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
