“I want to be a girl again”

Halima the bride is 13. Sani the groom is 60 and husband to three wives already. The match wasn’t made in heaven; elder males in a village in Katsina-Ala fixed it. That’s the hook the movie Dry sinks into a collective audience gut once play is hit, and then romance takes a hit too. Halima […]

Halima the bride is 13. Sani the groom is 60 and husband to three wives already. The match wasn’t made in heaven; elder males in a village in Katsina-Ala fixed it.

That’s the hook the movie Dry sinks into a collective audience gut once play is hit, and then romance takes a hit too.

Halima is naïve, knows nothing about marital requirements. Her nuptial night is a rape. Her screams of “Don’t hurt me” leave no dry eyes in the blacked-out theatre. The scene is repeated with beatings until she is finally pregnant.

The writing is on the wall: Halima doesn’t attend antenatal clinic, a local birth attendant is adamant she has the best solution for her. 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. For a girl who still dreams of her childhood in her father’s house, childbirth is the worst punishment. She’s just a baby giving birth to a baby.

“Smelling pig”

Her labour is obstructed and prolongs for hours. Her baby gets jammed in her narrow pelvis. Friction from pushing rubs a hole in the wall of her vagina. Through that hole leaks urine, sometimes faeces.

The 13-year-old has obstetric fistula, the plight of at least 800,000 women.

She doesn’t even know what’s happened till she wakes up one morning and wonders if she’s wet the bed, but her co-wives, mother-in-law and husband can’t stand the god-awful smell.

The village calls her condition anything from dreaded disease and witchcraft to a result of adultery, not minding her husband’s protest that she was a virgin on their nuptial night and hasn’t been outgoing since he married her.

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?”

Here, there, everywhere

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 in one scene.

“I want my childhood back, to be a girl again, playing in my father’s compound. Can you give me that?”

Dry isn’t just Halima’s story. Some 158,000 women currently live with fistula, according to estimates that include the National Demographic health survey. And up to 200,000 new cases emerge yearly.

Stephanie Linus (better known as Okereke throughout Nollywood) who wrote and directed Dry says the story’s time has come. Dry is her 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, and around 12,000 new cases emerge every year.

“Although it is curable, few have access to treatment,” says Dr Balami Wapada, director for family health at the federal health ministry at Dry’s premiere in Abuja.

Syndrome

Dry shows nearly everything that’s wrong with Nigeria’s health 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 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.

In one scene, the lights go out while a doctor is in the middle of surgery, and the only source of fuel for the shabby generator is a nurse with N1,000 she needs for her lunch.

In another scene, the same doctor squeezes through a window as a husband trundles up with his ailing wife in a wheelbarrow and leaps over clothesline to escape after abandoning his near-death wife.

Between the doctor, his staff and patients, it is more funny weird than funny ha-ha.

And a local matron who helps women with fistula isn’t laughing. Not when healthworkers who can help after training flee to big-city teaching hospitals.

Less than 100 doctors have trained in fistula repair, and up to 70% of them have moved on to some other specialty.

According to 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 the condition, women with fistula are mostly rural, poor, uneducated and can’t pay surgery bills that could run up to N100,000.

Help came for Halima too late. A Doctor Zara Robinson should have been able to repair Halima’s fistula, but septicaemia had set in.

On live national television, she pours out her heart (after all, Halima is her daughter through happenstance deep enough for a whole new story) before a National Assembly sitting.

She demands enforcement of the Child Rights Act to protect children like Halima. Some states have begun implementing it, others are still pussyfooting around it.

She demands to put things right, and in the end, she demands justice—no matter how little, no matter how late.