|
|
|
|
ETHIOPIA: Feature StoriesEthiopia Overview | Current Projects | Publications | Feature Stories
Addressing the Consequences of Early Marriage
Zegewechu Kassa overcomes the debilitating and stigmatizing condition of obstetric fistula through the help of a Pathfinder-trained community health worker
Fistula survivor Zegewchu Kassa alongside her Pathfinder-trained community based reproductive health agent Aynadis Bekelu | East Gojiam, Ethiopia: East Gojiam, home of sixteen-year-old Zegewchu Kassa, is a land of stunningly harsh terrain and deep gorges carved out by the Blue Nile. Located in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia, this isolated zone is characterized by strict gender roles and glaring inequalities. In this area, it is said that a man will never cross the threshold of the kitchen, nor do “woman’s work” of carrying water, looking after children, cooking, or washing. Women suffer under the triple burden of childcare, domestic labor, and heavy field work alongside the men. Here, every young girl is assigned a “dowry” based upon her capacity to carry out domestic work and bear children, which her family will reap upon giving her for marriage, generally as young as possible.
East Gojjam is also the location of a Community-Based Reproductive Health (CBRH) project supported by Pathfinder International. Pathfinder works with local partners to prevent early marriage and address its consequences in addition to providing other reproductive health and family planning education and services.
In East Gojiam, boys and girls typically get engaged at any time between birth and 14 years of age. Once married, a girl will move to the home of her husband’s family, sometimes when she is as young as six years old. Marriage at such an age not only threatens a young girl’s well-being and opportunities for education, but puts her and her children at great risk during the childbearing process, and threatens the economic stability and productivity of her entire household. Burdened with several children by their second decade of life in an area where land is scarce and jobs are scarcer, these women and their families have little opportunity to meaningfully improve their standard of living.
Zegewchu, who lives deep in the Nile gorge, a three-hour walk from the nearest town, was married when she was six years old to an unknown man. She stayed an initial 40 days with him at his family home following their marriage, and then returned home to her parents. Reluctant to leave her family home again, she was divorced a mere two months after her marriage. She cannot remember the man she was first wedded to, nor can she remember if there was any physical contact between them. “I just wanted to be with my family,” she says. “I couldn’t love or hate anyone else.”
Around three years later, her parents married her again, to another stranger. At the time, she was nine years old, and she guesses he was about fourteen. “I didn’t love him,” she recalls. Zegewchu lived with him for three years, through the first stages of her growth as a woman. She did not once get her menses while she was with him, because she became pregnant before she got the chance.
Pregnant at twelve years old, Zegewchu became ill and her husband sent her home to her birth family to care for her, following local custom. When labor began, her adolescent body experienced major trauma and she could not deliver. After three days of obstructed labor, her family finally brought her to the hospital, and she had an emergency C-section. It was too late to save the infant, but Zegewchu survived.
Her survival was tenuous, however. While in labor, she developed an obstetric fistula, a debilitating and stigmatizing condition where her urine and feces drained uncontrollably through her vaginal opening. She was sent back to her natural home to recover after her hospital stay, and her husband divorced her while she was ill to marry another woman.
In discomforting pain and ashamed of her condition, Zegewchu spent three dark years in seclusion with her immediate family, while her relatives and friends ignored her. “No one would ask for me,” she says of this isolating time.
Finally, she was identified by a community-based reproductive health agent (CBRHA), trained by Pathfinder International and its local partner, Ethiopian Aid as a fistula patient. In an effort to prevent early marriage and the repercussions of early pregnancy and childbirth, Pathfinder and Ethiopian Aid train a network of CBRHAs in East Gojjam where they educate communities on values of reproductive health services and family planning methods of choice. These individuals are also taught to recognize signs of maternal danger and complications of adolescent pregnancy, and counsel new mothers to seek antenatal care, skilled assistance with deliveries, and postnatal care and follow-up. They also report planned early marriages in the community to schools and local women’s associations, initiate counseling for families planning an early marriage, and resort to legal intervention if the counseling and persuasion fails.
Zegewchu’s CBRHA, Aynadis Bekalu, referred her to Ethiopian Aid for treatment at Bahir Dar Hospital, where there are doctors trained in fistula repair. Finally, in January 2006, Zegewchu and several other fistula sufferers, all young women, were provided transport and two-week hospital stays in Bahir Dar through Pathfinder’s project. “I am better, although I have slight pain in my uterus,” she says six weeks post-surgery. “Now, my relatives ask for me.”
Now healed, she is back at home with her father, and at sixteen years old is twice married, twice divorced, and has borne and lost one child. She is not yet in school, and fears that her father’s new wife is planning to marry her again. “I will not marry again,” she says emphatically. “I want to learn.”
Back to top 
|
|
|
|
