2010 has begun with an abundance of coverage of fistula in popular Christian magazines. It is so good to see the word getting out and people of faith getting informed!

Check out these articles and Bible reflections from Christianity Today:

“Hope for the ‘Most Voiceless’ on the Planet; A human rights lawyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and two world-class surgeons are rallying evangelicals to defeat fistula,” By Elissa Cooper for Christianity Today, Jan. 13, 2010

“A Walk to Beautiful: A Must-See Film,” By Elissa Cooper for Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics Blog, Jan. 29, 2010

“Jesus and the Unclean Woman,” by L. Lewis Wall for Christianity Today, Jan. 13, 2010

and this interview and Bible reflection from Sojourners:

“Extended Interview with Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn,” by Molly Marsh for Sojourners, Jan. 2010

“The Bleeding Woman,” By Julie Clawson for the God’s Politics Blog, Feb. 10, 2010

The following article, written by Suzanne Campise, outlines the Action Plan created by a Fistula Stories pilot group at Advent Lutheran Church. Read more and be inspired about what your own community could to do end fistula in this generation!

Inspired by the Fistula Curriculum, our group has decided to expand to include more members around the broader issue of Maternal Health. Beginning in April 2010, our group will launch a multi-month campaign at Advent Lutheran Church on 93rd and Broadway, NYC, advocating for maternal health as a national and international priority. Actions of this campaign will include:

1) Education – Hosting a screening of A Walk To Beautiful and have a forum with a panel of experts in the field of maternal health and obstetric fistula. We want to invite churches throughout New York City to this event in order to spread awareness and the importance of maternal health here and abroad.
2) Actions – Raising money for healthy birth kits. We will assemble the kits as a congregation, along with a letter writing campaign (specifics TBD)
3) Fundraising – for mobile hospital units in rural areas in Africa and for fistula repair surgeries.

Throughout, we will connect with ELCA Global Missions to determine where the need is most. We will also research the ELCA hospitals that are underfunded and what they are doing about obstetric fistula.

Our group is very excited and optimistic about this timely campaign for maternal health generally and obstetric fistula specifically.

Join us at the Interchurch Center on Tuesday, Nov. 24 at 1230pm for a brown bag lunch titled: How can faith communities address obstetric fistula?

Meet us in conference rooms C&D, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115.

We will be exploring Fistula stories and Susan Lee, Director of Special Projects at Engel Entertainment, will talk with us about how communities have used the film “A Walk to Beautiful” to raise awareness and call folks to action.

All are welcome!

Thinking that obstetric fistula is irrelevant to your life? Think again. Check out this weekend’s op-ed piece from Nick Kristof, fistula champion extraordinaire, as well as a mention in relation to celebrity gossip, of all things, in a recent post on Jezebel.com!

NEW YORK—Women’s Ministries at the NCC will be sponsoring three screenings of the Emmy award winning film, “A Walk to Beautiful” this fall. Two screenings will be in Minneapolis, MN at the General Assembly of the NCC and Church World Service, and the third will take place in New York at the Interchurch Center. All screenings will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers from Engel Entertainment, and are free and open to the public.

With deeply personal dramas and breathtaking cinematography, A Walk to Beautiful follows five Ethiopian women on their journey from devastating childbirth injury to health and freedom. Shunned by their communities, these women and just a few of the millions who spend their lives in loneliness and shame, while a cure exists. The film follows them on their journey to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital where their lives—and our hearts—are transformed.

The screenings are part of Fistula Stories, a program in development by the NCC through a grant from the United Nations Foundation to work with young women exploring the connections between faith and advocacy through the issue of obstetric fistula. For more information please visit our website at www.fistulastories.org .

Minneapolis screenings:

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 9:30am-11:30am
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 2pm-4pm
Both screenings in Terrace 3&4 at the Doubletree Hotel, 1500 Park Place Blvd. Minneapolis, MN 55416

New York City screening:

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 6:30pm-8:30pm
The Interchurch Center Chapel
475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115

Here’s the official Press Release!

Women’s Ministries at the National Council of Churches announces pilot program for young women.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine announced that women’s issues are the cause of our time.  Women’s Ministries at the National Council of Churches agrees, and is excited to announce a pilot program for young women exploring the connections between faith and action, through the lens of obstetric fistula, a birth injury affecting more than 2 million women worldwide.  Sponsored by the UN Foundation, this project seeks to bring faith communities into the campaign to end fistula in this generation by connecting the issue to the New Testament story of the woman with a hemorrhage who is healed by touching Jesus’ cloak.

The curriculum has four sessions, 1 ½ hour per session, and encourages the group to take some sort of action at the end of the study to continue to raise awareness and funds.  The first session covers information about what obstetric fistula is, explored through the stories of women who are survivors.  The next session explores the connections to our faith through Mark 5:21-43.  The third session pushes the group to examine their role, as women living in America, in the global movement for women’s rights, and the fourth encourages the group to see their strengths and skills and brainstorm ways to use those in the campaign to end fistula in this generation.

The curriculum is geared towards young women (18-30) and is intimately linked to interactive features on our website, www.fistulastories.org .  Our blog can be accessed there, featuring stories of folks affected by and advocating for and end to fistula, and the curriculum is available for download, along with other resources and action tools.  Suggested group size for the curriculum is 5 to 12 women. We are asking all participants in this pilot program to complete evaluation forms by December 1, 2009 to help us improve the program.

Please let Meagan Manas at the NCC know ASAP if you would like to participate in this pilot program.  We’d be so thankful for your help, and truly feel this would be an amazing learning opportunity for young women.  Contact Meagan at mmanas@ncccusa.org or 212-870-2516 no later than September 18^th, if you would like to participate.

In case you never read the NY Times Op-Ed section, and in case you missed the recent NYTimes Magazine issue devoted to women’s equality as the cause of our time, here’s a small heads-up: Women’s rights are the cause of our time.

Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and journalist Sheryl WuDunn (they happen to be the only married couple to have received a pullitzer) just released their book “Half the Sky,” named for the Chinese proverb that “women hold up half the sky.” Exploring the cause of women and girls around the globe, their book is a small effort to make up for the serious lack of coverage of the atrocities against women that happen every day (every minute even) in every corner of the globe. They are some of the few journalists to have actually covered obstetric fistula.

Check it out in your local bookstore, and see Kristof and WuDunn interviewed on the Brian Lehrer radio show from this morning on WNYC.

photo by Derrick Knisley

I have to admit that I knew very little about obstetric fistula before I began working with Women’s Ministries at the National Council of Churches in the early spring of 2009.  In fact, I had never heard of it before.  What I did know was that women’s inequality is rampant in our world, in blatant and more subtle ways, infiltrating everything from language to pay-scales to access to resources to quality of life in general.  The systems of power that consistently place “us” over “them,” rich over poor, white over black, humanity over the earth, the very systems that Jesus just as consistently dismantled in his ministry, are all tied into the same structure of power that places “male” over “female.”  If for no other reason, the work to end obstetric fistula is the work of Jesus inasmuch as it is the work to dismantle these systems of oppression.

My theological background comes from my time getting an MDiv at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.  The theological lens of the institution is largely focused on constantly asking who is being left out of the conversation or who is being oppressed.  Searching out these voices, or shutting our own selves up so they can get a word in edgewise, is a deep value of that place and most of its graduates.  With all this in mind, how in the world can a bunch of pretty privileged young women from the United States reach out to join the campaign to end fistula in a way that also upholds those women who have suffered and still suffer from it?  Is there a way, I wondered, that we can do this work not for or on behalf of these women, but in solidarity with them and with women worldwide?

And so “Fistula Stories” was born.  The impetus for this blog-style homepage comes from the desire to be in solidarity.  My hopes are that we can use this space to find the places where all of our stories connect, giving each woman who participates a voice and equally charging each participant to listen.  My colleagues in the United Methodist Church,  Jill Wiley and Linda Bales Todd, are working on an obstetric fistula project as well.  Their program, “Operation Healing Hope,” brings women together to learn about fistula by forming quilting circles.  The baby blankets quilted in these groups, which use fabric made by fistula survivors, can then display fistula information in the group’s church, and afterwards be sent to a mission hospital nursery.  I love the metaphor of quilting also for our project.  What are and were quilting circles but a form of social networking?  And might it be possible for us to think of ourselves as sitting together and working on something bigger than all of us–sewing our stories together as we listen and speak?

Some big dreams.  Let’s just start here.  Let’s get a small group together, meet four times and go through this curriculum, and just see what comes from it.

And it would be great to hear your “fistula story” too…

Julie Warren R. N. is the first to tell you she is passionate about fistula.  She also has a heart for mission that she pours into leading her United Methodist conference’s Volunteers in Mission (VIM) program in Central Texas.

For the past two years, Julie has led a team of doctors, nurses and other volunteers on medical missions to Ganta United Methodist Hospital located in northern Liberia where they have performed fistula repair surgery and other maternal and infant health care services.  In a five-day period this past July, the team of three doctors and five nurses completed forty-eight separate procedures.

During this summer’s visit, while Julie was attending to the women waiting in line for evaluation by the medical team on a range of medical issues, she felt a gentle tug on the sleeve of her scrubs. When she looked around, she encountered a small young woman looking up at her who said so softly Julie couldn’t barely hear her, “I’m VVF.” “VVF” is the common term for obstetric fistula in Liberia where regular radio public service announcements are aimed at raising awareness of “vesicovaginal” fistula or VVF. Lucy, the girl at Julie’s sleeve had heard one of these announcements and knew if she could just get to Ganta Hospital there would be a medical team from the United States of America that would be carrying on free VVF surgery.

After coming out of the crowd to identify herself to the blond American nurse, Lucy went on to inform the team she had had four stillbirths and had been suffering VVF for over six years. The following morning, she was in the operating room and by noon repair surgery had been completed.

The next afternoon Lucy and her sister Pauline who had traveled with her were seen walking around the hospital compound with wide smiles knowing that thanks to Julie and her team, it was indeed the first day of the rest of her life.  Encouraged by achievements made by Ganta Hospital in treating fistula patients, Julie is already setting her sights on a mission to Democratic Republic of Congo in Summer 2010.

Interview, article, and photographs courtesey of Jill Wiley, Operation Healing Hope.

For Rev. John Togba, chaplain at Ganta United Methodist Hospital in northern Liberia, there is no such word has hopeless.

He would not be blamed for feeling helpless, sometimes, as he counsels patients coping with diagnoses of irreparable fistulae or others with HIV/AIDS.  But hopeless?  Never.

The walls and windows of the chaplain’s office at Ganta Hospital are papered over with numerous posters bearing uplifting messages, as much maybe to remind Rev. Togba of his own positive outlook as to protect the privacy of those he counsels from prying eyes.

Many come to him with post-trauma issues and family problems, others with diagnoses of HIV/AIDS. He describes with great sympathy fistula victims who come to him in tears, sometimes suicidal, when their prognosis is not good. His calling, he says, “is to bring hope to the hopeless.” He takes exception when fistula patients are told point-blank that there are no options. “Our God is a miracle-working God,” he declares, taking inspiration from stories in the Gospel of Mark showing Jesus as healer, counselor and wonderworker.

Rev. Togba is familiar with God working wonders.  In January of 2003 when armed rebels stormed into the Ganta Mission chasing away and mowing down everyone in sight, Rev. Togba hid for five days on a compound under siege. He did so to be the sole protector of a10-year-old girl who was in hospital for treatment after falling into a bonfire and couldn’t move fast enough to escape.  They were without water and food as they stayed behind the locked doors of his parsonage. Gunmen approached the house but never sought to enter. When things became dire, Rev. Togba prayed desperately for rain, which came and he was able to reach a bowl where it collected and save them.  Shortly thereafter, family members of his came and rescued them and even in the chaos that followed he was able to find relatives of the young girl.

Rev. Togba will tell you that as a counselor or chaplain, you can’t give what you don’t have.  Thus, as he counsels fistula victims, HIV/AIDS patients and others, it is clear he can offer them much hope, because he has deep wells of hopefulness to give.

Interview, article, and photographs courtesey of Jill Wiley, Operation Healing Hope.