Where Young Women Find Healing and Hope

This. Must. Be. Stopped. Now.  We cannot continue to import this vile plague of Islam into the West.  We must do all in our power to rescue these poor innocents from the horror of Islamic child rape.  Where are you Mr. Obama?  Where are you Western femminists? 

FROM NYTIMES.COM:

Where Young Women Find Healing and Hope

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 13, 2013

DANJA, Niger — THEY straggle in by foot, donkey cart or bus: humiliated women and girls with their heads downcast, feeling ashamed and cursed, trailing stink and urine.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground

Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Hadiza Soulaye with other patients at the Danja Fistula Center.

Some were married off at 12 or 13 years old and became pregnant before their malnourished bodies were ready. All suffered a devastating childbirth injury called an obstetric fistula that has left them incontinent, leaking urine and sometimes feces through their vaginas. Most have been sent away by their husbands, and many have endured years of mockery and ostracism as well as painful sores on their legs from the steady trickle of urine.

They come to this remote nook of Niger in West Africa because they’ve heard that a new hospital may be able to cure them and end their humiliation. And they are right — thanks, in part, to you as Times readers.

There is nothing more wrenching than to see a teenage girl shamed by a fistula, and I’ve written before about the dreams of a couple of surgeons to build this fistula center here in Danja. Times readers responded by contributing more than $500,000 to the Worldwide Fistula Fund to make the hospital a reality. Last year, the Danja Fistula Center opened.

This is my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student along on a reporting trip to shine a spotlight on global poverty. So with my student winner, Erin Luhmann of the University of Wisconsin, I dropped in on Danja to see what you as readers have accomplished here. What we found underscored that while helping others is a complicated, uncertain enterprise, there are times when a modest donation can be transformative.

The first patient we met is Hadiza Soulaye; with an impish smile, she still seems a child. Hadiza said she never went to school and doesn’t know her birth date, but she said that her family married her off at about 11 or 12. She knows that it was before she began to menstruate. She was not consulted but became the second wife of her own uncle.

Article continues HERE.