Excision

August 13th, 2009

We gather under the hanger at ECLA as the last rays of light fade from the sky. This is one of the few times that all thirty-two of us get to be together as evident by the excited air of conversation that fills the air. Tonight we have a guest speaker coming in to talk about excision or female genital mutilation. I feel like the label of excision gives it some sort of cover or legitimacy. I’m not quite sure why they have decided to use it.

The speakers are two men from an agency that has been educating people about excision for several years now. First they spoke of its history. Excision was practiced on practically everyone born before 1985 though government efforts to stop the practice began a few years before that. Since then the government hopes that there has been a decline, and has evidence that there has been a decline in the cities. The villages though are both hard to collect data from and difficult to educate.

Then they gave us some of the reasons that they have heard from people defending the practice. Some reasons where religious, some sexual, and some superstitious. The two men said that this all boiled down to the fact that people are not very educated about the subject.

Then they brought out the models. The first was what a healthy normal women looks like. The next were absolutely shocking. I’ve heard about excision, I’ve read about excision, but nothing had prepared me to see, even in model form, the horrific mutilation and terrible side effects caused by excision. It was unfathomable to me what could posses someone to allow that to be done to their child, for someone to want that to be done to their child.

It comforted me to realize that this is part of the reason we are here. Directly confronting communities and engaging them in a discourse about excision falls more in the area of the GEE sector, but there are things I can do as well. And I certainly intend to.