Warm Shawls, Warm Hearts

Members of BPW Swan Hill and the community have been busy knitting scarves to join into shawls.  The shawls are sent to Ethiopian hospitals to keep women warm, while recovering from surgery, to correct women’s bladders which leak after damage caused during prolonged and obstructed labours.  Very few women in the developed world would know the shame and torment of the enduring smell of leaking excreta and urine from bladders and rectums damaged while giving birth.   In Ethiopia, such women are rejected by their families and become destitute outcasts.  And there are many of them:  an estimated 8,000 new cases every year.

Australian-born Dr Catherine Hamblin and her husband Reg, devised surgery to correct fistula in the 1960s and have since established fistula hospitals and mobile clinics in Ethiopia.  Reg died in 1993 but at the age of 82, Catherine Hamlin continues her work.  After surgery at the fistula hospital, the women are given new clothes and a shawl to keep them warm in the cold evenings and mornings in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, where the main fistula hospital is located.

The ‘young bride’ tradition of girls maybe 13 or 14 years , fall pregnant and as their pelvic areas are under developed, result in long and difficult labours producing these fistulae.  With inaccessible medical care the problem is exacerbated.

We thank Toll-IPEC for their generosity in donating the freight from Swan Hill to the Hamlin Fistula Relief and Aid Centre ,Turramurra, NSW.

Please contact Val at BPW Swan Hill if knitters in your club would like to take on this project also.