Walk to Beautiful

Tweet

Had trouble sleeping last night, lamenting the current affairs of my life. Ended up watching this documentary "Walk to Beautiful" on PBS. It is a documentary about a group of Ethiopian women who suffer from fistula and were being treated at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Very eager to be treated/cured, these women who have been isolated and ostracized in their society make this long journey, often taking days, to this hospital. Obstetric fistula is an injury mostly caused by neglected childbirth and leaves women incontinent and in some countries that lack such knowledge about obstetric fistula, the people often are suspicious and afraid of these "leakages", shunning the women who have them. If you want to learn more about this documentary and obstetric fistula, check out www.walktobeautiful.com. A few fast facts that are worth mentioning from this site are: (1) Each year, there are about 100,000 obstetric fistula cases resulting from childbirth worldwide (2) There has been no new case of such happening in the US (3) The last US hospital treating fistula patients closed in 1895 while (4) every year, they treat about 1,200 patients at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital alone. Knowing that this is happening in several countries worldwide and just imagining what these women were and are still going through make one think that personal problems are not that big at all. In fact, one is more fortunate than others out there.