04 05 14 Remarks After Touring the Fistula Clinic at St. Joseph's Hospital
Your Excellency
Bishop Edouard and to everybody here, it’s a great privilege for me to be able
to visit this hospital, St. Joseph’s. And I am so impressed by what I have seen
and moved by what I have seen. Sister Marie Joseph, thank you so much for your
incredible directorship here which you are leading and
doing.
And I had occasion
to talk at length with this wonderful surgeon, Dr. Dolores Nembunzu. And se is
saving lives and making an extraordinary difference and this hospital is for
young women who are victimized by sexual violence or in some cases by young
women who are simply giving birth to children way before the time that they
should be doing that. And they suffer damage to their reproductive capacity as a
result of that.
Fistula is a very
debilitating, degrading, and unbelievably painful, horrible condition that seals
the future of these young women. Many of these young women, unfortunately, are
ostracized by their community, abandoned by their families and their husbands,
and they are left to their own devices. And but for the extraordinary care that
is provided in a place like St. Joseph’s, these women would be
lost.
What is happening
here is an act of defiance, really, to fight back against violence, against
gender-based violence and gender-based discrimination, and decisions that are
made about young women that simply don’t work for those young women. So there
are some 4,000 cases a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some 200 get to
be treated here every year, I believe, by surgery. This wonderful doctor
performs amazing surgeries. She told me that the shortest surgery is a surgery
of 17 minutes; the longest surgeries are six or seven hours because that’s how
much repair has to be done to restore these women’s lives.
I just met two
young girls, one 26, a young woman, and a 19-year-old, both of whom were having
extraordinary difficulty giving birth as a result of the violence that they had
(inaudible) and as well as a lack of care, and the result was that they needed
an operation desperately. One of them came here so weak, lost weight, lost
strength, that for four months she’s been here, and much of that time was simply
to get her to eat, to get her to be able to get strong, so she could then be
cured and have an operation.
I met a woman a
few minutes ago who I talked to, Julienne Lusenge, who is an activist for women
who is courageous working with an organization that she has helped put together
with 56 different agents around the country who are working to fight for the
rights of women to be able to be freed from this kind of exploitation and
violence.
(In French.)
(Laughter.)
I mentioned that
there were 4,000 cases a year. Thanks to a program in the United States run by
the USAID – and our director of USAID is here, you can see up here our
50th anniversary effort – but we have treated 7,000 women that we
have helped have these procedures to be able to be cured from
fistula.
So I want to thank
everybody who is involved in this effort. I want to thank the church, merci
beaucoup. This is what the church should be doing to reach people and help
people and administer. And I think that we can all be very, very proud of what
this hospital is doing.
I also want to
thank all of the people in the hospital and the director, Sister Marie Joseph.
President Obama is deeply committed, as I am and everybody in our State
Department is, to work to prevent this extraordinary violence against women and
young girls. We are working to help educate young men, boys, and girls. And the
global community, I promise you, will continue to stay focused on trying to
prevent this kind of violence and help to save the lives of young women who have
been oppressed by it.