By Denise Grady
(Source: New York Times)
Lying side by side on a narrow bed, talking and giggling and poking each other with skinny elbows, they looked like any pair of teenage girls trading jokes and secrets.
But the bed was in a crowded hospital ward, and between the moments of laughter, Sarah Jonas, 18, and Mwanaidi Swalehe, 17, had an inescapable air of sadness. Pregnant at 16, both had given birth in 2007 after labor that lasted for days. Their babies had died, and the prolonged labor had inflicted a dreadful injury on the mothers: an internal wound called a fistula, which left them incontinent and soaked in urine.
Last month at the regional hospital in Dodoma, they awaited expert surgeons who would try to repair the damage. For each, two previous, painful operations by other doctors had failed.
“It will be great if the doctors succeed,” Ms. Jonas said softly in Swahili, through an interpreter.
Along with about 20 other girls and women ranging in age from teens to 50s, Ms. Jonas and Ms. Swalehe had taken long bus rides from their villages to this hot, dusty city for operations paid for by a charitable group, Amref, the African Medical and Research Foundation.
The foundation had brought in two surgeons who would operate and teach doctors and nurses from different parts of Tanzania how to repair fistulas and care for patients afterward.
“This is a vulnerable population,” said one of the experts, Dr. Gileard Masenga, from the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center in Moshi, Tanzania. “These women are suffering.”
The mission — to do 20 operations in four days — illustrates the challenges of providing medical care in one of the world’s poorest countries, with a shortage of doctors and nurses, sweltering heat, limited equipment, unreliable electricity, a scant blood supply and two patients at a time in one operating room — patients with an array of injuries, from easily fixable to dauntingly complex.