Prestigious National Honor for Kaiser Permanente Redwood City MD

Nearly 200 poverty-stricken Kenyan women, once considered cursed and shunned by their families and villages, are thriving now, getting vocational, educational, and business training, thanks to Dr. Debra Matityahu, a Kaiser Permanente Redwood City Ob Gyn. For her efforts, Dr. Matityahu was honored with the prestigious national David Lawrence Community Service Award from Kaiser Permanente.

“I’m truly humbled by this award,” said Dr. Matityahu, who has been a physician at Kaiser Permanente for 14 years. The Lawrence Award recognizes Kaiser Permanente employees and physicians who champion outstanding volunteer activities and initiatives to improve the health of our communities and our world.

Dr. Matityahu’s medical office at Kaiser Permanente is filled with large photos of smiling African women holding colorful hand-made cloth shopping bags, and an equally-smiling Dr. Matityahu with them.

The women are the beneficiaries of work that Dr. Matityahu and her young daughter Arielle started almost eight years ago.

“I didn’t want to start a non-profit but once Arieklkle got going on the project, it sparked something very deep inside me,” says Dr. Matityahu. “I felt obligated to be a voice for these women.”

In 2010, Dr. Matityahu and her surgeon husband and two young children began a 10-month medical fellowship journey to hospitals and universities in several foreign countries. One was in Kenya, and while her husband worked with the orthopedic department, Dr. Matityahu assisted in fistula surgeries with the world-renowned Dr. Hillary Mabeya, a family friend who is now running the Gynocare Fistula Center.

“I was assisting with fistula surgeries. After spending time interviewing and meeting these women patients, I felt a strong need to make a difference in their lives,” said Dr. Matityahu.

The woman came from remote Kenyan villages, where healthcare and education are limited. The women became pregnant by their husbands, but developed obstetric fistulas due to obstructed labor. After days of unsuccessful pushing to deliver their babies, the women damage both their babies and their own urogenital tissues causing fistulas.

“They not only lose their babies, but the women also suffer from uncontrolled leakage of urine and/or feces due to the fistulae,” she says. “Even after surgical repair at The Gynocare Fistula Center, they return to their villages, only to endure continued stigma.”

In Eldoret, Dr. Matityahu and her daughter interviewed some of the women with the translation help of a social worker, Linner Too. She learned that most of the women wanted a better life; in one case, a young girl wanted to return to school but couldn’t pay for a school uniform to qualify for continuing education.

Upon hearing the stories, Dr. Matityahu’s 9-year-old daughter Arielle chimed in: “Mom, give me your wallet,” she said. “We can do so much here for so little.”

And she did: after returning to the United States, Arielle set up a website to raise money for the obstetric fistula survivors in Kenya.

A while later, Dr. Mabeya and his wife Carolyn came to the United States for a visit, and they met with Dr. Matityahu and her daughter. The Mabeya’s urged them to do more for the fistula survivors. Again, it was her daughter Arielle, now older, who convinced her to start a non-profit. Originally called “ALittle4ALot,” Arielle helped to raise the initial funds at her bat mitzvah (“coming of age”) to begin the non-profit.

“The survivors were surgically repaired, but not healed,” says Dr. Matityahu. “We wanted to offer them social/emotional support and vocational training to help them after surgery.”

Their first success was a sewing program at the fistula center in Eldoret, where fistula survivors learned to produce the colorful cloth shopping bags and sell them for support. There is a smiling photo of the survivors with their hand-sewn bags and an equally-smiling Dr. Matityahu.

Dr. Matityahu now spends evenings and weekends managing this non-profit and fundraising. She has a core team of two women in Kenya who oversee the educational, business, and vocational training for the fistula survivors.

“We’re empowering the women with life skills so they don’t have to return to their villages shunned and isolated “says Dr. Matityahu. With that in mind, she’s now bought a ten-acre farm outside Eldoret.

"Our goal is to build a recovery and training center for the women to learn the business of growing crops and earning money, so they can return to their villages as more independent women with life skills."

A small ($10,000) stipend from the David A Lawrence Award will help her reach that goal. And despite her initial reluctance, Dr. Matityahu admits “I really couldn’t have lived with myself if I did nothing for these women.”