Sai Hankuri

Week One at Camp Fistula

 

Despite the warnings of nebulous threats from volatile neighbors, I decided to come check out Danja, the site where I initially planned to conduct my research. I took a United Nations flight to Maradi (a step up from my usual ride: a 3-seater missionary bush plane that shakes, hums, and flies too low to the ground for comfort). With about 170,000 people, Maradi is Niger’s 3rd biggest city and is often considered the country’s economic and religious capital. Close to the very porous border with Nigeria, money, commerce, people, and religious conservatism flow in from Niger’s southern neighbor.

Danja, about 12 kilometers south of Maradi, was a small village started in the 1950s as a mission hospital for lepers. Sixty years later, and after several expansions enlarging the hospital’s services, the mission has been successful in creating a small pocket of Christians (who outside of the Danja hospital walls represent only 1-2% of the region’s population). Women here are not in seclusion (a practice common among the Hausa whereby women in their reproductive years generally do not leave their homes). Their hair frequently peaks through their head coverings. Men are largely willing to interact with women – even shake their hands. And, due to hospital hiring practices which selectively hire Christians (a small pool to start with), much of the population here is on the hospital payroll and is thus relatively comfortable. All of these basic social facts, sartorial practices, family dynamics, gender roles, and economic realities seem to differentiate Hausa Christians from their Muslim counterparts.

Around the hospital grounds, men with deformities and disabilities sustained from leprosy lounge about, both within the hospital wards, on the terrace, and under trees near the improvised hospital market. Young women with sick babies, grandmothers watching over ill and injured children, and old women missing extremities sit together on mats, chatting through the afternoon heat. Probably it is worth clarifying that when I say ‘hospital’, it isn’t at all what a westerner might envision. While impressive for its context, the hospital is a simple complex of a few concrete buildings with corrugated tin roofs, limited technology, limited sanitation, non-existent patient privacy, and at the moment, no doctor. The hospital ward is a simple building of concrete with several (about 30) beds inside, right next to each other. Patients are expected to provide their own linens and food, and staff rely on the patient’s family members to take care of basic nursing functions (such as feeding, washing, bringing medications, and monitoring the ill).

Last year the Danja Fistula and Training Center officially opened. The center is run by a secular nonprofit () in cooperation with SIM, the mission which runs the Leprosy hospital. Here, women with fistula come from all over the country to receive free repair surgeries, post-operative care, and (as of next week) capacity-building classes. When I arrived to the center on Monday, about 60 women were here, many of whom waiting in the small village built behind the hospital in order to house the women through the sometimes very lengthy process of care (which can include months of waiting, recuperation, rehabilitation, and sometimes additional surgeries). Because fistula occurs largely within a rural population with low levels of education and very little as far as economic capital, a vast majority of the women spend two or more days travelling to the clinic, often leaving their villages by foot and walking for several hours before reaching a place where taxis can be found. None speak a word of French. And a vast majority are decorated with elaborate patterns of facial scarification, a practice often deserted by urban dwellers (who opt for more cosmopolitan beautification rites, like mascara and heels) but still popular in rural areas to show ethnic provenance.

Their stories, experiences, ages, ethic background, and prognosis are vastly varied. Some women come days after an obstetric catastrophe, with fresh injuries, full social support, and little experience of social stigma. Others come after decades of leaking, resigned to an existence of strict self-management, few social relationships, and childlessness (a harsh reality here where a life without children is often consider a life without value).

And yet, in this village tucked behind the newly plastered cement walls of the hospital, a vibe akin to that found at an all-women’s summer camp is created. Women tuck their hijabs into their bags, raise their voices, gossip, and dance. Indeed, despite the traumatic histories they’ve all know, ‘camp fistula’ is actually pretty fun.