Another View

Last Saturday was a busy day for us – we participated in tree planting around tow, visited Mt. Entoto (a tourist attraction in Addis), and that evening watched A Walk to Beautiful, a PBS documentary about the Fistula Hospital here in Addis Ababa.  The hospital is the first of its kind and has been transforming women’s lives for decades.  Here is Heather S.’s account of the day and the things God has been teaching her through her experiences.

Yesterday was Saturday, our main day of rest and fun on project.  After helping with a citywide tree planting campaign in downtown Addis, we went up to Mount Entoto, one of the highest points in the city.  There we took a hike, a scenic route through the woods with a great panoramic view of the city.  The view of the city was beautiful, but the view we got into the hopeless situation of many Ethiopians was heartbreaking.

During the hike, there were about ten kids, varying in age from about four to maybe sixteen, who generally took care of the goats and each other.  They were all eager to shake our hands; but as I passed one five-year-old boy named Cado and patted his head, a view opened for me to see a desperate longing for love and comfort he had never received.  His brothers and sisters were mostly interested in getting money from us, but he took my hand and didn’t let go.  He even picked a flower for me.  He kept looking up at me with such simple gratitude on his face.  When we got back to the buses, I gave him a huge hug.  That’s probably the last I’ll ever see or know of him, but he’s taught me one lesson: one touch of love can go farther than a million words.  I think that’s why Jesus healed the outcasts with a touch.

What affected me the most, though, was the bus ride up and down the mountain.  All along the road we saw women who, as a part of keeping house, hiked up the mountain to chop wood and carried enormous bundles of wood back down the mountain on their backs.  Day in and day out, they carry these bundles down the mountain; huge water jugs, too.  Some women are even taken from other homes and made to do this work.  But that wasn’t the worst part – that night we watched a video about the Fistula Hospital in Addis.  It had me in tears.  The same women we had seen carrying wood often start the work when they are two years old.  The weight of their burdens reduces their ability to grow so badly that some 19-year-olds look like 12-year-olds.  They are married off young, sometimes as young as eight years old, and when they have children, their bodies aren’t equipped to handle it.  These girls are out in the middle of the countryside and have no doctors to even make sure the baby is faced the right direction, much less perform a c-section.  Labor can last up to a week, and the baby rarely survives.  On top of that, the extended labor damages their organs and these women perpetually leak urine or feces or both.  When this happens to them, their families and friends ostracize them because of the smell.  Many of these women live the rest of their lives this way, with nothing to do and no reason to live.  This is where the Fistula Hospital comes in.  We heard stories about women who had lived this way for years before hearing about the hospital and traveling for hours, even days to reach it.  The doctors at the Fistula Hospital sew up the damage and give these women back their lives.  The weeks spent with other sick women and kind nurses is balm for their souls.  But this is an epidemic, and not near enough people are doing anything about the original cause or the problem itself.  The video broke my heart.  I prayed for God to break my heart this trip, and He has.  The plight of the Ethiopian women is kept under the rug for the sake of face.  But hearts and lives are being broken because of this.

Praise God that the women’s ministry will be working to help teach new skills to some women who were illegally stuck in the labor that causes this kind of sickness.  Please pray that they would have an enormous impact both spiritually and physically.