Yesterday I was watching a PBS film titled "A Walk to Beautiful."  I started watching it about fifteen minutes into the show so I missed a lot of the initial information.  It caught my interest because I remembered that Oprah had done a show on this subject.  The film was following a few womens journeys from their home to the city so that they can get an operation to correct a problem that was caused during the child birth process.  This problem is called a fistula and what it basically is is a hole that causes incontinece both of urine and feces.  Most women just suffer from one or the other but a few of them suffer from both conditions.  Women are forced to live alone and ashamed of this condition since they can't control the excretion of these substances.  The majority of the women are abandoned by their husbands and are forced to move back with their parents, unable to do anything because of the condition.  Dr. Catherine Hamlin and her late husband established a hospital in Ethiopia in 1974 just to correct these problems.  It is estimated that they have helped around 30,000 women.  Fistulas are a health care crisis in developing countries.  The U.S. was afflicted once with this problem but thanks to our evolving medicine it has become non-existent.  You can view this film online at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beautiful/program.html.  It's divided into six sections for easy viewing.  A transcript is also available.

"To learn more about the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital and the U.S.-based Fistula Foundation, see www.fistulafoundation.org."

An excerpt of what the film is about:

"The film tells the personal stories of rural women who make their way to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, seeking treatment for obstetric fistula, a life-shattering complication of childbirth that was once common in the pre-industrial United States but that is now relegated to the poorest regions of the world."

"Women with small pelvises, whether through malnutrition, overwork, or because they married too young, are most at risk, since there is often not room for the baby to emerge during birth. The result can be an obstructed labor that may last up to 10 days, a stillborn child, and a trauma-induced hole, or fistula, in the vaginal wall that produces chronic incontinence."

"The women profiled in "A Walk to Beautiful" are treated as virtual lepers in their villages, where they are shunned by family and made to live alone. One women admits to contemplating suicide."

"Through chance they learn that there are other women who share their affliction, and that the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital exists to help them—if they can manage to walk for hours to the nearest road, find public transport to the capital, and then search out the hospital in a strange and forbidding city. Once there, they enter a haven that they never imagined, surrounded by women like themselves and a medical staff of Western and African doctors who treat them like human beings, not outcasts."

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beautiful/?campaign=pbshomefeatures_1_novabrawalktobeautiful_2008-05-14