MADELEINE COLLINS meets Catherine Hamlin, an extraordinary Australian who has spent the last 44 years in Ethiopia, bringing the gospel to young women suffering the pain and the shame of fistula.
The New York Times has dubbed her ‘the Mother Teresa of our age’. To 60 Minutes she is ‘Saint Catherine’. In a jaded world where people can receive new hearts and conjoined twins can be separated at birth, Dr Catherine Hamlin, 79, has earned international acclaim for over 40 years, quietly repairing obscure childbirth injuries in a dusty third-world city. And she shows no sign of slowing down.
“I’m getting old,” she says. “I suppose I won’t be able to go on working forever, [but] I don’t want to retire because I’m able to work. I love living there.”
The first thing you notice about Catherine Hamlin is her height. She is very tall, willowy and surprisingly fragile, like a graceful bird. Her hands are long and nimble, with fingers that by rights should belong to a concert pianist. But then with Catherine Hamlin, appearances are deceptive.
We meet in the genteel North Shore suburb of Roseville, light years from her home in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. She is in Sydney visiting family, after an exhaustive US tour where she highlighted the urgent need her hospital still faces for funding. While there, she was awarded an honorary membership and made a Fellow of the prestigious American College of Surgeons.
Perched on a lounge chair looking out onto the leafy suburb, she looks like someone’s cherished grandmother, offering cups of tea, worrying about the cold wind outside, asking if I’ll be warm enough in my jacket. But this is a woman who has pioneered a radical surgical procedure that has cured 25,000 women of what is known as the world’s worst obstetric disaster. Her work is sponsored by World Vision in three countries. She was awarded Rotary International’s Award for World Understanding and Peace the year after it was given to Nelson Mandela. She has been nominated several times for a Nobel Peace Prize. “But I haven’t got it yet,” she laughs.
In 1959, newlyweds Drs Reginald and Catherine Hamlin packed up, left Sydney and went to live in Ethiopia after responding to an advertisement to help set up a midwife clinic. They were to stay for three or four years at most. “We didn’t belong to any mission society,” Dr Hamlin explains. “We just went as Christians to see if we could help where doctors were needed.” But those few years became a lifetime when the Hamlins discovered women with horrific childbirth injuries, fistulas, then unknown in the western world. “We soon came across these little girls, and we were very worried that nobody was helping them. The more we cured, the more came.”
Through civil war, Communist rule and decades of drought and famine, the Hamlins stayed and set up a hospital where women – deserted by their husbands and ostracised by their villages – would come to be repaired. Reg Hamlin died in 1993, but in his lifetime he saw how their decision caused a medical revolution to sweep through developing nations. There are now fistula clinics around the world. This year there are many Ethiopian gynaecologists in training to do the work.
A fistula is a hole between the rectum or bladder and the birth canal. They occur frequently in Ethiopia and other African countries where diet is poor and women are forced to marry as young as seven. If a girl’s body is underdeveloped and cannot hold a baby, it causes an obstructed labour, often lasting five or six days, and eventually a stillbirth. The baby’s head puts pressure on the birth canal, cutting off blood supply. The tissues die and a hole develops that leaks urine and faeces.
For the woman whose greatest joy is to see other women walk out of the hospital grounds completely healed, the condition is akin to leprosy. “We feel this is as serious, but because it’s affecting women, and these are the poorest women in the world, it’s been a hidden problem and nobody’s done anything about it. Here we are in the 21st century and still there are millions of women suffering. If it had been men affected, I’m sure something would have been done long ago.”
Fistulas remain a serious medical problem in Africa. There are 8,000 cases every year in Ethiopia; in Nigeria alone there are one million women waiting to be healed.
The work continues to take Dr Hamlin across the world to make the cause heard, not least with her book The Hospital By the River. But donations show no sign of abating. Just 12 months ago the Desta Mender village (‘Village of Joy’) opened, to house women who cannot be repaired. The Archbishop of Sydney’s Overseas Relief and Aid Fund helped to fund the work.
The hope now is to build five fistula clinics in hospitals across Ethiopia. In the southern region, construction is about to start on a clinic funded by a Norwegian aid organisation, and a Maltese group are laying the foundations for another in the north near the Blue Nile. Funds are still needed for the remaining three.
Despite financial pressures, the hospital has never wavered from its original aim: to share the love of Christ with the poorest of the poor. Dr Hamlin recalls many women who have responded to Christ, especially those who have learnt to read and write during their stay and those who have had the Bible read to them at their bedside. The thriving Egyptian Orthodox church is a strong supporter (all the hospital staff are Christians). Prayer groups, Bible reading and biblical teaching in the school attached to the hospital are part of daily life.
“I know that we’ve been sustained by so many people who’ve been praying for us all over the world. I know that God has helped us and kept us going.” There is a pause, and that softly spoken voice holds a trace of weariness. “But the greatest need is to have the hospital endowed so that we don’t have to beg.”
A humble aim indeed, from a woman who went to a strange land all those years ago, just to see if she could help someone who might have needed it.
