ENDING OBSTETRIC FISTULA AT THE RURAL AREAS

Eleh was already a mother of three before she became 20 years. One of the few (disadvantaged) ladies that survive by being a loyalist to a notorious drug kingpin. When I asked Eleh what led her to such life style, she told me a story that left me stunned.
She was given to marriage as a girl child at thirteen years to an old man who was her father's friend.

When she was pregnant of her third child, they were so poor that her husband could not afford antenatal care. She was taking to a traditional birth attendant who kept her for six days before she had her baby boy. She had complications of obstetric fistula but was never treated rather he got another wife so she ran away from her children and husband, met and stayed with her drug friend who helped pay for her surgery/treatment.

While discussing with a resident doctor with the department of obstetrics and gynecology, University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital Rivers State Nigeria, Dr. Calestus Nwaosu defined obstetric fistula as the fistula that occurs during labour especially in the hands of people who are not skilled in managing labour. So if the labour becomes obstructed, and the patient is referred and the delivery takes place, and when the patient develops vesicovagina fistula later, it's said to be obstetric fistula. That is fistula arising from management of labour and the process of labour. But that there are other fistulas that can also occur during surgery according to him.

Ending fistulas will start from ending girl marriages especially at the rural communities. Girls and women whose pelvis are not well developed before getting pregnant are the most at risk of suffering obstetric fistula. The worst happens when their pregnancies are managed by untrained persons who cannot identify such issues and give appropriate referrals.

The pains of obstetric fistula as narrated by Eleh is indescribable. It gives a stench of urine that smells along with your shadows wherever you are. As a result she could not associate with people, do chores, attend to anything that can put money in her hand.  It was an experience of total isolation and stigmatization which made her husband got another wife .

There is no better time to end girl marriage than now. As the world joins the United Nations every 23rd May to mark the international day to end obstetric fistula, @theruralpeople we demand for training and retraining of our traditional birth attendants, free and compulsory primary/secondary education especially to every girl child in our rural areas, ending of girl marriages and total abolition of cultures and traditions that practice female genital mutilation.