‘I want to be a girl again’

Halima is 13. Sani is 60 and husband to three wives already. That’s the hook the movie, ‘Dry’ sinks into a collective audience’s gut once play is hit, and then romance takes a hit too. Halima is naïve, knows nothing about nuptial nights. A rape and several screams of “Don’t hurt me,” leave no dry […]

Halima is 13. Sani is 60 and husband to three wives already. That’s the hook the movie, ‘Dry’ sinks into a collective audience’s gut once play is hit, and then romance takes a hit too.
Halima is naïve, knows nothing about nuptial nights. A rape and several screams of “Don’t hurt me,” leave no dry eyes in the blacked-out theatre. 
The writing is on the wall: Pregnant, Halima doesn’t attend antenatal clinic. Women like her didn’t go to hospital to give birth. That was selling out. The more respect lay in going into labour and giving birth at home.
But Halima isn’t prepared. Childbirth is the worst punishment – a baby giving birth to a baby.
Through prolonged hours of obstructed labour, her baby gets jammed in her narrow pelvis. Friction from pushing rubs a hole in the wall of her private part. Through that hole leaks urine, sometimes faeces.
She has obstetric fistula, the plight of at least 800,000 women.
Her co-wives, mother-in-law and husband can’t stand the god-awful smell. The village calls her condition a dreaded disease, witchcraft, the result of adultery. She’s barred from going out or cooking. Soon her husband can’t stomach it anymore.
“The whole house smells, my friends can’t visit me anymore and you can’t bear children,” Sani erupts, as he throws her belongings and the girl out of his home. “Who’d want to sleep with a smelling pig like you?”
Halima’s stench follows her everywhere – and gets her sanded and pelted in public – as she begins her desperate journey to get dry again.
“I want to be a girl again,” she sobs. “I want my childhood back, to be a girl again, playing in my father’s compound. Can you give me that?”
‘Dry’ is also Stephanie Linus’ (better known as Okereke in Nollywood) attempt to tackle fistula.
“People are ready for it. People are looking for things they can identify with,” she tells Daily Trust. “There are so many stories around us and we have to talk about things that happen in our society.”
Nigeria has some 150,000 cases of fistula, with around 12,000 new cases emerging every year.
“Although it is curable, few have access to treatment,” says Dr. Balami Wapada, director for family health at the Federal Ministry of Health.
‘Dry’ shows nearly all that’s wrong with Nigeria’s health care system -women attending antenatal clinic but opting to give birth at home; others can’t attend because the nearest is too far and they can’t pay the bills, and their political representatives just don’t care enough to do anything about it; patients coming to hospital when their condition is red-alert critical and the hospital almost can’t help them.
Less than 100 doctors have trained in fistula repair, and up to 70 percent of them have moved on to some other specialty.
Dr. Habib Sadauki, country manager for Engender Health, which runs Fistula Care Plus, a five-year programme funded by the US government to offer treatment for fistula, said affected women are mostly rural, poor, uneducated and can’t pay surgery bills that could run up to N100,000.
Help came for Halima too late. She died from septicaemia, failed by the Child Rights Act that should protect children like Halima.