Fistula in the frame
In a corrugated iron shack in the outskirts of the village, they find a young woman. Hands and feet bound together, hips contracted, muscles wasted. A miasma of stale, black air swathes her rigid skeleton. Her eyes betray a solitary tear as she agonisingly recollects a labour through which she saw the sun rise and set seven times. The nauseating stench of the faeces and urine that bathes her sheets makes her flinch. “If I stay still it will all dry up”, she thinks. If only the world were so kind.
Such is the image conjured up by a recent international film-based campaign that strives to end the plight of more than 2 million women worldwide with obstetric fistula. For a woman living in the west, fistula is something that has been consigned to the past. The possibility that, during labour, her baby's head could bore a hole through her own vagina and bladder so that she would be left perpetually leaking urine or faeces is unimaginable. But for many women in developing countries obstetric fistula is a reality: the result of prolonged labour without medical intervention during which the baby is usually stillborn. Albeit virtually eradicated in the western world during the 18th century, this silent epidemic marginalises women throughout Africa, Asia, and the Arab region, stripping them of their inherent entitlement to safe motherhood.
As part of a collection of advocacy documentaries for the Campaign to End Fistula, film makers Nancy Durrell McKenna and Lisa Russell have used this powerful medium to instigate reform. Fistula Pilgrims and Love, Labor, Loss offer compelling insights into the needless suffering of so many women in Africa.
The focus of Fistula Pilgrims is Telanish, one of the 9000 Ethiopian girls subjected to a life of shame and misery because of fistula. Betrothed at the age of 10 years, pregnant at 11, and mother to a stillborn baby at 12, her life seems to be over before it has begun. Resigned to the fact that medical care is financially and geographically inaccessible, Telanish's future is bleak.
Has history not taught us that a key antidote to such stigma is international collaboration? Love, Labor, Loss is undeniable testament to this in its depiction of a fistula repair compound spearheaded by local people in Niger and safeguarded by foreign medical expertise. The film follows the moving stories of five west African women who find medical care and solace from a life of neglect at the compound. But the life-changing work at the compound is impeded by insufficient resources and its temporary nature means that the health of most women with fistula in Niger remains fragile.
This exploration of Africa's growing maternal health crisis powerfully communicates its lucent aims: to raise the marital age; stop the medical brain drain from developing countries; and to increase access to health care for mothers. By putting fistula in the frame these films help to end the silence about what the United Nations has called “one of the top ten most underreported stories the world should know about”.