Why whi was founded
From 1999-2002 a Swiss couple (doctor/midwife) were responsible for a Health District in the North-East of Tschad, on the Sudanese Border. While working there, they met many young women and girls from Tschad and Sudan who were looking for help in the hospital because of severe childbirth injuries (vesico- and recto-vaginal fistulas).
These women had often experienced prolonged unrelieved obstructed labor, commonly culminating in a stillbirth. As a result, the women suffered from childbith injuries, which meant that they couldn’t control urine or sometimes even fecal matters anymore. They had therefore been abandoned by their husbands and often expelled from a normal life in the village society.
Together with a team of gynaecologists from the “Addis Abeba Fistula Hospital” in Ethiopia, a project took place in the District Hospital of Adré in March 2002, when about 30 women with obstetric fistulas successfully underwent surgery.
Soon after that, the couple had to return to Switzerland. Because of their strong wish to help women with obstetric fistulas in the long run, women’s hope international was founded on the 4th of December, 2003, in Berne.
