded by Hamlin and her late husband, Reginald. The hospital is equipped to treat about 2,000 patients a year, a dent in the scores of women suffering across the rural landscape, most who believe they are the only one in the world disgraced with this condition.

What left me shaken while watching the film was the dichotomy I felt trying to understand a medical problem so unfathomable to the Western world (according to reports by the World Health Organization and Population Bureau there were no reported fistula cases in the U.S. in 2007, and the likelihood of a woman dying from pregnancy or childbirth in the U.S. is 1 in 4,800 as compared to 1 in 22 in Ethiopia), and at the same time find myself so personally connected to the journey of pain and restoration in the women’s stories. The film captured not only the horrors and harsh realities of life for Ethiopian women, but also the common experience, feelings and human condition universally experienced by all women. Once I looked past the personal, physical and psychological struggles of the women, I saw women that could have been in any social gathering in any society of any socioeconomic status in the world. Women who laughed and cried together, who spoke of missing their family and friends while at the hospital; women who wanted to feel like women again – mothers and wives who were beautiful and wanted. Part of the healing process, aside from the medical attention and the surgery itself, is that these women are able to talk to other women who share a common journey, a common plight.

What could be more universal than this? Our collective need to share our stories and lives with other human beings, to know that we are not alone in our struggles?

The film forces Western women to look into the eyes of Ethiopian women and see something reflected back to them that is not as foreign from their own life as they might think. It forces American women to think about the comforts, opportunities and progress we enjoy, and remember a time when it was different for the generations of women that came before us. It reminds us that the same joy we experience from slipping our foot into a new shoe is the joy mirrored in Almaz’s face when she adorns her head with a new shawl after her operation and prepares to return home — a woman restored to wholeness with a new future she can now imagine for herself.

And what about Wubete? Her medical story was not as rosy as Almaz’s, but her future is now filled with promise. The damage to her body created by the fistula was too significant to be surgically repaired by the time she made the lengthy journey on foot to Addis Ababa. She received medical attention and learned how to insert a “plug” that allows her the freedom to enjoy a more normal life. She could not fathom returning to the village that had treated her as a leper and cast her out of her former life, but through the network of Addis Ababa contacts she has embarked on a new journey. She now works with orphans, mothering and nurturing the children of other women.

How can we help ensure support and treatment for the other thousands of Wubetes that have not yet made the critical journey? How can women a world away make a difference and help eradicate fistula, a tragedy that has not existed notably in this country since the 19th century? Twenty dollars covers the cost of one woman’s journey from a remote rural village to the hospital. $450 finances one woman’s restorative surgery. Visit The Fistula Foundation at www.fistulafoundation.org to find out about donating to their “Love A Sister” and other programs. Raise awareness amongst the women in your own life and support the United Nations Population Fund’s campaign developed to treat and prevent obstetric fistula worldwide at www.endfistula.org.

If we acknowledge the common bond we share with women beyond our borders, we will be forced to recognize the responsibility we have to ensure that all women are treated with dignity.

Jessica Cuthbertson is a resident of Aurora.

Comments

  • July 26, 2008

    9:36 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    nonayerbsns writes:

    I saw this film. It was difficult to watch, yet, I couldn't tear myself away.

  • July 27, 2008

    3:31 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    WestminsterJ writes:

    I appreciate the author's efforts in bringing this condition to our attention. I don't understand, however, why her article had to emphasize gender so much. Why can't "humanity" be "our common bond", instead of "womanhood"? I'm male, and I can still empathize with the women who suffer this. It seems Ms. Cuthbertson assumes that men won't care about these women.

  • July 27, 2008

    9:17 p.m.

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    kjhinarvada writes:

    Jessica wrote this from a feminine perspective--she is a female, and she is writing about a female condition--a condition brought about women who are mistreated by men. I don't think Jessica assumes men won't care, but her audience is other women. There's nothing wrong with writing to a female audience. If she also convinces men that this is a serious issue, more power to her.

  • July 28, 2008

    7:07 a.m.

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    bubblesmom writes:

    I believe that Jessica emphasized gender because it is a woman's medical malady. I think that WestminsterJ sympathizes with the victims of this medical condition, but it takes a woman to truly empathize with the problem. We already make a monthly contribution to this cause as it was a Christmas present from my husband because he realized how much the cure of these women meant to me. Thank you, Jessica, for making more people aware of the plight of thousands of women in Ethiopia. See this film if possible, it may change your life.

  • July 28, 2008

    9:21 a.m.

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    Coco writes:

    Why'd you bother to write that, Sas? Why did you take time out of your busy to day to emphasize what most of us already know - that you have no compassion for anyone.

  • July 28, 2008

    7:54 p.m.

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    WestminsterJ writes:

    Sasquatch- It might help you if someone you cared about suffered a terrible medical condition. Oh that's right, there is nobody that you care about, other than yourself. God, I would love to meet you in person.

  • July 28, 2008

    8:26 p.m.

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    me2 writes:

    They say sociopaths lack the ability to empathise with anyone. Another fun group is the narcissists who don't have room in their heads for anyone or anything but themselves.

  • August 1, 2008

    11:11 a.m.

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    T1anda writes:

    Be very careful Sasquatch...what goes around comes around!