TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: May 13, 2008
A difficult journey that begins in hopelessness
and shame for thousands of women in Ethiopia ends in a productive new life in
this award-winning documentary airing in its television premier on NOVA. Filmed
in a starkly beautiful landscape, the film juxtaposes the isolated lives of
village women who are outcasts because of their medical condition, with the
faraway hospital that offers a miracle after a long and arduous trek—a
"walk to beautiful."
The feature-length version of this film took top honors
at the 2007 International Documentary Association Awards Competition, where it
was named Best Feature Documentary. It also won the People's Choice Award
for Best Documentary at the Starz Denver Film Festival, the Audience Award at
both the San Francisco and St. Louis international film festivals, and the Best
Human Rights Film Award at the International Documentary Festival of Barcelona.
[Hear about the making of the film from producer Mary Olive Smith.]
The film tells the personal stories of rural women
who make their way to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, seeking treatment
for obstetric fistula, a life-shattering complication of childbirth that was
once common in the pre-industrial United States but that is now relegated to
the poorest regions of the world. (For more on disparities in women's
health worldwide, see Two Worlds.)
Women with small pelvises, whether through
malnutrition, overwork, or because they married too young, are most at risk,
since there is often not room for the baby to emerge during birth. The result
can be an obstructed labor that may last up to 10 days, a stillborn child, and
a trauma-induced hole, or fistula, in the vaginal wall that produces chronic
incontinence. (For more information, go to Anatomy of Childbirth.)
The women profiled in "A Walk to
Beautiful" are treated as virtual lepers in their villages, where they
are shunned by family and made to live alone. One women admits to contemplating
suicide.
Through chance they learn that there are other
women who share their affliction, and that the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital
exists to help them—if they can manage to walk for hours to the nearest
road, find public transport to the capital, and then search out the hospital in
a strange and forbidding city. Once there, they enter a haven that they never
imagined, surrounded by women like themselves and a medical staff of Western
and African doctors who treat them like human beings, not outcasts.
The story of this experience is told through the
women's own eyes and voices. There is Ayehu, 25, living in a makeshift
shack behind her mother's house where she has hidden for four years. Almaz,
also in her 20s, has suffered from a double fistula for three years. For
Wubete, 17, early marriage and her small physical stature left her with bladder
damage that makes her case especially difficult.
"My husband and I came to Ethiopia in
1959," says the hospital's cofounder, Dr. Catherine Hamlin, who is
from Australia. "The previous gynecologist that we replaced said to my
husband, 'The fistula patients will break your hearts.'"
And so they did. Dr. Hamlin's husband died
in 1993. But she is still there. (Read a wrenching yet hopeful interview with
Dr. Hamlin.)
Program Transcript
Program Credits
