Today, I am sharing with you another story from the book Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Mahabouba did not die in childbirth or due to giving birth, but she did become incontinent. According to Kristof and WuDunn, more than 3 million women and girls are incontinent due to the lack of medical care during childbirth.
Here’s Mahabouba’s (an Ethopian girl) tragic story: When her parents divorced when she was a small child, she was given to her father’s sister, who didn’t give her an education and treated her as a servant. Mahabouba and her sister ran away to town and worked as maids for room and board. A neighbor told her that he could find better work for her when she was 13 years old, but he actually sold her for $10 to a 60-year-old man as a 2nd wife. The man raped and beat her. She got no sympathy from the first wife either, who also beat her out of jealousy. Mahabouba tried to run away, but she was always caught.
She soon became pregnant, and so the beatings didn’t happen as often and she had more freedom. When she was 7 months pregnant, she ran away. She fled to town, but the people said they would take her back to the man, so she ran to her village. She found her immediate family gone, and nobody wanted to help her because she was pregnant and someone else’s wife. She went to drown herself in the river, but her uncle found her and put her in a little hut by his house.
She had no midwife, and so she tried to have the baby by herself, but her pelvis hadn’t grown large enough to accommodate the baby’s head (since she was so young) and she ended up in obstructed labor. After seven days, she passed out and then someone summoned a birth attendant. When she woke up, she discovered her baby was dead and she had no control over her bladder or bowels. She couldn’t walk or stand. The people in the village thought she was cursed, and she should leave. But her uncle was torn. He gave her food and water, but moved her hut to the edge of the village and took the door off so there was no protection from the hyenas.
The first night, the hyenas came. Even though she couldn’t move her legs, Mahabouba warded them off with a stick at 14 years old. She knew to survive she had to get out of the village. She had heard of a Western missionary in a nearby village, and so she crawled for almost two days to the next village, up to the missionary doorstep. The missionary saved her and took her to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital.
If you want to read what happens to Mahabouba at the fistula hospital or the wonderful work they do there, please buy the book: Half the Sky.
Tomorrow, I will tell you a way you can help girls like Mahabouba.
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