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	Female Genital Mutilation: A Mothering Exclusive Report

Taking on FGM 2007
By Candace Walsh

Leavetaking

Posted 1/24/07

When I returned home from Africa in late October 2005, I was filled with equal parts inspiration and anxiety. How could I possibly communicate the vastness of both the urgency and the promise of the current state of the continent's female intactivist movement? Too dire, and people would turn away. Too promising, and perhaps they'd feel like the battle was won. I hoped to channel the right words, the right tone. Because the stakes were about as high as stakes can get.

I'm on a plane right now, a puddle jumper from Albuquerque to Chicago. As I write, a Mothering reader in New Zealand is exploring the possibilities of coordinating a national fundraiser to benefit Equality Now's anti-FGM activists. Another reader wants to put on a Vagina Monologues fundraiser in her town to benefit the cause. And if it's true that for every one reader who writes in, ten have the same message, well, then, hundreds of mamas out there are donating and/or buying activism kits. The topic is tough, and has forever prompted people to turn away in distaste. But the Mothering community is tougher. Thank you ALL so much for encountering my article (in the January/ February 2007 issue) with such brave and generous hearts. On my first trip over to Africa, I had no idea if I could actually be part of the solution—I hoped to be, but felt like a drop in the bucket that had not yet landed. When I landed, you were there, too. The bucket was full.

Being the change you want to see in the world has an antonym: apathy. The "new earnestness" seems to be where we are going as a culture...and I'm right there with it.

My mom is taking care of my kids while I'm on this trip. Magical Grandma arrived on Saturday night. Her plane touched down in the midst of a sudden snowstorm...reminiscent of Mary Poppins' dramatic-weather entry into the Banks household. My daughter Honorée and she are kindred spirits, so the mutual admiration society commenced immediately while Nathaniel finished up his nap in the next room. When he did awaken, I was worried that he'd be in a sour mood (as is typical for late-ending weekend naps) and get off to a less auspicious start than sis. Luckily, though, he gave my mom a big hug and submitted happily to her loud, boisterous grandparent love (she's part Greek, don't you know).

Sunday, my mother and I did errands that needed doing (grocery shopping, prescription-filling, dry-run-to-Honorée's-dance-class-driving), and as happens in Santa Fe, I ran into three people I knew and was happy to see. Ah, home, where happy accidents = unexpectedly seeing dear ones and getting bonus hugs. Then we came back to the house, and found the kids in my office playing with dribbly bath toys. But! What? And then deep breath, and Surrender. Not a biggie. A definite smallie.

We had a hug puppy pile in the den, and the kids and I took turns making love rainbows between our hearts.

How to make a love rainbow:
Hug, chests together. Imagine a rainbow going from one heart to the other. Hang out with that, feeling the warmth that connects you. The hearts are like the big puffy white clouds that met the bottom ends of rainbows in those 80s illustrations that usually had a unicorn in there somewhere. Even when you move apart, the rainbow is still there, and it expands as you are farther and farther away, always connecting you.

"Our rainbow is going to stretch all the way to Africa!" Honorée said, running over to the globe to see how that would look.

It felt good that Peter and I said goodbye to such happy, sanguine kids. My mom had their schedules, dresser drawers filled with clean kid clothes, cupboards filled with their favorite foods, and a list of phone numbers of the coolest and most loving people I know. They were embarking on Adventure: Grandma at the Helm, as we embarked on an adventure of our own.

Posted 1/25/07

FGM is vast, and yet it affects individual girls as personally and specifically as you can imagine. For instance, I've been in touch with Gemma Enongila, who runs Aang Serian, a rescue center in Arusha, Tanzania, for girls who run away from home to flee FGM. Her daily life is inhabited by girls who left everyone and everything they know behind to protect the wholeness of their bodies—and her vision has manifested in both the concrete place that houses them and the fundraising to keep them fed, clothed, and educated.

Gemma is originally from the UK, but married a Maasai Tanzanian man, Lesikar Ole Ngila, and together they are shifting their local paradigm on the front lines. Because what they do is so specific, what we can do to help them is specific as well—and that gets me jazzed. Up until now, donations to Aang Serian have been put into a general fund. Within the next few weeks, though, they will be assigning personal sponsors to the 18 girls boarding with them.

You can be one of them. Each sponsor will receive regular photos and letters from the girl they are supporting, via email, and you are encouraged to write to them as well. $60 a month is the magic number. Gemma understands that not all of us can afford to spare the amount of money needed for a full monthly sponsorship, so she is happy to have more than one sponsor for each girl. Do you have five friends who can spare $10 a month? Together, your privilege leverages into keeping one young girl safe, fed, clothed, protected from early marriage, and educated—for a whole month. My daughter, at five years of age, is too young to know the ins and outs of FGM, but if she were older, I would want to involve her in this brilliant method of social consciousness- and compassion-raising...that just happens to specifically impact a deserving and intrepid young girl's life daily.

If you are interested, please email Gemma Enolengila at enolengila@yahoo.co.uk.

* * *

Last night, we arrived in Nairobi. 27 hours of travel...and I felt rather accomplished. It had gone so smoothly. Sure, my coccyx hurt, but it felt good to be an old hand at this flying to Kenya thing. And then...my suitcase didn't turn up. The big one, with Mothering issues, Katie Singer's books for the conference attendees, my clothes, all my clean underwear (I know, I know, I should have put some in carry-on) and my fave mary janes. I wicked lost it. In other words, I burst into tears. I went to the dark side. It was all lost forever. I would never get it back. PMS, plus oh, being awake for 27 hours, definitely contributed. Peter, exhausted himself, told me that there was no reason to cry. I gave him a swift and bleep-able retort. And then I realized—I was overtired. Like my kids get. Overtired. Sensitive. And it reinforced for me exactly how much it must rankle when kids are told that "there's no reason to cry." Even mine. I've said it. So, I got the double lesson of "you have done what he just did, so that doesn't make him the devil, it makes you both human," and "This is how your kids feel when they should have been put to bed an hour ago."

And then the nice lost baggage fellow told us that the suitcase had been tracked and would arrive at 8 a.m. the next morning. And I was spared the lesson of getting to the place of detachment from all of my most prized portable possessions. Some other times...not!

Posted 1/26/07

My suitcase has arrived, which means I am no longer limited to wearing my silly makeshift outfit of white sort-of-fancy ruffly embroidered skirt, Peter's white v-neck undershirt, and burgundy and moss green KangaRoo sneakers. It was, at the very least, humbling. Being jet-lagged did not exactly yield the rakish attitude that maybe, just maybe, could have pulled it off (yeah, right).

I ordered a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call, but the funny thing is that our wake-up call came at 4:30 (and we didn't realize this until we had showered). I'm actually thrilled—I knew I wanted to shower, meditate, work out, eat breakfast, and write a blog entry, but there would have been no way for me to do all that before 8 a.m. if I had gotten up at six. Thank you universe, for engineering that divine goof. I did it all! Having workout clothes again and pounding on the elliptical with Imogen Heap on my iPod gave me just the lift I needed (and I was already feeling quite good).

On Monday, we'll attend one of the most exciting new additions to this conference: Sustainability Day. Topics covered will be a sustainable and income-generating method called briquetting, and how to foster micro-businesses. The afternoon a presentation by Elaine Miller-Karas will take on trauma—how to release it from our bodies as both activists and humans, and how to turn around and pass that gift on to (for the African activists) the girls both fleeing FGM and the ones who were not so lucky.

Elaine has the warm, focused, and expansive energy that a friend of mine described as "earth mama." A Californian for decades, she has two children in their twenties, and did the whole natural childbirth/homebirth/breastfeeding/Lamaze instructor/conscious parenting thing that kind of matches up with my fuzzy fantasy of what groovy West Coast parents were doing while I was reading Judy Blume books that sometimes depicted said groovy parents (I wonder if Erica Jong ever swanned through one of her potlucks?).

Now that her kids are older, Elaine is fully engaged with the Trauma Resource Institute (TRI), for which she is the Director of Education. What's the TRI? Mothering has regularly published articles on Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapy as it relates to parenting, and TRI is a blossom on that tree. Basically, SE has to do with releasing trauma trapped in the physical body—including the body in the process of psychotherapy instead of focusing so much on the mind. Body/mind/spirit...as we have come to realize how rewarding it is to snap to a holistic concept of ourselves, SE happens to be there to reflect and support that in the therapeutic realm.

Elaine, an SE-trained therapist, looked around at the world and realized that she wanted to make the concepts more accessible to populations in need of this healing. Because it takes three years to be trained in SE, she and her colleague, Geneie Everett, developed a short-term model called Trauma First Aide—which can be taught in three days (!). They've been on the ground at the Tsunami, after Hurricane Katrina, and now, Elaine is here. They've also been invited to come to Rwanda to share their method.

"The goal of treatment is to help the client understand basic information about the nervous system, and then, teach specific skills to stabilize their own body. As the client becomes aware of how to stabilize their nervous system, by becoming more somatically aware, there is an increase in internal resistance."

Because of my own significant progress with SE back in Santa Fe, I came to the experience here with gangbusters confidence. Elaine, however, wanted to prep those of us who traveled here from the States so that we could be more engaged and helpful during the workshop on Monday.

We gathered in my room, a very roomy room that we got after rejecting both the twin bed room (first time I've been away with my husband in seven years...I don't think so!) and the second room, which was right on the boisterously noisy highway. Third time's a charm, says squeaky wheel moi.

Elaine gave us a little rundown..."SE helps you to find your way back to your body when you've been thrown off your center...In trauma we go through certain responses: fight, flight, and freeze. If the human cannot fight or flee, we go into a freeze response. We shut down, we can't move. It's a very elegant system of protection. We don't experience trauma in the same way—endorphins, natural narcotics, kick in. Pain is not as painful, time slows down, we completely dissociate. People say things like, 'I was floating on top of my body, looking down.'"

This freeze state works well in nature, but what animals do afterwards is literally shake. The shake out the trauma—many of us have experienced this shaking ourselves—and many of us have been told or told ourselves to stop. Even in the medical community, shaking is interpreted as something that needs to be stabilized, thwarted. I remember shaking both after anesthesia (and a nurse yelling at me to calm down...charming) and after childbirth (my midwives told me it was natural and to go with it). Most of us don't shake it out, and that's how trauma gets trapped in the body, and leads to other symptoms—persistent headaches, chronic fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder, extended hyper-alertness.

After the intro, we moved outside to the grass, paired off into twos, and took turns literally charging each other

a) First, Sally charged me and I was told to "escape" from her.
b) Then, she charged me and I resisted her.

Then, we switched, so that I charged her and she escaped, and I charged her and she resisted. We tracked how we felt in our bodies when we escaped, resisted, and were the attacker and the other. It was really wild. Some of us were exhilarated when we were the attacker. Some felt really activated and "bad" when we were that role. All of us, however, felt things very specifically in our bodies. Heart racing, warmth, different sensations. Some of us shook our arms and legs, implementing what we had just been taught. Another one of us rested flat on the ground. Elaine was there to help us move through the different reactions.

When I charged Sally and she resisted, I noticed that my arms and legs felt "not there," but my heart and chest cavity felt like a wound...not exactly what one would expect from being aggressive—but that's how it came up for me. We identified places in our bodies that felt good—or people or places that have good associations for us—and focused on that sensation or thought, and noticed what it did to our bodies. We noticed how just doing that engendered a nice, cleansing releasing breath, or a yawn, or tingling in a particular part of our bodies. "That's releasing, too."

Although the exercise was wonderful for taking theory and put it into practice, and for getting our bare feet on the grass in the sun, Elaine decided that the exercise wouldn't be a good one to do on Sustainability Day. It had brought up so much for us, and there would be no way to support the activists afterwards, as it was scheduled to be the last thing before the conference came to an end. However, she will present other, less activating examples of Trauma First Aide, and how to both benefit from it personally and share it with others. We were all happy, though, to have been blessed with such an intimate entree into Trauma First Aide.

Resources:

Posted 1/27/07

The first day of the conference was like Old Home Week—I saw Jessica Neuwirth, Taina Bien-Aime and Faiza Mohamed of Equality Now; Efua Dorkenoo, UK-based Ghanaian BBC commentator and author of Cutting the Rose; my girl Hadil El-Khouly, college student and activist at the Center for Egyptian Women Legal Assistance; Fatma Towfiq of Tanzania; and the charismatic Dr. Morrissanda Kouyate of Guinea. Also, luminaries of the cause Agnes Pareyio of Narok, Kenya (she met with the president of Kenya that morning), and dazzling orator and scholar Isatou Touray of the Gambia.

We met, we greeted, I got awesome African smooshing hugs (forget about body space and air kisses). Peter used his formidable cocktail party circulation skills and international relations background to both endear himself to all and pack his avid mind with so many of the attendees' amazing stories. I made a new friend, Rehab Mahmoud of Cairo, who has three sons from age ten years to four months, and promised to show me how to do her fabulous Cleopatra eye makeup before the cocktail mixer Saturday night. Below, some highlights of the conference presentations

SOMALIA

Today, Hawa Aden of Somalia shared her strategies for diminishing FGM in her area. She has a strong strategy in action: the children learn about FGM in their school curriculum. How? Through theater, poetry and singing.

Hawa said, "Somalis have a very strong oratory tradition. Both the girls and the boys are composing. It used to be that when it was time to recite, the girls would giggle and cover their mouths with their scarves. Not anymore. Now, they are up there, singing, reciting poetry, acting."

It's a beautiful strategy, because people fall in love with the music first, and only later, they grasp what the lyrics are. Hawa said, "Men have told me, 'I was nearly to cry, of what the girls and women were saying about undergoing FGM.'"

Another thing they've hit hard is clarifying that FGM is not mandated by Islam. "In 1994, in seven mosques, the speeches criticized us. Now, in two mosques, the imams point out that in the Koran, it says that it is not allowed for women to be tortured. When two girls died from FGM in our community, we informed everyone, so that nobody could say, "These women are cooking up stories, they are lying."

ETHIOPIA

Zegeye Asfaw of the organization Hundee works in the slums of Addis Ababa, with a predominantly Christian population that is still very much enmeshed with traditional belief systems. This group performs female genital cutting when their little girls are only 80 days old. "Infants cannot differentiate between right and wrong," he said. "We identify duty bearers as well as right holders," he said, rephrasing the old perpetrator/victim duality in fresher, more optimistic language. "We mobilize communities so that they adopt a traditional lawmaking in which they incorporate FGM as the worst enemy of young girls, wherever they may be." Ethiopia is a country that has recently criminalized FGM, and "The credit goes to a number of civil society organizations that Equality Now supported financially." How's that for getting a nice bang for your philanthropic buck? Hundee has also established nine economic enterprises with the profits to be used strictly to expand the mobilization against FGM and harmful traditional practices.

The most encouraging thing that I heard from Asfaw: "It has been so evident that youth leads the campaign. Our boys are saying, "We will not marry circumcised girls, and our girls are saying they will not be circumcised."

* * *
Isatou Touray, as a commentator, said, "Breaking the shackles of religious interpretation has been a formidable challenge. FGM is about controlling women's sexuality, about the deprivation of sexual pleasure in erogenous zones. There is no religion that condones cutting the clitoris of a girl child or baby."

Another activist commented, "Circumcisers have been given a certain role by the community, and women go to circumcisers, not the other way around. We need to limit this. Just sharing how FGM causes health problems has been hugely powerful. Before, if a girl bled after FGM, the community thought she was possessed by evil spirits, a witch. If a girl got keloid scarring, they blamed her and said it was because she was fighting the circumciser. The circumciser would cut the scarring and it would grow back—cut the keloids and they'd grow back, three, four times. Eventually, she would die, but the community would be told, 'Look, we got rid of the bad spirit.' See how far ignorance can take people? Just bringing gynecologists to these villages for education and care has ended these beliefs, has taught people how FGM causes these health problems."

* * *
Hawa Adem (Somalia) answered a question about how girls who are already cut must feel when they are in school learning about the horrors of FGM, and how it should be resisted.

"Yes, these girls are traumatized. They were harassed and taunted before being cut, 'You are not clean, you are not good.' What can we do? We have a dilemma. If we don't want to upset them, that interferes with saving girls who are not yet cut. The answer came when these cut girls came out as the most outspoken opponents of FGM. They said, 'Not my daughter. I will not allow my daughter to go through what I have gone through.' I've seen the mutilated girls take the lead, often, in writing poetry about the issue. In my lifetime, I am not expecting to see hundreds of girls who are not cut, but I am expecting to see hundreds who pledge not to let anyone touch their daughters."

She also talked about how, as an elder among other elders, they have power to advocate for younger ones. "When you are young, you are so-and-so's daughter. When you are older, you are so-and-so's wife. The only time to stand in the community and have a voice is when you are old. We older women gather and give support, now. We go with the women to tell the men."

BURKINA FASO

Burkina Faso is a shining star of a success story among FGM-afflicted countries. The national rate of FGM is 56%, but in the youngest generation of girls (in secondary school), the number is only 6.3%. Here are some of the country's strategies that have paid and continue to pay off:

1. sensitization on a large scale
2. effective application of the law (which is in the constitution right through to the penal code)
3. training program to carry out the law
4. advocacy
5. a "911" type number, SOS 1112, to be called if you feel at risk for FGM
6. in the courts, the penalty for circumcisers has gone from two months, to years in prison without the possibility of a fine.
7. military units patrol the country in the dry season. They put on discussions of consequences, contents of the law against FGM, distribution of brochures in French and four other languages, visits to homes of circumcisers.

Posted 1/29/07

My heart is aching like a sore throat in my ribcage. "Wight heah," as my little guy Nathaniel said once, pointing to his chest. Or maybe the emotion that tightens my throat has crawled down into my heart. Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, and it's my last night in Nairobi.

Travel is like that—just when you settle into the groove of a place, it's time to make some sense out of your jumbled, dispersed suitcase contents. To sort the dirty from the clean, the new from the castoff, to pack gifts and get rid of debris, to assimilate new knowledge and feel distanced from outgrown perceptions.

Just when I've gotten habituated to my hotel room's meditation corner, to swimming laps during the conference lunch breaks—to doing a fluid backstroke under a Prussian blue latticework bridge that spans the long rectangular pool. Giving myself that space to regenerate, breathe, use my large muscles, be in my body, is something I've learned to do since the last conference. And then during the conference I hear tales of girls bleeding to death from slashed femoral arteries. Of a Sierra Leonean activist who was invited into the bush on the pretext of giving a presentation, only to be hacked away at between her legs until she resembled the worst horror of the very thing she was trying to prevent. And the sun is on my body gliding through the water. And the blue bridge blocks the sun giving welcome brief shade. And my arms pull me through the water back into the sun shining through palm fronds. Repeat.

And we sit and listen. And there is cause for celebration and cause for despair. And the women are adorned in shiny satin head wraps or batik fitted dresses or Maasai ropes of beadwork or embroidery or petal pink and milky blue cotton fabric that covers everything except oval faces. Their strength, resolve and valor, combined with the beauty and pride of their self-presentation...I'm in a rarefied chamber of intrepid super-heroine blooms. These women are not flowers. But the feminine and the floral share something indisputable, and something about exquisite, adversity-forged women defending not just what they have lost, but what others stand to lose, are losing, and could be prevented from losing...that elemental feminine piece of us. I can't separate the two. I don't want to. The flowers compliment the women and the women compliment the flowers. And they are both beautiful just the way they are. We are.

Today, I felt the lessons the FGM activists have to bless us with, even though we have such different daily struggles. Isatou Touray of the Gambia explained how her organization, Gamcotrap, has enlisted community-based facilitators to track FGM cases in her territory's communities, because, "if we want to and insist on doing it all by ourselves, we will die."She works smart, like we need to do each day, in order to feel good inside ourselves, to be good to those around us.

* * *

Rehab Mahmoud of Giza, Egypt taught me how to kohl-line my eyes like a true Egyptian last night. I've filed it away in my minx-skills toolbox...definitely not going to be part of my daily makeup routine, but good to pull out for date night. How many other beauty trends do you know that have lasted since the age of Cleopatra? It's a keeper. She also taught me how to greet her, and others—"Habibi! Habibi!" "My love, my love!"I adore that.

I know it might seem contradictory to talk in one sentence about anti-FGM strategies and the next about eyeliner, but that's the thing. One of the lessons I am taking away from this conference is: feminism does not wear "comfortable shoes" around here. And I don't mean that there's anything wrong with comfortable shoes. They're usually where you can find my feet. What I mean is, remember those seventies suits women wore with the funny little string ties around their necks? The point was basically to downplay femininity to be taken seriously, and I am sure that was necessary on some level, because it seems in retrospect to be a wardrobe choice of the last resort. However, the African women around me aren't going there. And it's not because they've come a long way, baby.

When they go out into villages, they are trying to undo mind-boggling things like a woman's powerlessness to say no to sex with her husband. A girl's powerlessness to say no to being pulled out of school to get married at 9, 10, 11 years of age. To have a certain amount of children, and no more. Or no children at all. To be single or not. And trust me, partnering with a woman is not an option, either. As a matter of fact, in the Gambia, one of the justifications for FGM is that if a woman dies and is buried intact, she will come back in her next life as a gay person. So after she is dead, her genitals are mutilated before she is buried. The activist women are trying to undo a girl's powerlessness to keep her vagina free of rigid scar tissue that ruptures when a baby's head is coming down the birth canal. To safeguard, as Gertrude Stein put it, her tender button.

And they do it all standing tall, in the dazzling regalia of their tribes...embracing that part of which is traditional but does not harm them.

* * *

Rehab (all of 32 years old) is a pistol. She founded the organization SAWA (Association for a Developing Society), which raises awareness about the harmfulness of FGM in an area of Egypt without any other NGOs that addressed harmful traditional practices. They surveyed the area to find that 97% of the population supported FGM. After months of outreach and discussion and seminars with various segments of the society, some women came to her and were willing to talk on camera about their experiences of FGM—death of a daughter, chronic health problems, bleeding, pain...and the footage was made into a film that was shown at the area's community center. Attendance was huge. Everyone came to see it. And afterwards, when the community was re-surveyed, the percentage of people who supported FGM had gone down significantly.

Also from Egypt, 22-year-old Hadil El Kouly of the Center for Women's Legal Assistance (CEWLA) shared how her ongoing program of involving youth in dramatic productions of plays about FGM led to one woman saying, "If you had been here ten years ago, I would not have been circumcised, but now, I will not circumcise my daughter."Another neat thing: the Center's cleaning person overheard the rehearsals for the play, got engaged with the topic, and asked to be an actor. This request was granted, and it just so happened that she knew half the town, so that many more people came to see, and be influenced by, the play. "She's now the town's most active fighter against FGM."Radicalized! There's also now a waiting list of kids who want to be involved in the drama productions. "These young people talk to their families, and the families talk to their neighbors... "

She said something extremely relevant Mothering's readers—to all American women. "Either we live in denial, as in we don't want to face the disappointment that bad news brings—we live in our own little worlds. Others are really active, and try to actively change society for the better. How about the people in the middle? How can we engage them?" They have the power to turn this movement's goals into the status quo. Whom do you ID with? I used to be in the first group until the Pond Foundation pulled me into this world. I have never received so many blessings and grown as much as in I have in the last year. I am so happy that my "own little world," that cozy prison cell, with just a little window high on the wall, has been demolished.

* * *

Saying the word "patriarchy," even in polite US society, can have the effect of sticking virtual ear plugs into a room full of people. We've all been cornered by some earnest young woman (or been that woman....guilty as charged...) with two Women's Studies classes and a couple of drinks under her belt who says the word "patriarchy" so many times that it ceases to have any meaning. But I encountered the concept afresh after hearing Hawa Aden Mohamed, a truly riveting and brilliant elder of the Somali anti-FGM movement, share this story:

"We invited 24 religious leaders, and expert Islamic scholars and gynecologists, to talk about the harmful effects and lack of religious connection to FGM. We thought it was going really well, but on the second day, they asked us all to leave the room so they could speak privately. Well, they didn't know the tape was on.

The leader stood up and said, 'Brothers, we should not allow these women to get what they want, because if we grant to them today that FGM is not required by religion, they will ask tomorrow to be able to remarry after being widowed, the next day, the ability to receive inheritance, and the next day, an end to child marriage. We will be in a better position tomorrow if we don't let them have what they want today.'"

I believe, in my world, that the word "patriarchy" is about to be dusted off and re-inserted into my lexicon. If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...After telling this very discouraging story, Hawa was still just as stalwart and gleaming with purpose as she was when I saw her that morning. She ended by saying, "I really admire my sisters and brothers from other countries who have some clans who do it and some who don't—there is more room to stop FGM. In our country, every girl has to undergo it—rich, poor, north, south, whatever caste, everybody. I do hope it will stop, and that the Islamic way of life will be taught correctly—because it prohibits harm to any human being. We hope to have better statistics than we do. It will come. Patience, continuity, the forward activity, future activity, so that the younger generations will not suffer what we have suffered."

Mother Teresa said, "God doesn't give us more than we can handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much." Hawa might feel the same way sometimes, given the titanic challenges surrounding her. But I can see why she happens to be there, in one of the most direly entrenched places in the FGM belt. She is a rock, in that hard place. An exceptional human being in exceptional circumstances.

It's after midnight and I need to turn in. Tomorrow I wake up before dawn to toss back some coffee, pack up the room, and write some more. I need to make sure that I get through the weekend's notes before going to Sustainability Day, which promises to yield a fresh new mother lode of things that I absolutely must tell you all about. Thank you so much for expanding the reach of this conference experience through the energy and attention you bring to my account.

Posted 01/31/07

I have a confession to make. I intended to blog on Monday, simultaneously as Sustainability Day unfolded. That would have been quite the modern media operative skill—and one I haven't quite mastered yet.

Then, I planned to write in my hotel room for a few hours before we left for the airport. But it became the scene of an impromptu videotaping of five representative activists (Isatou, Agnes, Hadil, Morrissanda, and Amie) by Elaine and her daughter Jessie, for submission to a certain philanthropic media celebrity. There was no way I could pass on helping out that way. And I almost fell over when I realized that after four days of listening to anti-FGM activists speak at the conference, I was still rapt as they gave their off-the-cuff, eloquent ten-minute sound bites. It seemed like a microcosm of the movement—Agnes, the sage. Isatou, the academically unimpeachable orator. Hadil, the young, fresh-faced empowered Muslim feminist. Morrisanda, a man who has, for twenty years, devoted his life to ending FGM—not to mention a physician, spokesperson, and lobbyist who has charisma that could translate into ducats of political gold, should he ever pursue that. Amie, the sassy Gambian mama of two daughters, who was a television news broadcaster before reporting on a story about FGM flipped her over into social advocacy.

Agnes talked about the history of the campaign—how she walked from town to town with her wooden model that showed the deleterious effects of female genital mutilation. Isatou framed the issue in terms of girls' and women's rights, and shared how consistency of financial support allowed her NGO to follow through on long-term initiatives.

Hadil said (and I paraphrase), "FGM deprives a woman of precious things throughout her life. When she is a little girl, it takes away her freedom to play and act her age. After she is cut, she is told she must be serious and still and reserved. It also takes away her innocence, because she is made conscious of something just as it is being robbed from her. When she is a teenager, she loses the natural unfolding of her sensuality, and also can damage her ability to menstruate comfortably. When she is a young bride, it takes away from the enjoyment of sexual relations with her husband. When she is pregnant and it is time to give birth, it makes childbirth prolonged, more painful, and more prone to end in maternal and infant death. Because of the way it takes so much away from women their entire lives, that is why I have decided to work so hard to end FGM. People try to say that Islam prescribes FGM, but that is not true. Islam says that you shouldn't even harm an animal, so why would it condone such a harmful practice against women?"

Dr. Kouyate (Morrissanda) talked about the vital importance of men's involvement in the movement. He pointed out that FGM robs women and men of the intimacy that comes from un-interfered-with sexuality with their life partners. He also said, "FGM is not just an African women's problem. It is not just an African problem, either. It's a human rights problem, and as such, all humans should help to stop it.

Amie talked about how she had been cut, and that she had had her oldest daughter genitally mutilated before she realized how terrible it was—in time for her youngest daughter to be spared. She showed her broadcast journalism chops with the clarity and smoothness of her ex tempore speech.

That felt like living history. But what felt even more like living history was watching the activists tweak their statement to UNICEF on a laptop in my room while waiting for Elaine and Jessie to arrive. UNICEF has not been funding anything against FGM except for, um, public declarations against it. Big whoop. And to think I had just given them $20 on the plane ride over to Nairobi...I'm hoping that particular sawbuck gets funneled into something effective, like nutrition or education, and not a public declaration against FGM. After being witness to the bold and transformative grassroots actions performed by the conference attendees, to me, that just seemed so...insultingly grudging.

One part of the conference was devoted to drafting a letter to UNICEF, to ask for meetings and consideration of the powerful methods the grassroots activists are carrying out. As Isatou and Morrissanda and Agnes fiddled with it before it was finalized, I felt like a fly on the wall at the drafting of the Constitution. I hope you'll take a minute to bless its reception, and even express your hopes to them that they focus more effectively on ending this torture of female children.

So after they cleared out, I realized that I had just enough time to pack rather hastily and not eat dinner before we took a cab to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. I thought maybe I could write about Sustainability Day on the airplane, although I had only had a few hours sleep the night before, and was feeling addled and overly sensitive from sleep deprivation. That could be why I left my cell phone in the hotel room (zoinks!). We had tickets for a flight on Emirates Air to Mumbai, via Dubai, for a few days' experience of the mythical land of India before returning to Santa Fe. As I got on the airplane, I stayed awake only long enough to notice that the flight attendants had neat headgear (tomato red pillbox hats over cream-colored sheer veils that spilled down one side of their heads) and that the chairs were nattily turned out in Easter-egg-colored tapestry prints (it was like being inside a big Mary Kay samples suitcase), before passing out cold.

Sustainability Day was exciting. We had heard so much intense front-line reportage, and that day was about renewal, resources, and self-determination. Wendy of the Pond Foundation did a presentation on briquetting.

What is briquetting? Check this out—it's already happening in Haiti, quite rewardingly for all involved. First, you gather refuse-type vegetable material (sugar cane husks, leaves, banana peels), add water, and put them through a wooden press that molds the mixture into a kind of donut-shaped puck that can be used as a fuel source. The natural glue in vegetable matter causes it to fuse together after water is added, pressure is applied, and the briquettes dry. The press can be made with about $300-400 worth of materials available from a basic hardware store. Briquettes are used to cook food, heat a living space, and most powerfully, as a source of income. "We've had women experiment and come of with some amazing innovations," Wendy said. "They've realized that some materials burn slow and low, for cooking stews, and some burn faster and hotter, for heating up water. Also, adding eucalyptus leaves serves as a natural bug repellent."

It also benefits girls and women on personal levels. "In Haiti, the girls were having to go farther and farther away from their villages to collect firewood." Wendy said. "And as a result, they were getting raped more frequently. Briquetting takes away that imperative to go far away from protection. I also like that it cuts down on deforestation, and is a more efficient use of time, which gives girls more free time to go to school and engage in recreation."

Agnes' interest was piqued. "When the girls run to us during school breaks, they can make these briquettes to sell to put toward school fees. Also, we spend a lot of money on firewood, and it would help to save money that way, too."

If you'd like more information on briquetting, email wendypond@earthlink.net.

Sunny Moyo, of Zimbabwe, gave a presentation on goat-herding as a sustainable method for women in her community. First, goats are given to a group of women in a village. After three years, when they calf, they "pay back" the "loan" by giving three baby goats to another village, designated by the program. The women take turns herding the goats, in specific areas, because the goats' urine and poop serve as very valuable enrichments to the eroded and infertile soil of that land.

"When you teach women how to care for goats," Sunny said, "they do a very good job, because they care for them the way they take care of their babies." Some challenges were a lack of teamwork that can occur. "One woman began to miss her herding days because her husband was dying of cancer. She was kicked out of the group instead of anyone filling in for her. Our community can be very brutal sometimes. For instance when your husband dies, during the morning mourning ceremony [funeral], a new man is picked out for you. Right after your husband is buried, you have to go into your house with this man, while you are still in shock, and he has to have sex with you right then, two times. Two old men listen at the front door to make sure they hear that it's happening, and then the new groom lights a candle to signal the consummation. Imagine—you have lost your husband, the man you love, and while you are still in shock from this, you are forced to go with someone else. When the townspeople see the candle lit, they all ululate in approval."

Whoa.

Back to the goats—they are actually the property of the women, which is relatively unheard of in Sunny's Zimbabwean area. And, if the woman dies, the goats are passed on to her children, not her husband.

I want to tell you more, but I am hallucinating at the computer screen (it's 12:30 am). Tomorrow I will let you know all about the VDAY presentation by the lovely Cecile Lipworth, and the absolutely revolutionary introduction of Somatic Experiencing therapy to all of the activists. Get your hankies ready for that one.

Posted 02/01/07

Cecile Lipworth, director of the V-Day Worldwide Campaign, just happens to live in Santa Fe (so I get to have lunch with her at the Chocolate Maven every now and then!). Due to the beauty of working remotely, she coordinates V-Days (performances of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues) all over the world. As she said in an interview on interview on cut-up.com, "It is such a fulfilling experience to work with women from so many different countries and know that in some small way sitting at my desk in the high desert town of Santa Fe I am able to offer support and a connection to hundreds of other women around the world."

Cecile's originally from South Africa, and when we shared a taxi into Nairobi to do a little open market shopping, she knew exactly where to stop for a stomach-secure bite to eat: Steers, mix between fast-food and restaurant, that served the most delicious "chicken burgers" (hot chicken breast sandwiches) with "tomato sauce" (ketchup). And yes, that would be pronounced "to-mah-to." Common chicken burger topping: pineapple chunks.

As Hadil and Hawa have used drama and poetry to break through to girls at risk for FGM, Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues do the same—while fundraising for pro-women causes (it funded Agnes' rescue center) like rape crisis centers. Check out the details at their yummy pink website: www.vday.org.

Cecile started off her presentation by showing a picture of her five-year-old daughter, Tia, who is darling. "This is why I'm here—I love my daughter so much, and I want to help you to protect your daughters..." She talked about how as worldwide director of V-Day, she is very aware of how just saying the word "vagina" is a flash point for the way people feel about the validity of women and their right to their own body-determination. And, how that debate and reaction is a fertile locus for discussing, renegotiating, opening up, and unpacking our collective baggage around it.

I really got it. Right up until Sustainability Day, I just didn't use the word vagina. Not that I used "hoo hoo" instead—I like the Sanskrit "yoni" (divine passage). It just feels like it sounds, or sounds like it feels to me, or both. "Vagina" has felt medical, or like a word on a forensic report. And why? Because those are the strongest associations, because we aren't saying "vagina" the way we say "lower intestine" or "clavicle" or any other body part. If I said "vagina" as much as I said "hand," its context would be more everyday, and the word would be more everyday, less fraught.

Cecile shared how a college student had encountered resistance from her conservative Southern university campus when she tried to organize a Vagina Monologues performance. She had a meeting with the university top brass, along with a woman of advanced age who was a major university donor. After listening to the V-Day defense, the donor said to the college president: "Jesus came from a vagina, you came from a vagina, and we're doing the Vagina Monologues!"

I think that needs to be on a t-shirt.

I used to think it "sounded ugly." Well, it has aural similarities to...designer, vine, enjoin, Jainism...and they aren't considered words that sound unappealing. I do believe that I, and many people, have transferred their own particular stuff about vaginas onto the way they perceive the word to sound. And, have you ever just thought about a word until it starts to sound weird? When you really think about a word, it falls apart, stops being a sound you take for granted, like, say, "crisscross." I think that a similar thing goes on with the word vagina.

The word vagina just needs to be said more. I am going to make a point of it...when it comes up, no more euphemisms (not that "yoni" is a euphemism—and it will always be an alternate term in my house). In other words:

"Because if you can't say it, then you can't own it. If you can't own it, then you can't protect it. If it's violated, you can't protest or complain. Because it never belonged to you, if you can't even say it, claim it, or name it... Do you see that when women break silence about the vagina, they can break silence about the violence?" — Hibaaq Osman V-Day Special Representative for Africa, Asia & The Middle East [read more from this letter to the Ugandan government at http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/resistance/uganda/osman].

"The taboo on the word is no accident. As long as we cannot say vagina, vaginas do not exist. They remain isolated and unprotected. Young girls get genitally mutilated and sex trafficked throughout the world. Women get raped and acid burned, and beaten, and no one is held accountable."

—Eve Ensler

Before closing, we all stood up and yelled, "Vagina!" in all of our own languages: Kiswahili, Ma, Shona, French, English, Arabic, and more. It felt good. Do me a favor. Think about putting on a Vagina Monologues in your town. Cecile would love to help you out.

Posted 02/02/07

"Trauma First Aide" Presentation by Elaine Miller-Karas, of The Trauma Resource Institute.

Elaine, as I mentioned earlier, has worked with traumatized people of the Tsunami, and in New Orleans and Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina. Monday, she presented the Trauma First Aide (TFA) program to the African activists, as a way to unleash this extremely effective method on the ones who need it most—women and girls who have undergone FGM, and girls fleeing FGM who are mourning the loss of their families and homes.

As girls are held down during FGM, their natural fight-or-flight impulse is thwarted.

"When neither escape nor response is possible, the woman's system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized." Judith Herman wrote. The normal range of a body's homeostasis—regulation of breathing, blood pressure, heart rate, saliva, stress hormones, pupils, digestion—can get stuck on high (hyperactivity, hypervigilance, elation/mania, anxiety/panic, rage) or low (depression, disconnection, deadness, exhaustion, numbness) .

Elaine asked the activists to describe what they had noticed about girls who had just undergone FGM. One woman said, "After, when they are healed, they become very calm and self-contained, withdrawn." Hawa said, "They don't have energy for quite some time to talk, to play, to participate." Another woman said, "The girls tremble, and relive what has happened to them. They keep to themselves."

"The mind and the body are inseparable," Elaine said, echoing the central tenet of Somatic Experiencing. So, physical trauma turns up in the psyche, which we have already taken for granted, but mental trauma turns up in the body, and physical trauma gets trapped in the body, when it can't be discharged through fight or flight responses.

And how to release it after the fact? It's never too late. And it's easy, when you're in good hands, and when you surrender to the process.

Elaine asked for a volunteer. Sunny Moyo of Zimbabwe raised her hand and was chosen. I've been loving Sunny all along—she has a wonderful, alert, cheerily businesslike way about her, and has a great sense of humor, too. She had said, "My name is actually Sunanilu, but when I first went to school and the teacher asked me what my name was, I said, 'Sunanilu,' and he said, 'Shut up, that's a sentence.' [everyone laughed] From then on I was Sunny."

Elaine said, "I'm going to show you how to develop a resource. Everyone, write down some things or people that make you feel happy, good, proud." She asked Sunny what she came up with.

"My children."
"Tell me something about your children."
"Well, they're young, and whenever I am going on a flight, they sing me a little goodbye love song."
"How does your body feel when you think about them singing the song?"
"Warm, in my heart, and in my chest." Her face was aglow, with thoughts of her children, her smile big and wide and full.
"Can you sing the song for us?"
She sang the song. And I couldn't really hear the words, but the words were irrelevant. It was a beautiful song, filled with love, simple and sweet, a song of love from children to a mama about to get on an airplane and fly far, far away. I. Lost. It. I was crying so hard. And then, a few bars into it, some other women joined in the song, with clear, sweet voices, in the still, sun-lit room.

I was crying because I missed my babies so much. And I was crying because I had proposed that the Pond Foundation bring Trauma First Aide to the conference, and they had done it—took the leap, trusted me. And I was crying because I felt in that moment how much I had transcended through the method, and now, its pragmatic, commonsense healing power was being unleashed across an entire continent of the those who needed it perhaps most acutely, who would pass it on, and pass it on. And it was happening. Right there in front of me. I thought about how powerful these activists already are, and how much more powerful they would be with bodies free of old, trapped pain. And how much more powerful their girls would be, too. In a movement that needs so much energy, to continue its momentum and overcome.

With Sunny, Elaine was showing us how to develop a resource so that we could go to a good-feeling place in our bodies when old trauma was triggered inside us, or when we needed to work through things that just happened or were happening.

When we went into a good-feeling place in our bodies, the change in our nervous system was immediate. Often, a nice big deep breath came up and out. There was warmth, and a place where tingling took place—"That's a release!" Elaine said. We moved our attention (very slowly) from the good-feeling place to a physical place where we had identified trapped trauma (say, from my heart, to the place on my hip where I was hit by a car), and then back again, and it made things happen. Just moving our attention from point A to to point B, and back to point A. "That's pendulation," Elaine identified.

Here's an example of the process I'm describing from Trauma First Aide's training material.

"Move your sensory awareness back and forth between the constriction and the comfort.
As you shift back and forth, what do you notice? Where in your body do you notice that?
Is the uncomfortable sensation the same, smaller or bigger?
If it is smaller, notice the change and as you notice the change, what else happens inside?
Are there any thoughts, feelings or meanings that arise?"

Instead of being at the mercy of events or associations, we could use these times as opportunities to off-load that which did not serve us. To be stronger, more resilient, unflappable. Or, less flappable. We'll never stop being human.

Because the afternoon session could only be an introduction to something that usually takes three to five days of training, we weren't able to get super-deep. However, we broke up into pairs and took turns experiencing our personal resources. Wendy worked with Hawa. "She was glowing!" Wendy exulted later. I worked with Peter, because I was too far gone down emotional alley to actually work with someone in a way that wouldn't cause them to be worried about me—and it was so not about me! I felt safe enough with him to move through it while we did the exercise.

After I calmed down, I noticed that it looked like Zegeye from Ethiopia was without a partner. I went over to him to ask. He said that he had worked with a partner, but the partner had to go. I said, "Wasn't it so sweet, Sunny's song?" He nodded. I asked him if he had children. He said, "Yes, but when they were very little, I was put in jail as a political dissenter, and since then I haven't been under the same roof with them for more than ten days." My eyes widened. He continued.

"When I was jailed, my wife and children had to flee the country. I was in jail for ten years, and the only thing that kept alive my will to survive was my wife and children." I didn't have to teach him about resourcing. He had practiced it for ten years.

But now time had passed, and they were grown up, and apparently his marriage hadn't survived the experience. "But we email," he said, his eyes brightening. "And my children are in graduate school in the United States." And even after being in jail for ten years, he still worked every day to end FGM, to be there to protect children now, even though he had not been able to do that when his own children were small.

Given that it was Africa, as we worked, we heard chanting, dancing, the bleating-sounding blowing of animal horns in the next room. That and the warm close fragrant air, the particular African alchemy of simultaneously being present to the most exquisite, transcendent, and most tragic shades of human experience, would never let us forget where we were.

Read the Taking on FGM 2006 blog.

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