Mariana

Age 29, abandoned
married at 15 in Niger

"I never want to get married again," Mariana says. "I am frustrated with men and marriage. My husband has never visited me once since I left his home to give birth at the home of my mother." That was 12 years—and three fistula-repair operations ago.

Mariana was interviewed for this essay in the compound at the National Hospital in Niamey where scores of women live while awaiting repair for obstetric fistula. Some of these women have been waiting for more than 7 years. She had recently had her final surgery and was waiting for the rainy season to go home to her mother.

Mariana is from the village Korgomie Tombo. Her marriage story begins when, at 15, she is given to a cousin she had never met before the wedding ceremony. She was not happy, she explains, because she didn't love her husband, and because he was not kind to her.

While married, she earned some money by weaving mats to sell in the market. She cooked. She pounded millet. And after she became pregnant at 17, she followed tradition and left the home she shared with her husband to return to her parents' home and wait for the baby to be born.

During labor, Mariana's mother thought there was something wrong, but she didn't know what to do. The pain seemed much worse at night, but eased a bit at daybreak. So she did not try to transport her daughter to the health clinic.

But on the fourth day, when the baby came—stillborn—with the placenta still inside Mariana, her mother and uncles loaded her onto a donkey cart and set forth on the nine-hour journey to the health center in Bonkuuko. Mariana does not remember the journey. She was unconscious.

There, her mother woke the sleeping doctor who removed the placenta—the room illuminated by flashlight, as there was no electricity. And when Mariana gained consciousness several days later and realized she was leaking urine, she asked her mother "what is happening to me?" You have a "sickness," her mother explained.

Mariana's mother has taken care of her ever since—across the years without hope, through the time when they learned that the "sickness" can be cured, during the search for the cure, after two failed operations. Finally, after 12 years and a third operation, success—at the hands of visiting American surgeons—though she still leaks some. Mariana is ready to go home to her mother again, as soon as the rainy season comes.

"If I were young again I would like to go to school. Then I could understand everything. I would have a life. When I get a prescription from a doctor or nurse, then I could read them. If I had gone to school, then I could speak to you without a translator."

 

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