A fistula surgery camp was launched on Monday in Western Bahr el Ghazal State with 45 patients from different parts of the Bahr-el-Ghazal region set to benefit.
The Catholic Church health coordinator, Dr. Jurel Payii Mamur, said that the registration of patients has already been done with some of the fistula patients being admitted and the rest are expected to report.
“We are going to have a fistula campaign. It was supposed to start on the 4th but due to some arrangements which were not in place and COVID-19 we could not start on time,” Dr. Payii said. “We are going to start today (Monday) officially with our operations. We have already registered our patients and some of them have already been admitted to the ward.”
The acting director-general of health, Henry Gabriel Sasa, pointed out that for South Sudan to recover from fistula prevalence, issues like early pregnancies and the marriage of teenagers need to be tackled.
“We have to address how we prevent occurrences. We need to deal with the social issues, prevention of early pregnancies. We need to address these at the community level. This cannot happen unless we create awareness within the community about why fistula is occurring,” Sasa said
The Catholic Church Vicar General, Fr. Santino Maurino Morokomom, pointed out that the communities must know that life is a gift from God and must be prevented.
He regretted that the communities in South Sudan are abusing human dignity especially young school-going girls.
“What is happening in our society is the abuse of human dignity. If a girl at the age of 12 or 13 is getting pregnant and we doubt the husband, who is going to look after her in life? Nobody will take care of her and this is the problem we are facing here in our society and our country and elsewhere-this abuse of human dignity. Sometimes people take advantage of the poverty of these young girls to abuse them, even sometimes by elderly people,” Fr. Maurino said.
The fistula medical camp this year is hosted by St. Daniel Comboni Hospital in Wau-WBGS and is expected to end on the 18th of December.
An obstetric fistula is a hole between the birth canal and rectum or bladder that is caused by prolonged obstructed labor, leaving a woman incontinent of urine or feces or both.
According to the Ministry of Health, from 2006 up to date, over 60,000 obstetric fistula cases have been registered.