A Walk to Beautiful - A Journey to Healing

I normally don't talk about the movies I've seen or watched but I'd be darn! This is the first time I've ever watched a movie documentary that left me crying from beginning to end to a point that I was uncontrollably sobbing after it ended...Talk about powerful! "A Walk to Beautiful" is a tragic, yet very moving story of a woman's suffering and the effect of a devastating childbirth in a culture and country where girls are forced to adulthood and married off as young as 10 years old...gets pregnant at 12 and become "broken vessels". They become outcasts and ostracized by their own families and abandoned by their husbands...

Ayehu walking 6 hours to get to a bus station 

picture courtesy of AWalktoBeautiful.com

Even as I search for more information about this story online, tears won't stop flowing from my eyes. Seeing these women's stories made me feel shame and guilt for sometimes questioning the kind of life I have right now. For to compare my life to theirs, they'll easily consider mine a paradise...

What made this movie so powerful?
A Walk to Beautiful chronicled the journey of five women in Ethiopia as they took the path to healing and the courage to reclaim their lives and lost dignity. All suffering from Obstetric Fistula.

They made me cry.

Ayehu and daughter

Ayehu is 25 years old and leaking for 6 years. Her husband left her and their 6 year old daughter and married someone else. Her family disowned her, became an outcast, no job, no home, she contemplated killing herself by drinking poison.

Wubete - picture courtesy of PBS.org

Wubete is 17. Motherless. Married off when she was 10. Ran back home. Beaten up by father. Re-married off 4 times and always running back home and always getting beaten up for it though she stayed with her 4th husband because she got pregnant. She was 15. She was leaking for 2 years. She's an outcast. She too, contemplated killing herself.

Both womens' babies were stillbirth due to protracted labor. Ayehu walked 6 hours on a dangerous path just to get to the bus station and traveled a total of 23 hours to get to Adidis Ababa Fistula Hospital to finally get the help she needed. The only hospital in Ethiopia exclusively dedicated to help victims of obstetric fistula and providing their services free!

Watch their story

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Are you in tears yet? If you are moved by this story, I urge you to consider donating to A Walk to Beautiful to help these underprivileged women get their life and dignity back. They deserve it!

Isn't this a very zensible story? What powerful movie/s have moved you to tears?

Related Stories:
Update on  A Walk to Beautiful
Confession of a Hitchhiker
Braving the Storm
And the Journey Begins
Alien No More