Show your love for mum by helping another

This Mother’s Day why not show your love for her by helping another?

As we lead in to Mother’s Day, cbm are focusing their efforts around the struggles that women are faced with every day throughout the developing world – a condition known as fistula. This month cbm is focusing their fund-raising efforts around the little-known but devastating condition which plagues over two million women throughout Africa and Asia – yet can be cured by a simple medical procedure.

cbm is a registered New Zealand charity that works to improve the quality of life of persons with disabilities living in the world’s poorest countries.

Fistula can result from prolonged labour, and is caused when a hole forms between internal organs, allowing bodily waste to leak through, resulting in conditions including severe infection, ulceration, incontinence and nerve damage.

The condition however is hardly heard of in the developed world as skilled doctors and modern medicine prevent this problem from occurring.

When Helen Green, chair of cbm New Zealand, recently visited the cbm-funded Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation hospital in Tanzania (CCBRT). She met with several women whose lives had been dramatically changed thanks to a small and simple operation performed by cbm sponsored doctors.

Helen met Naioma, aged 19 from Tanzania who had been pregnant with her third child when she went into labour at home in her village which is four hours away from the nearest clinic.

After three days in labour she delivered a stillborn child and the prolonged labour had ruptured both her bladder and her bowel, causing a double fistula.

Helen explains the destruction fistula had on Naioma’s life; “Her husband deserted her and she was left confined to her house because of the smell and constant leakage of body fluids.

“Naioma needed full time care to survive, so her oldest boy had to drop out of school to care of her along with her youngest child who had to manage their garden to grow the food they needed to survive. “This went on for eight years and that’s not uncommon. I have heard of a woman who had been untreated for 26 years before she came to CCBRT” Helen says.

Naioma lives in a very rural area, but she did have access to a radio and it was across the airwaves that she heard of the work of CCBRT were doing for women suffering from fistula. So Naioma made her way with her children to an outreach clinic and gained a referral to the hospital “When I met her she had been operated on three days previously and was so excited to have a new chance at life,” says Helen.

“She explained how both her boys would be able to attend school again and she would now be able to take over the gardening and grow green beans which she could sell to make a small profit and so help her family to improve their lives.”

The operation to repair a fistula is not a difficult one, says Helen. “The difficulty is for the patient to get to a hospital, to be cured. Often these women think they are the only one to have this condition. They are amazed when they get to a hospital and find many women like them. This also helps with their healing.

“The operation literally means a new life for them. They can rejoin their family and their community. Many are able to have more children after the operation, and have a completely normal life. It’s just wonderful to see the change in these young women.”

If you would like to donate to cbm and help women like Naioma, please visit cbm New Zealand’s website www.cbm-nz.org.nz or post your donation to CBM New Zealand, P.O box 303477, North Harbour 0751 Auckland and change a life today.

ENDS

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