Louis C.K. dominated Jeopardy!Power Players, beating out CNN's Kate Bolduan and The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart. With all of those bragging rights and Celebrity Jeopardy! jokes comes $50,000 for a charity of choice. And Louis's lucky recipient is the Fistula Foundation.
Wait, what?
That's right: The uber sharp comedian is the champion of a little-known foundation that is tackling a similarly unknown but major women's issue. So unknown that we had to ask Fistula Foundation CEO Kate Grant how the unlikely partnership came about, and what exactly $50,000 would help them do.
“The short answer: He was interested in a women’s issue, particularly one where women are underserved,” Grand told us.
And with Fistula, Louis hit the nail on the head. An obstetric fistula is a hole, most often caused by prolonged labor, between the vagina and rectum or bladder, that leaves patients incontinent. Meaning they lose control of urination or defecation or both. Pretty intense stuff.
“Fistula patients, they’re modern day lepers,” she says. “Too often in places, women don’t get Depend pads or even hot showers or multiple changes of clothes, and end up way too often they become outcasts in rural areas.”
The good news is the problem is fixable with surgery.
"There's no way to fix except for surgery, but 80 to 90 percent of that time it is completely successful."
Grant has traveled to many countries that have high numbers of women with fistulas, including those in Africa and Asia, which tend to be poor and have limited access to emergency care. The foundation has partnership agreements with hospitals in 23 countries, for which they raise money to sponsor surgeries. The organization is lean, built on Internet efficiency, she says, raising 8 million dollars last year, which equates to roughly 5,000 surgeries as well as surgeon training, hospital construction and more operating rooms.
"We work in places nobody visits. People haven’t seen the injuries here, it’s been eradicated," she says.
"Generally the biggest injury is beyond the physical, it’s the social. They're left by a husband and just shunned."
So how did one of the most famous comedians wind up talking about a problem that is, as Grant admits, hard for even her dad to discuss?
It was a friend of a friend thing that started the introduction, and Grant says he has been in touch ever since. And before he got off Twitter, he sent a tweet or two that crashed the foundation's website.
The counterintuitive partnership with a comic who has been accused of perpetuating rape jokes is not lost on Grant.
"It's not so subtly feminist, which I think is provocative and profound and wonderful. He’s such an unusual messenger, not Gloria Steinem," she says.
"You start talking about incontinence and vaginas and everyone gets uncomfortable. And the population is indigent. We're so grateful to Louis C.K., it takes a real mensch to get this done."
