~ F G M ~ PART TWO ~
~ PERSONAL EXPERIENCE ONE ~
I was genitally mutilated
at the age of ten.
I was told by my late grandmother
that they were taking me
down to the river
to perform a certain ceremony,
and afterwards I would be given
a lot of food to eat.
As an innocent child,
I was led like a sheep
to be slaughtered.
Once I entered the secret bush,
I was taken to a very dark room
and undressed.
I was blindfolded
and stripped naked.
I was then carried
by two strong women
to the site for the operation.
I was forced to lie flat on my back
by four strong women,
two holding tight to each leg.
Another woman sat on my chest
to prevent my upper body from moving.
A piece of cloth
was forced in my mouth
to stop me from screaming.
I was then shaved.
When the operation began,
I put up a big fight.
The pain was terrible
and unbearable.
During this fight,
I was badly cut
and lost blood.
All those who took part in the operation
were half-drunk with alcohol.
Others were dancing and singing,
and worst of all, had stripped naked.
I was genitally mutilated
with a blunt penknife.
After the operation,
no one was allowed
to aid me to walk.
The stuff they put on my wound
stank and was painful.
These were terrible times for me.
Each time I wanted to urinate,
I was forced to stand upright.
The urine would spread over the wound
and would cause fresh pain all over again.
Sometimes I had to force myself
not to urinate
for fear of the terrible pain.
I was not given any anesthetic
in the operation to reduce my pain,
nor any antibiotics
to fight against infection.
Afterwards, I hemorrhaged
and became anemic.
I suffered for a long time
from acute vaginal infections.
This was attributed to witchcraft.
Hannah Koroma
Sierra
~ PERSONAL EXPERIENCE TWO ~
In a nomadic culture
like the one I was raised in,
there is no place for an unmarried woman,
so mothers feel it is their duty
to ensure their daughters
have the best possible opportunity
to get a husband.
And since the prevailing wisdom in Somalia
is that there are bad things
between a girl's legs,
a woman is considered dirty,
oversexed and unmarriageable
unless those parts
~ the clitoris, the labia minora,
and most of the labia majora ~
are removed.
Then the wound is stitched shut,
leaving only a small opening
and a scar where the genitals had been
~ a practice called
infibulation.
Paying the gypsy woman
for this circumcision
is one of the greatest expenses
a household will undergo,
but is considered a good investment.
Without it the daughters
will not make it
onto the marriage market.
The actual details of the ritual cutting
are never explained to the girls.
It's a mystery.
You just know that something special
is going to happen when your time comes.
As a result, all young girls in Somalia
anxiously await the ceremony
that will mark their becoming a woman.
Originally the process occurred
when the girls reached puberty,
but through time it has been performed
on younger and younger girls.
One evening when I was about five,
my mother said to me,
"Your father ran into the gypsy woman.
She should be here any day now."
The night before my circumcision,
the family made a special fuss over me
and I got extra food at dinner.
Mama told me not to drink
too much water or milk.
I lay awake with excitement,
until suddenly
she was standing over me,
motioning.
The sky was still dark.
I grabbed my little blanket
and sleepily stumbled along after her.
We walked out into the brush.
"We'll wait here," Mama said,
and we sat on the cold ground.
The day was growing lighter
and soon I heard the click-click
of the gypsy woman's sandals.
Then, without my seeing her approach,
she was right beside me.
"Sit over there."
She motioned toward a flat rock.
There was no conversation.
She was strictly business.
Mama positioned me on the rock.
She sat behind me
and pulled my head against her chest,
her legs straddling my body.
I circled my arms around her thighs.
She placed a piece of root
from an old tree between my teeth.
"Bite on this."
Mama leaned over and whispered,
"Try to be a good girl, baby.
Be brave for Mama, and it'll go fast."
I peered between my legs
and saw the gypsy.
The old woman looked at me sternly,
a dead look in her eyes,
then foraged through an old carpet-bag.
She reached inside with her long fingers
and fished out a broken razor blade.
I saw dried blood on the jagged edge.
She spit on it and wiped it on her dress.
While she was scrubbing,
my world went dark
as Mama tied a blindfold over my eyes.
The next thing I felt was
my flesh being cut away.
I heard the blade sawing
back and forth through my skin.
The feeling was indescribable.
I didn't move,
telling myself the more I did,
the longer the torture would take.
Unfortunately, my legs began to quiver
and shake uncontrollably
of their own accord, and I prayed,
Please, God, let it be over quickly.
Soon it was, because I passed out.
When I woke up, my blindfold was off
and I saw the gypsy woman
had piled a stack of thorns
from an acacia tree next to her.
She used these
to puncture holes in my skin,
then poked a strong white thread
through the holes to sew me up.
My legs were completely numb,
but the pain between them
was so intense
that I wished I would die.
My memory ends at that instant,
until I opened my eyes
and the woman was gone.
My legs had been tied together
with strips of cloth
binding me from my ankles
to my hips so I couldn't move.
I turned my head toward the rock.
It was drenched with blood
as if an animal
had been slaughtered there.
The pieces of my flesh
lay on top,
drying in the sun.
Waves of heat beat down on my face,
until my mother and older sister, Aman,
dragged me into the shade of a bush
while they finished making
a shelter for me.
This was the tradition.
A little hut was prepared under a tree,
where I would rest and recuperate
alone
for the next few weeks.
After hours of waiting,
I was dying to relieve myself.
I called my sister,
who rolled me over on my side
and scooped out a little hole in the sand.
"Go ahead," she said.
The first drop stung
as if my skin were being eaten by acid.
After the gypsy sewed me up,
the only opening left for urine
and later for menstrual blood
was a minute hole
the diameter of a matchstick.
As the days dragged on
and I lay in my hut,
I became infected
and ran a high fever.
I faded in and out of consciousness.
Mama brought me food and water
for the next two weeks.
Lying there alone
with my legs still tied,
I could do nothing
but wonder
~ why?
What was it all for?
At that age I didn't understand
anything about sex.
All I knew was that
I had been butchered
with my mother's permission.
I suffered
as a result of my circumcision,
but I was lucky.
Many girls die from bleeding to death,
shock, infection or tetanus.
Considering the conditions
in which the procedure is performed,
it's surprising that any of us survive.
Some time back, Laura Ziv,
a writer for the fashion magazine
~ Marie Claire ~
made an appointment
to interview me.
When we met,
I liked her right away.
I said,
"I don't know what kind of story
you wanted from me, but all of that
fashion model stuff's been done
a million times.
If you promise to publish it,
I'll give you a real story."
She said,
"Oh? Well, I'll do my best,"
and switched on her tape recorder.
I began telling her
the story of my circumcision
when I was a child.
Halfway through the interview,
she started crying
and turned off the tape.
"I mean, it's horrible. It's disgusting.
I never dreamed such things
still happen today."
"That's the point." I said.
"People in the West don't know."
The day after the interview,
I felt stunned and embarrassed.
Everybody would know
my most personal secret.
My closest friends didn't know
what had happened to me as a little girl,
and now I was telling
millions of strangers.
But after much thought,
I realized I needed to talk
about my circumcision.
First of all,
it bothers me deeply.
Besides the health problems
that I still struggle with,
I will never know
the pleasures of sex.
I feel incomplete, crippled
and knowing that there's nothing
I can do to change that
is the most hopeless feeling of all.
The second reason was my hope
of making people aware
that this practice still occurs today.
I've got to speak not only for me
but for the millions of girls
living with it and those dying from it.
When the interview came out,
the response was dramatic.
The magazine was swamped with letters.
I began giving more interviews
and speaking at schools,
community organizations
and anywhere I could
to publicize the issue.
In 1997
The United Nations Population Fund
invited me to join its fight
to stop female circumcision,
or female genital mutilation
~ FGM ~
as it is more aptly called today.
The World Health Organization
has compiled some truly terrifying statistics
that put the extent of the problem in perspective.
After I saw those numbers,
it became clear that this wasn't
just my problem.
FGM is practiced predominantly
in Africa in 28 countries.
Now cases have been reported
among girls and women
in the United States and Europe,
where there are large numbers
of African immigrants.
This practice has been performed on
as many as 130 million girls
and women worldwide.
At least two million girls
are at risk each year
of being the next victims.
That's 6000 a day.
The operations are usually performed
in primitive circumstances
by village women
using knives, scissors,
even sharp stones.
They use no anesthetic.
The process ranges in severity.
The most minimal damage
is cutting away
the hood of the clitoris.
At the other end of the spectrum
is infibulation, which is performed
on 80 percent of the women in Somalia,
and which prohibits the girl
from enjoying sex for the rest of her life.
When I imagine more little girls
going through what I went through,
it breaks my heart
and makes me angry.
With great pride,
I accepted
The U. N. Population Fund's offer
to become a special ambassador
and to join its fight.
I will return to Africa,
at great personal risk,
to tell my story
and speak out against this crime.
The tribal wars,
like the practice of circumcision,
are brought about by
the ego ~
the selfishness
and the aggression of men.
I hate to say that,
but it is true.
Both acts
stem from their obsession with
their territory,
their possessions
and women fall into that category
~ possessions ~
both culturally and legally.
Perhaps if we cut their testicles off,
my country would become paradise.
The men would calm down
and be more sensitive to the world.
Without the constant surge of testosterone,
(the male hormone)
there would be no war,
no killing, no thieving, no rape.
And if we chopped off their private parts,
and turned them loose to run around
to either bleed to death or survive,
maybe they would understand
~ for the first time ~
what they are doing to their women.
My goal is to help the women of Africa.
I want to see them get stronger,
not weaker,
and the practice of FGM
simply weakens them
physically and emotionally.
Since women
are the backbone of Africa
~ and they do most of the work ~
I like to imagine
how much they would accomplish
if they were not butchered as children
and left to function
maimed
for the rest of their lives.
In spite of my anger
over what has been done to me,
I do not blame my parents.
I love my mother and my father.
My mother had no say so
in my circumcision,
because as a woman
she is powerless to make decisions.
She was simply doing to me
what had been done to her,
and what had been done to her mother,
and her mother�s mother.
And my father
was completely ignorant
of the suffering
he was inflicting on me.
He knew
that in our Somalian society,
if he wanted his daughter to marry,
she must be circumcised
or no man would have her.
My parents were both victims
of their own upbringing,
cultural practices that have continued
unchanged
for thousands of years.
But just as we know today
that we can avoid disease and death
by vaccinations,
we know that women
are not animals in constant heat,
and their loyalty has to be earned
with trust and affection
rather than barbaric rituals.
The time has come
to leave the old ways
of suffering behind us.
I feel God made my body
Then man robbed me,
My womanhood was stolen.
perfect the way I was born.
took away my power
and left me crippled.
If God had wanted
those body parts missing,
why did he create them?
I just pray that one day
no woman will have
to experience this pain.
I just pray that one day
it will become a thing of the past
and we will hear that
female genital mutilation
has been outlawed in Somalia,
then the next country
and the next
and so on
until the entire world
is safe for all women.
What a happy day that will be
and that is what I am working toward.
In�shallah
~ if God is willing ~
it will happen.
Waris Dirie
African Supermodel
~ EPILOGUE ~
You have read about FGM
and arguments for and against it.
You must sift through the facts
examine the truth
and make your own decision.
Thank you for taking time
to learn more about our world.
~ RESOURCES ~
Desert Flower by Waris Pirie
Si-Kata P.O.Box 204 Venice, CA 90294
National Organization of Circumcision Information
Resource Centers (NOCIRC)
P.O.Box 2512 San Anselmo, CA 94979-2512
Special Projects Fund,
Population Action International
19th St, NW Suite 550 Washington, DC 20003
The Washington Metro Alliance
Against Female Genital Mutilation
Catherine Hogan, MS
17700 New Hampshire Ave.
Ashton, MD 20861
Atlanta Circumcision Information Center
David J. Llewellyn, Director
2 Putnam Drive, N.W.
Atlanta, GA 30342
Women's International Network News
Fran Hosken
187 Grant Street
Lexington, MA 02173
Congresswoman Patricia Shroeder