WINTER, 2008
In this issue:
• Letter from our Executive Director
• Understanding Obstetric Fistula
• Tea and Empathy for Fistula Sufferers
• Virginia Fundraiser: From Talk to Action
• Remembering Dr. Allan Rosenfield
Click here to give a young Ethiopian woman her dignity—and get a little of your own
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New Harar Hospital Funded by Fistula Foundation Thriving In Eastern Ethiopia
The Harar Hospital in Eastern Ethiopian opened with great fanfare in May. It was built entirely with funds from the Fistula Foundation with critical support provided by the Ethiopian-American community through the Foundation's Tesfa Ineste Program — which means "Let's give them Hope" in Amharic.
The Hospital has a total of forty beds and is the fourth of five planned regional fistula hospitals in Ethiopia. The Hamlin Fistula team is learning valuable lessons with the opening of each of these new facilities. The first Hospital that opened in Bahir Dar, in Northern Ethiopia had only twenty beds. But quickly demand for the services filled the beds with women waiting to be admitted. Therefore, the Harar Hospital was built to treat twice as many patients at a time and expects this capacity to be needed.
Staff outside the Harar Hospital
The Hospital is run by Dr. Yifru Terefe and Nurse Coordinator is Sister Kibebe Tafesse, with important help provided by Sister Tensae Hailu assisting in the Operating Room. The Hospital has also hired a Public Health Officer, Ato Negash Yehualshet who has the important job of outreach, both teaching about the perils of obstructed labor and resulting fistula, and also helping find otherwise forgotten patients in the most rural areas and ensuring they receive the necessary treatment. Like the main hospital in Addis, the new Harrar Hospital also employs former fistula patients as nurses' aids to tend to the patients. As one can imagine the former patients have a particularly empathic and compassionate relationship with new patients.
Because of the Hospital's location in Eastern Ethiopia near the border with Somalia, the Hospital will also be treating patients from that troubled country. Previously, such patients had to travel to the hospital in Addis, but can now be treated at the new Harar Hospital much closer to their homes.
Many thanks go to the hard working Tesfa Ineste volunteers who helped make this important new hospital possible.
Harar Hospital in Eastern Ethiopia
Letter from the Executive Director
Kate Grant,
Executive Director, Fistula Foundation
Dear Friends,
The end of the year provides an opportunity for reflection.
2008 has brought us days of joy and pride, as the new Hospital in Harar, in Eastern Ethiopia opened this spring. This new facility is providing important services for many otherwise forgotten women. We are very grateful for the generosity of many people like you who enabled its construction.
On a more somber matter, this year has also been one of loss. On October 12th, Dr. Allan Rosenfield, a two-term Board member of the Fistula Foundation, lost his three year battle against A.L.S., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig Disease.
Many of us who had the pleasure and good fortune of working with Allan already miss him. He worked up until the end of his life and indeed he was scheduled to write a piece for this very newsletter. If it is true that it is in the toughest of times where we see the true character of an individual, Allan provided us with a model of grace, tenacity, determination and generosity of self even while battling a humbling disease. How lucky we are to have known him and how sorry we are to have lost him. We've provided a copy of his obituary on Page 6 of this newsletter.
This Holiday Season we are counting our many blessings. We are most grateful for the countless volunteers around the country who organize events to help us open hearts and minds to the tragedy of fistula. We are inspired by your generosity and selfless devotion to helping women whose pain and suffering is hard to truly fathom. There is one volunteer in particular, Mr. Jerry Goldstein, who helps every week in our office, providing us with both assistance which we appreciate and wisdom and humor which we couldn't do without. Thank you, Jerry!
We wish you all the best this Holiday Season,
Kate Grant
Executive Director
Board of Directors
Abaynesh Asrat |
C. Stephen Saunders, Esq. |
Understanding Obstetric Fistula
Recently one of our loyal donors named Janet called and asked specifically how does the injury occur, and we promised her we would do an article to explain the injury in more detail.
Simply stated the term "fistula" means a hole between an internal organ and the outside world that should not exist. Obstetric fistula is a hole in the birth canal that is usually caused by prolonged obstructed labor, though it can also be caused by traumatic rape, as has been the case in the Congolese war.
For those of us fortunate to be living in developed countries such as the United States and those in Western Europe it is difficult to comprehend the difficulty laboring women face in many developing nations. In countries in sub-Saharan Africa most women give birth without a trained birth attendant, let alone a doctor. When problems arise — as they do in approximately 15% of births — there is no one to help.
For women with obstructed labor, that goes unattended, the labor can last up to six or seven days. The labor produces contractions that push the baby's head against the mother's pelvic bone. The soft tissues between the baby's head and the pelvic bone are compressed and do not receive adequate blood flow. The lack of blood flow causes this delicate tissue to die and where it dies holes are created between the laboring mother's bladder and vagina and/or between the rectum and the vagina. This is what produces the incontinence.
When timely emergency obstetric care is available to women with obstructed labor fistula is prevented, usually by delivering the baby by C-section. This is why the injury is unheard of in the United States where virtually all women have access to emergency care. For women living in rural areas in developing countries, particularly those that lack paved roads and emergency care, fistula is comparatively common."Just about the worst thing that can happen to a teenage girl in this world is to develop an obstetric fistula that leaves her trickling bodily wastes, stinking and shunned by everyone around her."
— Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Columnist
IN THE NEWS
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Fistula Foundation Executive Director, Kate Grant, gave a presentation to Trinity United Methodist Women's group on October 13th. Thank you to Lois Chestnut from the American Association of University Women for helping organize the event.
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The award-winning film "A Walk to Beautiful" was screened at a special session of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Many thanks to Liya Kebede, wife of Board Chair Kassy Kebede and World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador for Maternal and Child Health, for anchoring a panel discussion following the screening.
Fistula Foundation Board Member, Dr. Gerald Shefren traveled to Ethiopia to attend the second meeting of the International Society of Fistula Surgeons (ISOFS). Dr. Shefren is the President of the Pacific Council of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and is a two-term Fistula Foundation Board Member.
Tea and Empathy event focuses on Fistula Foundation
Kat Likkel, event hostess and Cindy Chupak, co-founder of Tea and Empathy
What is the most personally embarrassing event you can remember? That was the conversation-starter question posed by the Tea and Empathy event hostess Kat Likkel to a group of talented and engaged professional women gathered in her home. The group came to learn more about obstetric fistula and Kat's question definitely got the conversation going as women recalled laughter creating episodes of embarrassing emails and personal beauty disasters. But, what became clear after the group had watched a short film about women with obstetric fistula is that none had experiences anything close to the humiliation and loss of basic dignity experienced by women left incontinent by the childbirth injury obstetric fistula.
On a beautiful sunny Sunday in November the women, who work mainly in the entertainment industry, gathered to hear more about lives of women a world away. The event was titled "Tea and Empathy — Women Dedicated to Making a Difference One Tea at a Time — focusing on the Fistula Foundation". The Tea and Empathy group was formed over a year ago by Cindy Chupak and Liz Abbe to help open hearts and minds, and not just wallets, to organizations and causes of interest. The busy group of women takes time out every two months to learn about and support diverse organizations.
Fistula Foundation Executive Director Kate Grant attended the event in Pasadena, giving a talk about fistula and leading a discussion of what can be done to help the approximately 2 million women the World Health Organization estimates still struggle mightily with untreated fistula.Virginia Fundraiser: From Talk to Action
Jeff Blithe, Kate Depret-Guillaume, Tsedale Assefa and Carmela Knepler
What started as a conversation at the community pool in Fairfax, Virginia, after viewing the award-winning film "A Walk to Beautiful", turned into an empowering event three months later. The main event, held on September 13, drew a diverse group of dedicated women. The main organizers, Carmela Knepler and her friend Kate Depret-Guillaume reached out to tens of their own friends opening hearts and minds to the plight of fistula patients and raised $10,000 to support fistula treatment. Several old friends of the Foundation were key participants in the event. Award-wining photographer Mary Calvert shared her photos taken at the Bahr Dar Fistula Hospital. Tsedale Assefa, the chair of the Washington DC Tesfa Ineste Committee, and Jeff Blithe, who worked at the Hospital, provided their personal accounts of the work of the Hamlin Fistula Hospitals.
Mary Calvert's photo exhibit
Holiday Giving Ideas
This Holiday Season we have a few ideas for those on your gift
list.
We provide a way for you to show you care about the recipient and women who need
your help.
You can order any of these gifts online at our website at www.fistulafoundation.org, or by calling our office toll free at 866 756 3700 if you live in the U.S. or 408 249-9596 between 8 am and 4 pm Pacific Time weekdays. If you wish to send earrings, a scarf or a bracelet as gifts for the Christmas Holiday, please place your order with us no later than Monday, December 15. Help restore health and dignity to otherwise forgotten women.
Dignity Bracelet
The silver-plated Dignity Bracelet incorporates the Fistula Foundation logo and the word Dignity in English on one side and in Amharic, the most common language in Ethiopia, on the other side of the central bead. For any donation of $125 or more you can receive a Dignity Bracelet or send one to a recipient of your choice.
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Dignity Earrings
The silver-plated Dignity Earrings make a simple but lovely gift that helps support the work of the Foundation. With any donation of $65 or more you can receive a pair of Dignity Earrings or send a pair to a recipient of your choice. The earrings are designed to match with the Dignity bracelet so they can be worn together or separately.
Dignity Bracelet and Earrings Gift Set
We are offering a new gift option for women you want to honor, which is a gift set that includes both the dignity bracelet and a pair of the dignity earrings. With any donation of $150 or more, we will send this gift set to a recipient of your choice. (This is a special offer, providing a savings of $40 if requested separately.)
"Blue Flower" Scarf
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Love-a-Sister Tribute Gift
For those wishing to make a gift that will likely never be forgotten, we encourage you to consider providing a gift equivalent to the cost of complete treatment for a woman suffering from fistula. Since the Foundation began this program over 2000 women's treatment has been covered by our "Love-a-Sister" supporters. For a gift of $450, the approximate cost to provide complete treatment for one women, we will send the person who you want to honor an 8 12'" x 11" four-color certificate on high quality paper that acknowledges that this life changing gift has been made in their honor.
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Tribute Holiday Card
We invite you to make a gift in support of women with fistula in honor of someone you care about. For your donation of $10 or more we will mail a custom Holiday card to someone special in your life.
Dr. Allan Rosenfield, Womenıs Health Advocate, Dies at 75
Mrs. Clare Rosenfield (wife of Dr. Rosenfield) and Dr. Rosenfield
By H. ROGER SEGELKEN
Published: October 16, 2008, New York Times
Allan Rosenfield, who as dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University became a leading advocate for women's health during the global H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, died on Sunday at his home in Hartsdale, N.Y. He was 75. The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., said his son, Paul Rosenfield.
Dr. Rosenfield, who learned he had A.L.S. in 2005, also had another progressive disease, myasthenia gravis, but he continued to work until his retirement in June 2008, after 22 years as dean of the school. He worked for more than four decades on women's reproductive health and human rights, innovative family planning studies and strategies to address maternal deaths because of AIDS in developing countries. Perhaps his most notable effort was the Mother-to-Child Transmission program, which has so far brought comprehensive health care to more than 500,000 women and infants.
When Columbia University's president, Lee C. Bollinger, announced in 2006 that the public health school's main building on West 168th Street would be named for Dr. Rosenfield, he said, "Over the last three decades at Columbia, Allan has not only inspired and trained generations of public health leaders, he has helped define what a school of public health should be."
Among the global initiatives organized from the school during Dr. Rosenfield's tenure were the $50 million Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program (from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (with $125 million from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief).
Dr. Rosenfield was born April 28, 1933, in Brookline, Mass. He received his B.A. in biochemistry from Harvard College in 1955 and his M.D. from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1959.
In the 1960s, before H.I.V./AIDS became a global concern, Dr. Rosenfield worked in Thailand with the Population Council, a nonprofit group, advising the Thai ministry of public health on reproductive, maternal and child health issues — an effort he later recognized as the turning point of his career.
At a time when the annual population growth rate in Thailand was 3.3 percent and the country faced a severe shortage of physicians, Dr. Rosenfield helped develop a national family planning program that trained auxiliary midwives to prescribe birth control. By 2000, Thailand's population growth rate had dropped to 0.8 percent a year.
In 1975, Dr. Rosenfield joined the Columbia faculty as a professor of public health and obstetrics and gynecology, as well as director of the school's new Center for Population and Family Health. He ordered a dual focus — the global outreach that the public-health school would become known for, and efforts in Columbia's immediate neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, where community-based programs included the Young Adult Clinic for adolescent women, the Young Men's Clinic and clinics in intermediate and high schools.
Dr. Rosenfield worked, with other members of the Columbia faculty, in the neighborhood clinics through 1986, when he was appointed dean of the Mailman School and administrative and fund-raising duties became more time-consuming.
The clinical experience, however, had provided insight to problems on a global scale, and in 1985 he published, with Deborah Maine, a call to action for maternal and child health, known in the field as MCH, in The Lancet. The article, "Maternal Mortality — A Neglected Tragedy: Where is the M in MCH?" drew attention to the many third-world women who died in pregnancy and childbirth. He said that the crisis in women's health was worsening, and that providers were focusing on children at the expense of women and families. As a result, international health groups and policy makers began to focus on the universal shortage of maternal health care, including access to emergency obstetric care. Dr. Rosenfield used the support of Gates Foundation to establish more than 85 "safe motherhood" initiatives in 50 countries around the world.
Speaking out at the World AIDS Conference in 2000 in Durban, South Africa, Dr. Rosenfield again demanded that attention be paid to maternal care. With the support of nine private foundations, he started the MTCT-Plus Initiative to address mother-to-child transmission of the disease. Dr. Rosenfield was national chairman of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1985 to 1986 and was chairman of the Program Board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
He is survived by his wife, Clare, of Hartsdale; a son, Paul, of Riverdale, N.Y.; a brother, Jim, of Manhattan; a daughter, Jill Baker of Brookline; and five grandchildren.FLORIDA: REGISTRATION #:Ch17941- A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION FOR THE FISTULA FOUNDATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE DIVISION OF CONSUMER SERVICES BY CALLING TOLL-FREE (800-435-7352) WITHIN THE STATE. REGISTRATION DOES NOT IMPLY ENDORSMENT, APPROVAL, OR RECOMMENDATION BY THE STATE. VIRGINIA: PLEASE NOTE: A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION FOR THE FISTULA FOUNDATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE OFFICE OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS, COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, BY CALLING: 804-786-1402.