The Friendship That Saved More Than 60,000 Lives
From top: Healing Lives is about the bond between Dr Catherine Hamlin and Mamitu Gashe; Mamitu (right) with Matron Asnakech in 1965; Reg and Catherine Hamlin with hospital staff and Mamitu (at left) in 1965.
The first time I saw a queue of patients sitting on a slatted wooden bench waiting to be admitted to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, I was shocked to the core.
Their heads were bowed, their shoulders slumped, and every one of them looked forlorn and completely defeated. They avoided all eye contact, with me and with each other. They were a picture of absolute despair.
Then I saw the reason why. Beneath each was a small tell-tale puddle of urine. Each of these women had suffered an obstructed childbirth, a long and agonising labour, a dead child and horrific internal injuries that had left them unable to control their bodily functions.
It’s a situation virtually unknown in the developed world, thanks to the availability of caesareans and easy access to doctors, midwives, hospitals and clinics. But obstetric fistula is still the scourge of many of the world’s poorest countries, where childbirth is the most dangerous undertaking of all.
As I watched, all the women suddenly leapt to their feet. A tall white woman had appeared, arm-in-arm with a much shorter Ethiopian. Some of the women bowed deeply; others sank to their knees and kissed her hands. The atmosphere crackled with excitement and hope.
This was the Australian doctor, Catherine Hamlin, who set up the hospital accompanied by her protégé and constant companion Mamitu Gashe, who has become one of the world’s top fistula surgeons. I tell their story in my book, Healing Lives.
Catherine beckoned the women up from their knees. “No, no,” she said. “It’s all right. The doctors will see you soon. Don’t worry.” Mamitu translated for her and gradually the pair were surrounded by a sea of smiles.
Catherine may have passed on, but this scene is repeated almost daily at the hospital which was set up mostly by donations from Australians. More than 60,000 women have now been saved from a life that, they say, was no longer worth living. With tears in their bladder and often their rectum too, unable to control the discharge of their urine and faeces, these women were usually cast out by their husbands, abandoned by their families and banished from their villages.
“It’s a terrible condition,” Catherine told me on that initial visit, as we spoke over a cup of tea and slice of cake at her house in the hospital compound. “These beautiful women are at the start of their lives. But they’ve lost their babies and their lives are now being cut short by fistula. Their plight can’t fail touch your heart.”
Mamitu was once in exactly in the same position. As a 16-year-old girl from a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands, she spent four days in labour before the village medicine woman pulled out her dead baby’s body. She was left with horrendous fistula injuries.
Her family and neighbours carried her down the mountainside on a stretcher made of eucalyptus branches and put her on a bus to Addis Ababa where she arrived at hospital, close to death, and met Catherine and her husband Dr Reg Hamlin, who saved her life.
In gratitude, she started working at the hospital and proved so smart and adept that, despite never having attended school and being unable to read and write, the Hamlins trained her to become a fistula surgeon herself.
Since then, she’s won one of medicine’s highest international honours, the Royal College of Surgeon’s Honorary Gold Medal. Alongside Catherine and Reg, she has operated on tens of thousands of women and taught visiting doctors and surgeons how to perform the surgery. It’s said that today everyone operating on fistula has either been taught by Mamitu or been taught by someone who’s been taught by Mamitu.
“As a 16-year-old girl, Mamitu spent four days in labour before the village medicine woman pulled out her dead baby’s body. She was left with horrendous fistula injuries.”
“I know what it’s like to suffer fistula,” she says simply. “I wanted to die. I prayed to God to take me. But Catherine and Reg treated me with such care, I called them emaye (mother) and abaye (father), and they treated me like their daughter.
“Now I want to give others the kind of care I received and help them be cured and go back to their former lives.”
The story of Catherine, Mamitu and the daily miracles they performed entranced me. We talked about writing a book about this incredible friendship that had done so much good in the world.
Sadly, Catherine was never to see Healing Lives finished, dying in March at the age of 96. Finishing the manuscript became a more difficult task than we’d ever imagined, with COVID-19 cancelling all flights to Ethiopia. Mamitu and I had to conduct the rest of our interviews via Zoom, with a translator.
Now that the book is out, Mamitu is delighted. “Emaye will never be forgotten,” she says of Catherine. “And this book will make sure of that. I miss her every day and I am sure they will one day make her a saint. But now I hope this will help us eradicate fistula from my country and the rest of the world. Every woman deserves the chance of a safe childbirth.”
The Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation welcomes donations.
Words_ Sue Williams
Photos_ Main, Graeme Young; others supplied