Visit to Fistula Hospital and Hamlin College of Midwives

On Tuesday november 26 the ‘broads-abroad’ women’s group assembled in front of the Phistula Hospital for a visit. We appeared to have parked  in front of the neigbours’ quite beautiful house where a Dutch family lives. So I had a pleasant introduction to Mirjam, about 10 years younger than I am and we got on very well. Her husband is the defense attaché at the Embassy.

The Fistula hospital has been started by Australian gynaecologists Catherine and Reg Hamilton in the 50ees to help the usually very young women (14-18 years old) out of their dreadful situation.  The problem is this:  when a young girl gives birth to her first child, sometimes  her pelvis is not mature enough or too narrow.  The baby is in the wrong position or too big, the labour is obstructed. The family members who assist in the birthing process press her to continue pushing, in order to get the baby out, because that is what they know from experience. After up to 4 or 6 days of pushing, the baby dies and the young woman is exhausted. This is already bad enough. The village doctor sometimes takes out the baby in pieces. After that it appears that urine and sometimes faeces is just running down the womans’ legs. This is due to a fistula'  that developed due to the endless pushing: an open connection between the uterus and the bladder or between the uterus and the colon. Of course the young woman doesn’t know what has happened to her; least of all what to do. Because she is smelling so badly and she can' thave sex, her husband marries another woman and sends her back to her family. Her own family will put her in a seprate hut and she is ostracized by the community. She doesn’t dare go out and depends on food and water that is brought or thrown to her.  In general such women emaciate and die after a  number of years. If they happen to know about the hospital they take sometimes years to get there, since they need to collect money for the bus, walk for days, travel for days or weeks because some busses will not take them as they smell so badly.  We got the chance to meet with Catherine Hamlin who will be 90 in two months time. She is still working there.

The Fistula hospital has a programme focussing on three solutions:

-       1. Treatment: ‘repairing’ the women with an operation

-    2.  Social, physical and psychological rehabilitation

-    3.  Prevention. By educating rehabilitated women as a midwife, after which they go back to their community and by awarenessraising about the existing possibility of healing and about the existence of the hospital  and - in the mean time - 5 health centres spread over the country. All the nurses are former patients.

Some women can’t be fully healed. They may have to live with a handicap. For those women a village has been built, where they live together and learn a profession, Hamlin village, see picture. There is a restaurant, they cook, they raise chicken and grow vegetables and fruit, there is a dairy farm, they make bedsheets, tablecloths and embroidery and they sell all their products. 

We visited this place as well and we were impressed with the cleanliness, the layout, everything. As the projectmanager,  a beautiful woman with the name Belasatcho, said: this is paradise for the women. And for them it is difficult to go back to their village in a remote area after they have experienced this, but hey must,  to make place for new women.