Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.

I was reporting in the West African nation of Niger when the Unicef workers I was traveling with suggested we make a side trip to a clinic that treats women suffering from fistula.

Fistula occurs when the lining between the bladder and the vagina is punctured. It happens often to girls when they experience tears while delivering babies before their bodies are fully developed. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has written extensively about the condition, which often leaves the girls unable to control their bladders, viewed as dirty and ejected from their families.

There was steady demand for treatment of fistula in Niger, a poverty-stricken nation with high rates of child marriage. The fistula facility we toured was near a leprosy clinic, a sign of just how stigmatized these patients are by society. It also treated girls who had been subjected to genital cutting, a practice that has been outlawed but still occurs in some places.