Dorcas (pictured) is a 50-year-old woman from Kogi State, Nigeria. She lived nearly half of her life with fistula—incessantly leaking urine for 20 years. Here Dorcas gives a thumbs-up to donors and healthcare staff who transformed her life by providing her with free fistula repair surgery.

Obstetric fistula is a horrible injury that affects some women after giving birth. It’s rare in affluent countries, but in poorer places where women have to give birth without proper medical care and there aren't the resources to perform a Caesarean, a woman can lie in agonising obstructed labour for days. Afterwards, if she survives, she is left with a gaping hole in her lower body through which urine and faeces leak continually. As though she hadn’t already suffered enough, this woman is then often shunned by her husband and community, because her incontinence is a source of disgust.

But fistula is treatable via surgery. It costs about 600 Euros for the Fistula Foundation to heal one woman from fistula. The Fistula Foundation is ranked by independent evaluators as one of the most effective charities working today to alleviate human suffering.

My personal target is to raise at least 300 Euros per month for one year for the Fistula Foundation via busking (singing on the street). At the end of the year I will have raised at least 3,600 Euros - enough to heal six women from this debilitating condition. I'm hoping this initiative will inspire others enough to raise ten times this amount - €36,000 - so that not six but 60 women will be able to have this transformative surgery to give them their lives back.