Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff
Published: Thursday, September 18th, 2014
New York (TADIAS) – Last January in Addis Ababa friends and supporters of Dr. Catherine Hamlin held a celebration marking her 90th birthday and 55 years of service in Ethiopia in the presence of invited guests from around the world and dignitaries including Ethiopian First Lady Roman Tesfaye. When it was her turn to take the microphone Dr. Hamlin joked: “Only Ethiopians can throw a party like this.”
Dr. Hamlin is about to receive another birthday bash, this time from the Diaspora, on Saturday, September 27th at the Ritz-Carlton, Washington, D.C. Organizers announced that the program “will consist of a special message from Dr. Hamlin and several notable guests, all gathered to support Dr. Hamlin’s call to eradicate childbirth injuries.”
In his speech at the January celebration Martin Andrews, CEO of Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia, noted that the Australian native and a gynecologist has treated over 40,000 fistula patients in her adopted country over the past five decades. “Through her love and her compassion for these patients, she has ensured that we have restored the dignity of those patients, and given them their lives back, which is far more than their medical treatment,” Andrews said. “We all know that Dr. Hamlin’s passion is to eradicate fistula in Ethiopia and she has started to fulfill that dream by establishing the midwifery college.”
Dr. Hamlin, who is the founder of the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital (along with her late husband Dr. Reginald Hamlin) has lived in Ethiopia since 1959 and has since built five additional regional Hamlin Fistula centers. In an interview with Tadias Magazine several years ago she described her first day in Ethiopia as love at first sight. “When we first arrived we were rather taken with the country because we saw our eucalyptus trees,” recalled Dr. Hamlin. She had a three-year government contract to establish a midwifery school at the Princess Tsehay Hospital. “I felt very much at home straight away because the scenery seemed very familiar to us,” she said. “We got a really warm welcome so we didn’t really have culture shock.”
But what shocked her was the lack of medical care for young mothers, especially in rural areas, that suffer from obstetric fistula – a preventable childbirth injury as old as humanity itself. “There is currency dug out of pyramids containing images of fistula,” Dr. Hamlin told us. “Yet in the 21st century it is the most neglected cause.” Fistula affects one out of every 12 women in Africa. In remote areas where access to hospitals are difficult to find, young women suffer from obstructive labor which can otherwise be successfully alleviated with adequate medical support, such as Caesarean section.
In an article published in The New York Times last February, marking her 90th birthday, Nicolas Kristof called Dr. Hamlin: “the 21st-century Mother Teresa.” And more recently Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister Dr. Tedros Adhanom nominated her for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
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If You Go:
Saturday, September 27, 2014
11:00 AM to 2:00 PM
The Ritz-Carlton Washington, D.C.
1150 22nd Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
$100 contribution per guest
www.hamlinfistulausa.org