Provide Dignity for Angolan Women Awaiting Surgery

Hope For Our Sisters, Inc. (HFOS) is excited to share with you our report on our now retired microproject with GlobalGiving to Provide Dignity for Angolan Women Awaiting Surgery. As you may recall, this project was started as a subset of our project to Enable Women in Angola to Generate Income via the Aftercare program administed by our partners at the CEML Hospital in Lubango, Angola. Women awaiting surgery for fistula repair, an injury secondary to violent trauma or childbirth that renders a woman incontinent of urine and/or feces, do not have a private place to do their wash, and are often ridiculed and bullied by others in the laundry facility due to the stench of bodily waste on their clothes. To maintain dignity, it is important for these women to feel clean. This microproject aimed to build a separate laundry facility where the women could feel comfortable meeting their needs without facing stigma, shame, and unkindness. Our partners at CEML have described this as a significant need.

Thanks to your generosity, almost $1,000 was raised towards this project, and funds will continue to be raised by our partners to meet the total cost. While awaiting the exciting day when they can break ground, we wanted to highlight a beautiful story for you about the kind of strong, brave woman who will benefit directly from these efforts - her name is Rosa. 

Rosa is unsure of exactly how old she is, but she speculates she is about fifty years old now. Her fistula occured with her first and only pregnancy, when she was in her late teens or early twenties. She has lived more than half of her life leaking both urine and feces, abandoned by her husband who did not think her problem was curable and did not want to be "burdened" with her. Rosa heard about fistula surgeries at CEML from another fistula patient and decided to make the journey. 

When she arrived, the staff described her as angry - it is easy to see why. She was far from home in a place where her native language and accent were not typical, she did not understand why she would need multiple procedures over several months to be cured, and she had been living the life of an outcast for decades. Scars had formed over her heart. As the staff began to explain the minimum of three procedures necessary to close her fistulas, one of which was very complicated and one of which required use of a colostomy (external fecal diversion bag) between phases, the other fistula patients rallied around Rosa. She placed her trust in this new community, and today, after a long road, she is dry and healed! 

Rosa would have gone to the communal laundry facilities with clothes that a mother in a developed nation might just throw away if her child brought them before her, not wanting to deal with the waste on them. But to Rosa, living on the margins and likely in extreme poverty, this wasn't an option. She might have had to endure terrible words and looks because of her condition, because people didn't understand her "uncleanliness". We want to ensure that women like Rosa don't have to worry about that while they go about the important work of healing both body and spirit. 

Thank for you for partnering with us to help women like Rosa. 

Links:

• HFOS Homepage