A dream hospital celebs want to be part of

By Kwamboka Oyaro

When the Hamlins left Australia to set up a midwifery school for nurses at the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital in Addis Ababa in 1959, they had no idea that treating fistula patients was going to be the major part of their posting.

They did surgeries to repair fistulas and their work reached Emperor Haile Selassie, who visited the hospital (named after his last daughter Tsehai) in the early 1960s, according to Dr Catherine Hamlin’s autobiography The Hospital by the River. Concerned with what he saw, the emperor asked Reg, “Why do my women get fistulas?”