A Walk to Beautiful

I just finished watching "A Walk to Beautiful" (aired by PBS.) I'm nearly beyond words. It is about women who develop fistulas (a hole in the birth canal either to the bladder or rectum caused from extremely long hard labors [they said up to 10 days of hard labor] causing incontinence) These women are shunned by their communities, families, abandoned by their husbands. They cannot even live in their family's homes, they have to live in a hut out back.

There are hospitals (the one they focused on in particular is in Adis Ababa, Ethiopia) that specialize in this issue but they said there are something like 70,000 women with this problem and only 146 obgyns. (Don't quote me on those figures..)

My heart broke hearing the stories of these women. Many, after days of labor, lost their babies and then were cut off from society.

I always think of ways to serve as a missionary like teaching people about Jesus, teaching them to read, write, farm. Even being a doctor or nurse and treating them for disease or malnourishment. But what an incredible honor would it be to be able to basically give these women their very life!? There are so many practical ways to serve God's people, His children, but this is one way that by helping cure one person, you'd be affecting so many; their families, their children.

So many of the women in the hospital said that if this surgery didn't work, their only other option would be suicide. They cannot go back to their villages for fear of being shunned. One girl was 17 years old and had been married off at 9 or 10 years old and kept running away and her father would beat her and send her off with another husband and with the fourth husband she ended up getting pregnant and was in labor for 5 days, causing the fistula and I think she was one who ended up losing her child. Her mother had died I think when this girl was a child so she didn't want to go back because her father would just beat her and marry her off again (or try, no man would probably consider taking her.)

I think part of the reason it touched me so much is that our compassion child, Biruk, lives in (or near) Adis Ababa and to think that his family could very well be affected by this issue (he is an orphan, so maybe his mother died in child birth or from some sort of complication) and to be able to go there and make a difference, such an incredible, life changing difference, and that in the name of the Lord..

It just gives you (me) a new perspective on the petty 'problems' in my life!