Address By Sabina Higgins at the First Irish Exhibition of the Makush Art Gallery, Addis Ababa, In Support Of The Hamlin Fistual Hosptal
The Smock Alley Theatre, 3rd September 2015
I would like to thank Liam Barnard for inviting me here this evening to the first Irish exhibition of Ethiopian art works in collaboration with the Makush Art Gallery, Addis Ababa in support of the Hamlin Fistula Hospital.
What a wonderful exhibition it is and I am grateful for this opportunity to enjoy this fine African Art work.
I had the great experience last November of visiting the Hamlin Fistula Hospital. I was accompanying the President on his official visit to Africa - going to Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa. We visited the development projects Ireland supports. Ethiopia is a country of great poverty and facing great challenges but it has made great achievements too and it was so heartening to see what can be done with some help.
Ireland’s Development Co-operation Programme gives high priority to improving women’s lives in as many ways as possible by empowering them in health, education and economically. This is so important for the future of African Countries.
The Irish Aid Programme has a focus on access to quality reproductive health-care, to aid that empowerment, and Irish Aid’s Programme in Ethiopia has a focus on maternal mortality.
Ireland is supporting the NGOs who are supporting the Ethiopian Ministry for Health’s Strategic Plan to reduce maternal mortality including encouraging women to give birth at health centres and to address the problem of prolonged and dangerous labour.
In line with this we visited the Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa – this was a truly extraordinary and up lifting experience. We were met by the founder obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr. Catherine Hamlin and Martin Andrews an Irish man who is the CEO of Hamlin Fistula Hospital and dedicated to its work.
Dr. Catherine Hamlin herself is a very impressive and awesome woman. She is tall, erect and beautiful and at 90 years of age she is still actively committed to and engaged with the hospital. She lives in the grounds and visits patients first thing every morning, as love and care for the whole person, is an integral part of the ethos of the work.
We also met Harriet, Martin Andrew’s wife who is also dedicated to the hospital in a voluntary capacity, and I am delighted to see her here this evening.
We learnt the whole history of the hospital. We visited difference parts of the campus, the health centre, the rehabilitation centre and the hospital wards. In the wards there were whole rows of women who had had surgery. There was a lovely atmosphere there - all looked fresh and bright and pleasant.
They were such beautiful women. They were lying down in recovery, some were sleeping and some were resting. We spoke to some briefly. They seemed very pleased to see us and we got such lovely smiles and I had a sense of the relief and consolation and hope it was for them to be in this safe haven.
For women, including the poorest and from the remotest areas, facilities of the highest standard in professional care and concern were on offer.
I must add here that from the outset I was swept away by the beauty, warmth and grace of the Ethiopian people. They are truly one of the most beautiful peoples in the world.
We learnt how it all came about - that in 1959 Catherine and her husband Reginald Hamlin both obstetricians and gynaecologists, in Sydney, answered an ad in the Lancet Medical Journal. They came on a 3 year contract with the Ethiopian Government to work as obstetrician gynaecologists and to set up a midwifery school in Addis Ababa. There they were confronted with a medical problem that they had not come across before – it was obstetric fistula.
In Developed Countries it is no longer a problem – with good obstetrician care and the availability of Caesarean Section. Obstetric Fistula is an injury resulting from long unrelieved obstructed labour during child birth. This often results in the death of the mother, and the baby is usually stillborn. An obstetric fistula, is a fistula or hole between a women’s vagina and bladder and/or rectum. This develops over many days of obstructed labour when the pressure of the baby’s head against the mothers pelvis cuts off the blood supply to the soft vaginal tissue, this tissue wears away and falls away. The fistula or hole results in incontinence of urine and/or faeces. Many women who develop obstetric fistula are abandoned by their husbands and ostracised by their communities because of the offensive smell. Dr. Reginald Hamlin wrote of it ‘Mourning the stillbirth of their only child, incontinent of urine, ashamed of their offensiveness, often spurned by their husbands, homeless, unemployable, except in the field, they endure, they exist, without friends and without hope. They bear their sorrows in silent shame, their miseries untreated are utter, lonely and lifelong”.
The Hamlins were so distressed by such suffering and that so many young women would have their lives devestated by such an injury and neglect, they committed themselves to studying the injury and a possible cure. They began operating on the women at the government hospital and they had success. While continuing their other obstetrical work the Hamlin’s refined the technique to close the obstetric injuries. Within the first three years they had operated successfully on 300 fistula patients. News of a cure spread and many more women came seeking treatment. The Hamlins looked for donations and built a hostel, and they then worked for 10 years to establish a Fistula hospital and in 1974 founded the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. It was the only medical centre in the world at that time, dedicated exclusively to obstetric fistula repair. Many doctors came from around the world to be trained by them.
Reginald Hamlin worked there until his death in 1993 and Catherine continued on until now with more than 42,000 patients treated. When we met Catherine she had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for the 2nd time. Among her many awards is “The Right Livelyhood Award” which is the Alternative Peace Prize which she received in 2009. The great work of Hamlin Fistula continued and expanded. In 1999 the hospital was expanded and a great rehabilitation facility planned. In 2004 an ambitious further expansion programme commenced to build 5 Regional Fistula centres.
To improve maternal health in Rural Ethiopia Catherine at the age of 84 began training midwives to prevent fistula. The Hamlin College of Midwives was the start of a plan to place midwives in 25 rural health centres around the country as part of a plan to locate high level maternal health skills in rural areas.
A key preventative strategy of the Ethiopian Ministry of Health is to increase the number of trained midwives across the Country – with a goal of providing midwife care for every pregnant woman in Ethiopia.
Hamlin Fistula Hospital provides comprehensive care to all patients before and after surgery free of charge – following surgery many women require rehabilitation services to assist them to reintegrate back into village life, build self-esteem and/or find meaningful employment. It provides comprehensive learning, health and reintegration services with specialist teams of teachers, social workers, psychologists, physiotherapists, and nurses.
This work is so wonderful one can only be so full of gratitude and appreciation for everyone who has given of their abilities and generosity to help this great humanitarian endeavour.
Finally to give you some idea of the difference that this health care has made I can only quote something said by a young mother at an outreach clinic in rural Ethiopia:
“I thought I was the only one with this terrible problem. Since I gave birth to a dead baby boy I have leaked urine constantly. It has eaten away at the skin. The pain is terrible but the shame is much worse. When I came here, I could not believe my eyes, the whole world is here. So many other girls suffering in the same way. This is the first time I have been able to smile since the baby was born.”
Ethiopia is a country facing great challenges but has made great achievements too as I saw in many of the Irish development Programmes I visited. However, walking into the Hamlin Fistula Hospital was a truly extraordinary and uplifting experience for women including the poorest and the most remote rural areas facilities of the highest standard in professional care and atmosphere and concern were on offer. What was being provided was all the more important that this care was being provided for women with an often hidden and neglected disability that was of1 the Obstetric Fistula which is an injury received from neglect during a long obstructed childbirth.
I saw the difference it made in the lives of those treated and those who stayed on to help in a pioneering and powerfully assisting facility for women in Africa.