THEY CALL ME SMELLY JOYCE

They Call Me Smelly Joyce

She slowly climbs into the matatu and firmly plants herself into the ‘sambaza’ (the wooden boards that matatu crew put on aisles as seats for extra passengers). The other passengers heave a collective sigh of relief. The last passenger in, it means that the matatu can surely be on its way now.

The excitement is however short-lived.

They twitch their noses in severe discomfort and reach for the windows.

The new passenger smells like a burst pipe of raw sewage.

The man next to her can’t hide his disappointment in her hygiene.

“Yawa, Lake Victoria imejaa maji mingi, si uoge hata siku moja. Watu kama nyinyi ndo maana baba haezi shinda kura”

(Go take a shower in Lake Victoria)

If the words stung, you couldn’t tell it from her expressionless face.

She remained impassive. Like a deaf. Like she wasn’t the one being talked to.

Jane* has endured more taunts in her lifetime than you can probably imagine. She’s just in her late thirties but you would be forgiven for thinking she’s an old grandmother.

She is among the three thousand women who succumb to obstetric fistulas every year in Kenya.

The condition may not have killed her, but it has drained her of all the life within.

She says society has cast her aside like a spent car.

Despite the high numbers of women who continue to curse every day of their lives due to this conditions that makes them unable to control their piss and stool, this disease hasn’t been addressed with the same vigor victims have been ostracized.

But women with fistulas require more than acts of kindness. They need more than just our indifference.

They require attention.

They need to be restored back to full health. They need to experience right to dignity as enshrined in our supreme laws.

However, this remains a mirage if Jane isn’t aware that her condition is treatable or that Kenyatta National Hospital has the powers to restore her smile back.

But increasing fistulas are just a manifestation of a leaking healthcare system. She probably underwent a prolonged, obstructed labour without timely medical intervention probably due to inaccessibility to health facility during childbirth.

Now, she has to survive eight hours of taunts as she travels to Nairobi for a corrective surgery.

County governments must now step up and ensure universal access to healthcare. They have unprecedented opportunity to reign in on their local endemic and emerging challenges.

This however goes deeper than treating the sick. It needs to go beyond ensuring access to services and information.

Tackling fistulas require taking care of underneath issues like teenage pregnancy, high fertility rates, non-youth friendly reproductive health services among others.

Now more than ever, we need to take care of adolescents and youths, not just to reduce the burden of disease now and later in life ,to ensure a healthy generation ,to  harness demographic dividend but also as an inalienable human rights