AT the age of 88, Sydney-born Catherine Hamlin still walks from her mudbrick home on the banks of an African river to perform surgery at the hospital she founded nearly 40 years ago. Dr Hamlin, who is in Australia to raise funds for the hospital in Addis Ababa, has devoted much of her life to helping Ethiopian women who suffer debilitating injuries during childbirth.
She arrived in Ethiopia in 1959 with her husband, the late Dr Reginald Hamlin, on a three-year contract and has been there ever since.
She plans to be buried there beside her partner.
The Australian Living Legend and former nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, continues to work with women who become incontinent after suffering damaged bladders and rectums during childbirth.
The Hamlins set up the Addis Ababa hospital in 1974, determined to help poor African women from becoming social outcasts due to their incontinence.
The doctors at the Addis Ababa hospital and five regional outreach centres operate to repair holes known as fistulas in the women’s bladders or rectums, which are caused by difficult births.
And Dr Hamlin, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, joins in, her hands and eyesight still up to the job, though she’s glad it’s a sit-down one.
“I do an operation when I feel like it every Thursday. I love to work with the patients,” she told AAP on Thursday.
“I have so much interest in the hospital. They love me really because I’ve been there so long and they look upon me as their mother.”
Dr Hamlin explains that the conditions she treats were largely eradicated worldwide at the start of the 20th century, thanks to caesarian section operations and better care for birthing mothers.
The work she and her husband started continues through the Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia organisation, which is reliant on donations from international donor groups.
The organisation’s new midwifery school in Addis Ababa is part of plans to eradicate the terrible birth injuries that too many Ethiopian women suffer, Dr Hamlin said.
“Our little women that we treat are living in isolated communities and they’re very poor.
“They haven’t even got the bus fare to get into the nearest big town.
“They have to borrow or beg or save it up and when it’s an urgent need it’s difficult for them.”
Dr Hamlin said her midwives would be trained to detect abnormalities that might obstruct labour, such as oversized or badly positioned babies, and ensure proper care and delivery.
“To put a midwife into every village would one day eradicate this problem from Ethiopia,” she said.
She said she is very happy in Ethiopia in her mudbrick house by the river and the many planted gum trees in the country remind her of Australia.