these fragile bodies

After nearly a week at conferences I start to feel like my head is going to explode. I come to these conferences every year and every year I love it—getting to see friends I really only see at conferences, learning about new things, meeting new people, having the fire in my belly for the world's poor and sick stirred up a little. I remember my first year at these conferences, five years ago—nervous me in my suits, needing a job, not knowing who to talk to in the sea of strangers. Now I can hardly get where I’m trying to go for running into people I know and want to talk to, and even the people I don’t really know (or can’t remember if I know) all look weirdly familiar. Today a woman about my age walked up to me and I still can’t for the life of me remember how I know her but we concluded that we did in fact know each other from my DC days and somehow I know she’s a Christian as well so it was fun to talk.

Anyway, it is now my 6^th day at conferences and I am feeling like I need to sleep and I need to cry and I definitely need to stop eating rich conference lunches and desserts and did I mention that I really need some rest?

Today I have heard a couple stories of the kind that I have heard so many times but will never get used to. Child soldiers. Child mothers. Child mothers whose bodies rip so that they leak feces and urine for years and decades to come. Obstetric fistula can happen when women are too young and their bodies too immature when they go to give birth. Anal-to-vaginal fistula can also happen as a result of violence, such as what is happening in N Uganda and North Kivu, DRC. I have blogged about this before. A doctor today told stories-- guns shoved into women's bodies and fired, rape in the most horrible ways you can imagine.

He shared a quote from a child soldier in N Uganda who had forced old women to lay down and spread their legs and then had shoved sharp sticks into their vaginas until they died. To me nothing is more chilling that children who perpetuate violence like this. It's such a clear picture of the dehumanizing nature of evil and such a reminder that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the powers of evil. I wanted to weep for the child as much as the poor grandmothers-- that poor child who begged his counselor (during his re-integration counseling) not to send him back to his mother in the village because she would know what he had done and how could he ever live with himself?

What is on my mind is the fragility of women's bodies-- and the aching question of why? Even in normal circumstances of pregnancy and childbirth there is so much that can go wrong, so many ways a woman's body can break and tear. Those poor pregnant girls who become leaking, stinking outcasts as a result of one bad delivery. The millions of women who die in childbirth. Why could God not have built our bodies to be more the equivalent of, I don't know, armored tanks. So that a child couldn't invade old women's fragile bodies with a stick until they died. So that a soldier with a machete couldn't rip open a woman's body in her most vulnerable place. Why this fragility and horrible vulnerability?

I think I've blogged some of these before but Nick Kristoff at the NYT has some good stuff on Catherine Hamlin's work at the fistula hospital in Ethiopia.

Tea with Mother Theresa (blog post about tea with Catherine Hamlin)

Alone and Ashamed (article about hospital)

The Illiterate Surgeon (my favorite article of all-- makes me cry every time)

There's a great book about Catherine Hamlin. And yes, she and her husband (now dead) were missionaries and committed Christians.

And a movie about women being healed from fistula that I'm dying to see: A Walk to Beautiful.

On a happier note, how is this for an “it’s a small world” moment. We were having dinner last night with J’s good friends, who he knows from Texas and started Heart for Africa with and spent 2 months in Africa with in 2004. They moved to DC about the same time I did in 2005 and I actually heard about Amy from mutual friends we have and always meant to meet her but never did until J and I started dating and we figured out our connection by way of Texas. So while hanging with these friends last night we were talking about their church which is one of those churches that has split off from the Episcopal church and is now under an African Anglican diocese. I mentioned a friend who was in my Bible study two years ago who was about ready to get ordained in that same church and then the split started to happen and she wasn’t sure what was going to happen to her ordination because the Nigerian Anglican church who they were coming under doesn’t ordain women. Amy says, “Oh yeah, that’s Erin.” Turns out they are in the same small church plant from the bigger Anglican church (what are the odds??) and Erin is going to be the first ever woman ordained under the Church of Nigeria! Amy said Erin had been telling her recently about someone she knew in Boston who was working on public health/Africa stuff and Amy thought about asking her if she knew me but then thought it was a silly question because Boston's a pretty big city. I said, “Yeah, she was probably talking about me!”