Even while she loved the country, though, she noticed how difficult it was to be a girl there. Many girls in Senegal have their genitals cut very young—usually between 3 and 5 years of age. Many are married very young and are encouraged to have children quickly and often. Outside groups had tried to change these practices, but no one succeeded, and Molly found herself in a position to see why.
She became a translator for development programs, serving as the link between villagers and outsiders who wanted to help. She quickly saw that there was more than a language barrier dividing these two groups. There was an empathy barrier. The outsiders showed little skill in projecting themselves into the lives of the people they wanted to help, and they had little interest in trying to understand why something was being done in a certain way. They didn’t even have the patience to explain to villagers why they thought something should change.
On our drive out, Molly explained to me that the empathy barrier stymies all efforts in development. Agricultural equipment that had been donated was rusting out, health clinics were sitting empty, and customs like female genital cutting and child marriage continued unchanged. Molly told me that people often get outraged by certain practices in developing countries and want to rush in and say, “This is harmful! Stop it!’” But that’s the wrong approach. Outrage can save one girl or two, she told me. Only empathy can change the system.
That insight prompted Molly to launch an organization called Tostan and develop a new approach to social change. No one from her organization would tell a villager that something they were doing was wrong or bad. In fact, Molly told me that she never uses the term “female genital mutilation” because it’s heavy with judgment, and people won’t listen to you if you’re judging them. She uses “female genital cutting” because it doesn’t offend the people she wants to persuade.
The Subtle Art of Change
Tostan’s approach is not to judge from the outside but to discuss from the inside. Trained facilitators fluent in the local language live in the village for three years and guide a community-wide conversation. They host sessions three times a week, several hours each, and the process begins by asking people to come up with their ideal village, their so-called Island of Tomorrow. Everything Tostan does is geared toward achieving the future the villagers say they want.
To help the villagers achieve that future, facilitators teach about health and hygiene. They teach reading and math and problem solving. And they teach that every person has fundamental rights—to learn and to work, to have their health, to voice their opinions, and to be free from discrimination and violence.
These rights were far from reality even where they were being taught—particularly in communities where a woman speaking in public was considered a “good reason” for her husband to hit her. The idea that men and women were equal seemed absurd. But over time the women could see how certain changes—men doing “women’s work,” women earning an income—were moves toward equality, and those changes were helping. People were healthier. More of them could read. Maybe there was something to this idea.
After lessons on fundamental rights and the equality of men and women, the class started talking about women’s health. It was taboo to even talk about female genital cutting—a practice they considered so old and sacred it was simply called “the tradition.” Even so, the facilitator laid out its health consequences, including the risk of infection and hemorrhaging. She was met with stony silence.
At the next class, however, the village midwife raised her hand and stood up. Her heart racing, she said she’d seen firsthand how women who were cut had more difficult births. Then other women started sharing their stories, too. They recalled the pain it caused them when they were cut, the way their daughters lost so much blood, the deaths of some girls from hemorrhaging. If all girls had a right to their health, wouldn’t cutting violate that right? Was it something they had to do? They debated intensely for months. Finally, they decided that when the time came to cut their daughters that year, they wouldn’t do it.
Molly had moments like that in mind when she named the organization Tostan, a Wolof word that refers to the instant a baby chick pierces through its shell for the first time. The English translation is “breakthrough.”
As Molly recalls, “We were witnessing something so significant—the act of people coming together to collectively reflect on their deepest values, to question if current attitudes and behaviors were, in fact, violating those values.”
To me, that is a sacred act.
But Molly faced a challenge. She was seeing the culture of the village change, but she was worried the change wasn’t going to hold. The people from this village married other people from many surrounding villages. Marrying outside their villages was a source of strength for all of them, a chance to build ties and form a larger community. But if the other villages kept the practice of female genital cutting and insisted on it for marriage, then the village Molly was working with would be isolated; its young people might find no marriage partners, and they’d probably return to the practice. Somehow, all the villages had to agree—none could change all alone.
The imam in the village and Molly discussed this worry, and he said that change needed to happen. “I will get this done,” he said.
He went out for many, many days on a walking tour, visited all the villages, and spent time sitting, listening, and talking to people about girls and marriage and tradition and change. Molly didn’t hear from him for a long time. Then he returned and said, “It is done.” He had convinced all the villages to abandon female genital cutting—all together and all at once. In that region of Senegal, parents no longer faced a choice between cutting their daughters or forcing them to live as outcasts.
The movement quickly spread to other villages, and even other nations—led in large part by villagers whose lives the program had touched. Before long, people were questioning other harmful practices, too.
In one Senegalese village where Tostan had created a program, parents had forced their daughters to marry when they were as young as 10. People there began talking in their Tostan class about how early marriages were affecting girls. Soon after these talks began, one woman who was separated from her husband learned that he had arranged for their daughter to be married. The daughter’s name was Khady, and she was 13 years old. The husband sent a representative to Khady’s seventh-grade class to pull her out of school and explain that she was going to be married the next day and wouldn’t be returning.
That night, her mother struck back, organizing a special meeting with the leaders of her Tostan program and the head of the elementary school. They talked long into the night. The next morning, dozens of community members and students from the school launched a march, carrying handmade signs: KEEP GIRLS IN SCHOOL and WE DON’T ACCEPT CHILD MARRIAGE.
It worked. Khady stayed in school. And the mother sent a message to Khady’s father telling him that in their village, child marriage was not allowed. Khady’s rescue was more powerful than the police rescue I described earlier. The police rescue was a matter of law. This rescue was a change of culture.
Today, 8,500 communities where Tostan works have promised that girls will not become child brides. According to Tostan, more than 3 million people in eight nations have said that they will no longer practice female genital cutting.
* * *
These were some of the stories Molly told me as she and I rode together to the village to talk to the people who’d brought about these changes. When we arrived, Molly and I got a raucous welcome and were invited to join a Senegalese dance. Then the imam offered a prayer, and the group held a village meeting to explain the approach of Tostan: The people in the group make all their decisions together based on their vision for the future and the rights of everyone.
After the meeting I got a chance to meet with people one-on-one. They couldn’t wait to talk about how their lives had changed. The women stressed how the men had started to do chores that used to be considere
d women’s work, like getting wood, taking care of the children, and fetching water. So I wanted to talk to the men about why they were willing to change, since the old ways seemed to serve them. “Why are you pulling water up from the well?” I asked a man after he and I had been talking for a while. He said, “It’s backbreaking work. Men are stronger; men should do it. But also, I don’t want my wife to be so tired. Our women were tired all the time, and when my wife isn’t so tired, she’s happier and our marital bed is happier.”
I’ve told that story around the world, and it always gets a laugh.
When I talked to the women, I asked them how they got along with their husbands. One woman said, “Before, we didn’t speak to our husbands, and now we are friends. Before, they beat us, and now they don’t.” Most of the women said that they were using contraceptives and their husbands were supportive. And the imam said, “When you have children one after the other, it’s not good for your health. God would be happier if the children were healthier.”
The men and women both explained how they used to marry off their daughters around age 10, but now they wouldn’t do it until their daughters turned 18, even if they were offered money. I asked one of the young unmarried men if he would marry a girl under 18 from another village, and he told me he had already refused an offer to marry a girl under 18, even though he didn’t know if she would still want him when she grows up.
After meeting with several larger groups, I was invited into a home with a small number of women. They talked to me about cutting; the room was dark, and the air was heavy with grief and regret. One of the women explained, “Our ancestors did it to us, so we did it to our girls. That was what we were supposed to do, and we never thought about it. We never learned about it. We thought it was an honor.”
Another woman cried the entire time she described her role in the tradition. She took a piece of cloth that she was wearing on her head and used it to wipe the tears from her face, and she just kept wiping the tears away the whole time she spoke.
“I was not the cutter,” she said. “I was more involved than the cutter. The cutter could not see the girl’s face. I would hold the children down while they were cut. I needed to be strong to hold them down because it was horrible. The girls would scream and shout. I’ve held down girls even after they had run away. I’ve seen horrible things. Now we have stopped. I was highly criticized by my family when I stopped. But I told them it was God’s will to stop because girls were dying and hemorrhaging. We will never do it again. I talk about stopping it now, and I talk to everyone.”
When I returned to my hotel room that evening after hearing these stories, I couldn’t stop crying.
What Gives Me the Right?
I came away from Senegal with two questions: What makes Tostan work? And what gives me the right to get involved?
These questions—which I’ll take up in a moment—relate to Hans Rosling’s thought from chapter 1: American billionaires giving away money will mess everything up!
Hans had a point. I can see at least three ways a rich, inexperienced donor can mess things up. First, if a major funder enters an area and picks one approach over others, people working in the area might abandon their own ideas to pursue the funder’s because that’s where the money is. If this happens, instead of finding good ideas, the funder can inadvertently kill them off. Second, in philanthropy—in contrast to business—it can be hard to know what’s working. The grantees and beneficiaries may, for many reasons, tell you things are going well when they’re not. Unless you work objectively to measure results, it’s easy to keep funding ideas that don’t work. The third danger is that wealthy people can think that their success in one thing makes them an expert in everything. So they just act on instinct instead of talking to people who’ve spent their lives doing the work. If you think you’re super smart and you don’t listen to people, you can reach into areas outside your expertise and make bad decisions with big impact.
Those are some of the ways that Hans was right to be concerned about billionaires giving away money. I try to take these ideas into account in the way I work and in the questions I ask myself, especially this question:
What gives me the right, as an outsider, to support efforts to change the culture of communities I’m not part of?
Sure, I can say that I’m funding the work of local people and the insiders are taking the initiative. But the work of insiders can be opposed by other insiders, and I choose to back one group over another. How is this not the “I know best” arrogance of a wealthy, Western-educated outsider? How am I not using my power to impose my values on a community I know almost nothing about?
There’s no denying that I hope to advance my beliefs. I believe that all lives have equal value. That all men and women are created equal. That everyone belongs. That everyone has rights, and everyone has the right to flourish. I believe that when people who are bound by the rules have no role in shaping the rules, moral blind spots become law, and the powerless bear the burden.
Those are my beliefs and my values. I believe they are not personal values but universal values, and I join battles for changing social norms when I can support a move away from a culture that makes one group dominant over others. I believe that entrenched social norms that shift society’s benefits to the powerful and its burdens to the powerless not only hurt the people pushed out but also always hurt the whole.
So when a community denies its women the right to decide whether and when and whom to marry, but instead assigns a girl to a man as part of a financial transaction, taking from her the right to develop her talents and forcing her to spend her life as an unpaid domestic servant of others, then the universal values of human rights are not honored—and whenever there is a desire on the part of members of that community to stand up for girls who cannot speak for themselves, I believe it is a fair place to join the fight for women. That is how I explain my support for culture change in communities far from my own.
But how does Tostan’s approach help me justify my involvement? Luckily—to protect others from my own blind spots and biases—the ideas I support need a lot more than my support to come into force. The process of changing from a male-dominated culture to a culture of gender equality must be supported by a majority of community members, including powerful men who come to understand that sharing power with women allows them to achieve goals they couldn’t achieve if they relied on their power alone. That itself serves as the greatest safeguard against any overbearing bossiness from outsiders.
The change comes not from outside but from inside—and through the most subversive action possible: community members talking about actions that are commonly accepted, rarely discussed, and often considered taboo.
Why does it work? Conversation accelerates change when the people who are talking to each other are getting better—and I don’t mean human beings getting better at science and technology; I mean human beings getting better at being human. The gains in rights for women, for people of color, for the LGBTQ community, and for other groups that have historically faced discrimination are signs of human progress. And the starting point for human improvement is empathy. Everything flows from that. Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That’s how we gain a common base of knowledge. When people can’t agree, it’s often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared experience. If you feel what others feel, you’re more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand one another. Then you can move to the honest and respectful exchange of ideas that is the mark of a successful partnership. That’s the source of progress.
When people become better at seeing themselves in the lives of others, feeling others’ suffering and easing their pain, then life in that community gets better. In many cases, we have more empathy for each other today than the people did who set the practices and traditions we now live with. So the purpose of conversations about accepted practices is to take out the old bias and add in empathy. Empathy is not the only force need
ed to ease suffering; we need science as well. But empathy helps end our bias about who deserves the benefits of science.
It’s often surprisingly easy to find bias, if you look. Who was omitted or disempowered or disadvantaged when the cultural practice was formed? Who didn’t have a voice? Who wasn’t asked their view? Who got the least share of power and the largest share of pain? How can we fill in the blind spots and reverse the bias?
Tradition without discussion kills moral progress. If you’re handed a tradition and decide not to talk about it—just do it—then you’re letting people from the past tell you what to do. It kills the chance to see the blind spots in the tradition—and moral blind spots always take the form of excluding others and ignoring their pain.
Identifying and removing moral blind spots is a conversation that can be facilitated by outsiders, but it cannot be manipulated by them, because the people themselves are discussing their own practices and whether they serve their goals according to their values.
When communities challenge their own social norms in this way, people who were forced to bear the pain of a practice that benefited others now have their needs recognized and their burdens eased. In the case of child marriage, a community-wide discussion based on empathy and guided by equality leads to a world where a woman’s marriage is no longer forced, her wedding day is no longer tragic, and her schooling doesn’t end when she’s 10. When you examine old practices to take out bias and add in empathy, everything changes.
As Molly and I were leaving the village that day, I had one last conversation, this one with the village chief. He told me, “We used to take money for our girls—it was like buying and selling. It was the men who said that this is the way it is, but we did not understand what marriage is about. It should be where a woman is happy. If she doesn’t want it, it won’t be successful. There is no more forcing with us, no more child marriage. These things don’t go with our true beliefs. We now have clear vision, whereas before we were nearsighted. Nearsightedness of the eyes is bad, but not nearly as bad as nearsightedness of the heart.”
The Moment of Lift Page 15
