Aminata

Aminata had three children and a husband and life was good. Then she became pregnant again and her life took a drastic turn.
She endured three days of childbirth and, knowing her baby was dead, Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) placed Aminata in a hammock strung up on poles and two men walked for seven hours to find help.

Once they arrived, Aminata watched her dead child being delivered. The baby had been rotting inside of her and she bled profusely. She did not yet know she had developed an obstetric fistula which rendered her incontinent. She learned this later, when she woke up in a pool of urine.

On top of coping with the loss of her child, her parents disowned her and then her husband moved her into a small shack because of the constant stench of urine. Then he left her too.

After that, she lost her friends and was reliant on her children selling firewood to buy food.

But one day, a woman stopped and told Aminata that she had been incontinent at one time but that she had undergone free surgery at the Mercy Ships clinic near Freetown and she was healed – both physically and emotionally.

This was the first time Aminata heard another woman had suffered the same affliction. It was also the first time she heard of a solution.

Aminata was treated at a fistula clinic, run by the international charity Mercy Ships and after her free life-changing surgery, she sat in the hospital ward, dry for the first time in years.

She joyfully recounted, “At first, I didn’t see myself as a human being since people didn’t want to be around me. Now, I see healing and it’s like life has returned again.”

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