Mocuba, Zambezia Province — Beatriz Sebastião suffered in silence. She had no friends in the neighbourhood or at school. When she went to church, she sat alone. When she went to the river, other women mocked her before leaving to bathe elsewhere.
She had become pregnant at 15 and because she lived far from the hospital, planned to give birth at home. After three days of labour, her parents had to raise money to rent a motorcycle to take her to the hospital, where she delivered a stillborn child. She developed an obstetric fistula, and when she became pregnant again, that child, too, was stillborn. But the fistula caused urine to leak, and the resulting smell isolated her from nearly everyone for the next six years.
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