A missionary's calling

Dr Catherine Hamlin began working for the fisutal cause almost 50 years ago. Picture / Martin Sykes

The tall elegant woman in the cream suit and art nouveau print blouse has an accent of the sort that used to be known as BBC English. Her posture suggests she was taught early to sit up straight. Her manners are flawless. There is something about her which suggests another, nicer, gentler time.

She looks, and sounds, so terribly English that when you offer a drink you find yourself suggesting a cup of tea. She would like a cup of coffee, thank you, with milk and sugar. She looks quite bewildered when asked whether she would like a flat white.

She is 82 and has skin which looks as though she has spent her life under pallid skies, in pursuit of the quieter, finer things in life.

Dr Catherine Hamlin has, she would say, used her life to pursue the finer things in life, but those things are not what you might guess. And she is not English.

She is an Australian gynaecologist. When she was a young woman applying for medical school, her mother was interviewed - these were different times - about her daughter's suitability.

"I was very keen to do it but my mother embarrassed me beyond words. She said, to the superintendent, 'Now look after Catherine, she's very delicate.' I've never shown any signs of being delicate."

She married Reg Hamlin, a New Zealander, her boss, who was also a gynaecologist and one day she phoned her mother to tell her some news. Her mother said, "Oh, I knew that Reg would take you to some outlandish place that nobody had heard about."

Catherine Hamlin came from a wealthy Sydney family - her father made his money from lifts - and had a lovely childhood, with ponies, and a yacht on Sydney harbour. She and Reg could have stayed in Australia, set up in private practice and had a nice, comfortable life.

Instead, in 1959 they went to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. She still lives there, in a mud house with wide verandas which remind her of home - "I said I want it like a colonial house from Australia - and a roof that is a patchwork of corrugated iron."

If you turn up for a visit, she will get out the good china and ask whether you take milk and sugar. If you had turned up after one of her fundraising visits away, she might have said "We'll have coffee in the bathroom." This is because when she goes away people who love and revere her go into her house and do up a room. Last time it was the bathroom.

"It's very grand now," by which she means "it's not grand at all." She is "wondering what it's going to be like when I return. I hope they don't have the whole place demolished."

She will return home later this month after time spent in New Zealand in her capacity of professional beggar - a description she does not mind. It is what she is in New Zealand doing: trying to raise money for a cause she and her husband, who died in 1993, began almost 50 years ago.

It is a good cause and hearing about it you might, if at all squeamish, turn away. In which case stop reading and skip to the bottom where you will find an address to send a nice big cheque.

Her little mud house is in the grounds of the hospital she and Reg built in 1973 to perform fistula surgery on mostly young women, hardly more than girls, who arrive at their hospital, as Liz MacIntyre of World Vision wrote after a visit: " ... dripping urine and faeces, usually grieving for a dead baby and their own life that is no longer a life, but a daily agony."

They are called fistula pilgrims and they are often, because of their inability to bear a live child, but mostly because of the smell, ostracised by family and community. MacIntyre said: "No one would publish my story."

You can see why. Fistula and the surgery which can, in most cases, easily fix the condition, is not a glamorous cause. It is about young mothers who have an obstructed birth without medical assistance. The pressure of the baby's head against the young mother's small pelvis - a labour can go on for days until the baby dies and is able to be ejected - causes tissue damage to the bladder. A hole appears in the bladder and, sometimes, the rectum. It costs about US$1 million ($1.56 million) a year to run the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital and so far no movie stars have adopted it as a pet charity.

So Hamlin takes what she can get, and has spent many hours in dull church halls and community centres asking for money. She has a tiny, whispery voice; the talking doesn't come easily.

She is not a natural attention-seeker but when attention comes seeking her and when it means money for her hospital, she will take it gratefully.

There is one way to stop her talking and it involves mentioning the New York Times column which called her "the new Mother Teresa of our age". This, for the second time in her life, "embarrasses me beyond words".

She rather desperately fishes out a photograph of scarlet bougainvillea and Wedgwood blue hollyhocks and says, "That's a bit of my garden ... "

She is still visibly shuddering about the Mother Teresa mention, and if you go on to read out the line about how her life is spent "quietly toiling in impossible conditions to achieve the unimaginable," she says, "Oh, what nonsense. We have lovely conditions. We've been very blessed. I get very cross. Look," brandishing another photo, "this is our lovely physio centre."

She hates "all that adulation" but when it leads to her going on Oprah and being called "An Angel in Ethiopia" - which raised US$3 million in donations - she can just about stomach it.

"After the interview she said 'Come up to my office, I want to talk to you.' It was a huge office with beautiful thick carpet your feet sank into and a little cocker spaniel running about and she said she was going to give me this money from her own account, not from her trust." Oprah gave her US$450,000.

"She's very, very sweet. I said 'You must come and visit us' and she said 'Oh, yes, I'm going to come."' I thought, 'Oh, she'll never come,' and then we got a message from her office to say she was coming on December 12, 2004, for the day."

And she did. With US$100 for each patient, and a "beautiful outfit for each one". Hamlin doesn't think the girls knew who Oprah was. "She said 'I want to make up one of their faces.' So we picked a very pretty one and Oprah sat on the bed and did her all up and this girl was looking at herself in the mirror and, you know, she was gasping!"

Making the girls pretty and clean again is as important as the reconstructive surgery, Hamlin says. "It's terrible when they first come. The poor things.

"Once two came and said they'd sat on a tin at the back of the bus hoping urine would drip in the tin. They're often turned off the bus. Other passengers say 'This woman's smelling. I think she's got some disease.' To restore their mind and their spirit is very important for their healing."

If you tell her that describing fistula causes many people to cover their ears she is astonished. "If they could see our girls they would really fall in love with them. "They're so sweet."

She comes from a family with a strong Christian faith. She had a great aunt who set up a mission in the Solomon Islands despite being told "Oh, no, you can't possibly go there. They're all cannibals." Ask Hamlin if she is a missionary and she says: "Well, I hope I am."

As a young woman she wanted to work with women and make their lives better. She is "certainly not a feminist. Well, I don't like the feminists because I think that men and women have a different role and I don't think that women should necessarily take over the role of men." She did, though.

"Well, medicine is different. I don't understand what the feminist outlook is, really. What do you mean by feminists?"

A decent definition might be someone who has devoted their lives to bettering the role of women. So she might, inadvertently, be one.

"Oh, well. I probably am a feminist but I'm not one of these ones that want to shout about it."

She knew and was fond of feminist Sylvia Pankhurst who died in Ethiopia in 1960. Hamlin was at her deathbed. "She was a complete atheist but she had a terrific brain."

She has no conflict about taking her Christian values to another country. "No, I don't try to impose it on them at all. We show them the Jesus film and we give them a Bible if they want it.

"The Muslims come too. The country is almost half Muslim now. It used to be two third Orthodox [Christian] and one third Muslim. But the Muslims are invading with great gusto."

She is not too perturbed. She and Reg survived the 1974 communist revolution and lost friends and had their hospital requisitioned. "We used to say, 'Well, we're the true communists because we don't charge any fees'." What bothers her more, she might even get a little cross, is when people look at her life and think "What a lot she gave up".

"That upsets me. I think I've gained far more than if I'd been in a practice and stayed in Sydney. I don't know what they think I've given up. There's more to life than material things. There's a very great spiritual side to life and I know that I'm meant to be there."

Dr Hamlin will speak at St Kentigern College in Pakuranga tomorrow at 2.30pm. Hamlin Charitable Fistula Hospitals Trust, New Zealand email address is: hamlinht@xtra.co.nz