by Aimee Molloy
Thierno Bah smiled at her.
“And I want you to know that there is a very important purpose to my visit.” As she spoke, she sensed the budding tension in the room and the surprised, cautionary posture of the Tostan staff members. “I would like to know if I can ask you something,” she said.
“Yes, of course.”
“As you may know, in other parts of Senegal, the women and men have started to learn about problems related to health because of the women’s tradition. So far, forty-four villages have decided together, with the support of their religious leaders, to abandon the practice. I’ve spent some time this week speaking to women here in the Fouta. They are telling me that they, too, have experienced terrible problems related to this. They are afraid to talk about it with others, but the health consequences can be dire. I thought it was serious enough to bring this matter to you.” She paused again and waited to allow Gellel to translate. “The women have complained of many things. Severe pain at the time of the cutting. Hemorrhaging. Problems during childbirth. A health agent in one village near here showed me official records indicating three young girls died this year following the procedure. I know that Islam seeks the health and well-being of everyone, and Tostan would like to implement a module on women’s health, which would include information on the tradition. We have been doing this in other parts of Senegal, providing information about the health consequences, all of which are based in science. But before we do anything here in the Fouta, I came here to speak to you. If you tell me that no, this is not the thing to do right now, because I trust you … I will follow what you say.”
Some of the Tostan staff members audibly gasped as Molly’s words were translated. For several minutes, as Molly grew more nervous and uncomfortable, the marabout sat very still and said nothing. Finally Cherif, the son of Thierno Bah, broke the tense silence.
“My father cannot answer this now,” he said, the aggravation evident in his voice. “No one has ever asked him this question before. This is a very complicated issue. He will need time to think about it.”
Thierno Bah lifted his hand, silencing his son. “No. Stop, son. I will answer.” He looked at Molly. “I know you, and I have known and observed Tostan since 1992. You have always held respect for our culture and our religion, in this and nearby communities. You tell me that the women have told you that there are health problems, and if you tell me this, I believe you. And if this is true, if there are indeed health problems, this needs to be addressed. Do you want my decision?”
“Yes, I do,” Molly said.
“Here it is. Go forward with what you need to do. Work on this. If it is for the health of women, Islam is behind you and I will support you. It will not be easy for you, but if anyone asks you why you’re doing this in the Fouta, if anyone challenges you, you must tell them to come and see me.”
The words were such a surprise, so unexpected. Molly stared in disbelief, and then, unable to hold back her tears, she began to cry. They were tears of relief that he had not been furious with her as everyone had predicted. Tears of sadness for all that the women who had confided in her had to endure under such harsh conditions. Tears of joy in realizing that the support from this religious leader would make all the difference. Tears of hope for the future and what this might mean for thousands of women across the Fouta.
“Molly, don’t cry,” Gellel said, touching her shoulder.
“No, tell Molly it is all right to cry,” the marabout said. “But it is not necessary. She will be happy. This is a noble thing she is doing.” Molly lifted her head to look at him. “God is on your side, and you will be victorious.”
22
Njàmbaar (Courage)
Six months later, on January 13, 1999, the Senegalese government enacted a law making the practice of female genital cutting illegal. The law set a prison sentence of six months to five years for anyone who practices FGC and life imprisonment with forced labor in cases where a girl died. The day before the vote, a delegation of villagers, including Demba Diawara and Ourèye Sall, accompanied Molly to the parliament to try to convince legislators to reconsider the bill. While everyone should stop practicing FGC, they argued, passing a law at this time was not the means to end the practice. Rather, they believed they had found the way: human-rights-based education, outreach, and open dialogue about the potential health consequences, plus a collective decision by interconnected communities to end the practice.
“I can assure you that if I hadn’t gone through the Tostan program and you passed a law telling me to stop the practice or face imprisonment, I would have chosen jail,” Ourèye stated before the deputies. “Please understand. Your efforts could actually hurt the movement under way. Give us time to do the educational work that needs to be done. Trust that we have found the right path.”
Despite these efforts, the law passed. The next day, in the region of Kédougou, one hundred girls were cut in protest.
A few days later, Ourèye called Molly at the Tostan offices. She knew that after Molly’s meeting with Thierno Bah, Tostan had begun to implement the health and human rights modules in more than sixty villages across the Fouta. “If you are going to take the risk of speaking publicly about the tradition in the Fouta—in a place where, growing up, I wouldn’t have dreamed a woman could feel empowered enough to even mention it aloud—I’m going to be a part of it,” she declared. “It is not enough that the tradition has ended here in my village and others. We need to end this tradition for good, in Senegal and beyond.”
Knowing how deeply entrenched the practice was in the region, Ourèye expected the women of these villages would face deep resistance, as she did with her own mother and sisters, and she now wanted to embark on an effort to help raise awareness among her vast network of relatives in the Fouta about the health risks of the tradition and show them that an alternative was possible.
“We’ve all learned from Demba what is possible with effort,” she told Molly. “I am a traditional cutter. People will listen to me because I am the one who has seen the consequences of this practice. I will go for as long as it takes.”
Molly was overjoyed to hear of Ourèye’s interest. While she remained hopeful about the possibility of change in the Fouta, she also knew that it would likely not happen as readily as it had in the villages around Thiès. Patience and a longer process would be required, made possible, Molly hoped, by the momentum of change occurring in other regions of Senegal. With help from Tostan, to pay her transportation and food costs, Ourèye set out a few weeks later with a team of other concerned village participants from the Fouta. They traveled mostly by bush taxi, but frequently the villages they visited were so remote they could only be accessed by a horse-drawn cart. For weeks at a time, Ourèye endured several hours a day on the back of a cart, making its way slowly through the flat, treeless landscape.
She went first to the villages where Tostan classes were operating. Like Demba, Ourèye faced trouble and resistance. In one village, a woman spit on her. “We will stop this tradition over my dead body!” she yelled. “I will curse you.” But Ourèye remained steadfast. Her Tostan education had trained her how to approach people—always in a peaceful, nonaggressive way, determined to find solutions rather than focus on the problems. And her message was always the same: “I am the one who defended this tradition the most,” she said repeatedly. “I was even paid for it and have given up my only source of income. I am now here to speak to you not because I have chosen to turn my back on my traditions, but because I seek peace, well-being, and health for our granddaughters.”
At the end of her travels, she would return home for a short time to check on her family before setting out again. Her days were long and difficult, filled with fatigue, heat, hunger, and a deep loneliness she felt at missing her children, the youngest of whom was just seven. But Ourèye knew in her heart that change and peace were coming, and she chose to focus on this rather than on the hardships of the travel, knowing that time and patience were critical here i
n the Fouta.
Every time she left a village, she promised to return again to continue the discussion. “All of us, every woman of Senegal, should come together united to promote peace and health for our children,” she would say. “If we do this together, if we all come together to celebrate our best values, if we do this in the spirit of peace and health, all will be right.”
GIVEN THE DIFFICULTIES OF working in a region as conservative as the Fouta, many NGOs had long refused to invest their efforts there. But since 1998 Tostan had been receiving funding for its work in the Fouta from the German National Committee for UNICEF, one of the few funding organizations willing to take the risk of investing in the area. Christian Schneider, the director of the German National Committee, explains: “We were immediately impressed with Tostan because it never pointed a moralistic finger at anyone. With Molly, you have someone who really wants to change things but is always very respectful.”
In April 2002, Molly decided to invite two representatives of the German National Committee—Claudia Berger, the communications director at UNICEF, and Katja Riemann, a well-known German actress who served as the UNICEF ambassador for Tostan—to accompany her to the Fouta to witness for themselves the tremendous progress being made.
It took ten hours to travel the rough potholed road from the Tostan office in Thiès to the town of Ourossogui, and Ourèye was waiting for them when they arrived. Molly had organized a meeting with Tostan participants, spearheaded by Mère Habi, an energetic, dynamic woman who led the Community Management Committee in the Matam region.
The next morning, after an early breakfast of bean paste and omelet sandwiches at their hotel, Molly, Ourèye, Claudia, and Katja prepared to leave the hotel to meet Mère Habi and the other women of the Tostan class. Before they left, Molly noticed from her hotel window that a large crowd of two hundred or so men had gathered on the street below, chanting something she couldn’t decipher. Behind them was a mountain of fiery tires, sending black plumes and the rancid smell of burning rubber into the hazy morning air.
“Oh no,” Molly said. “There seems to be some trouble outside. I’ll go check and see what it is.” When she got to the hotel lobby, a few of the Tostan coordinators were there. They stopped her from going outside.
“Don’t go out there, Molly,” one said, gently taking her arm.
“Why not? There’s something happening outside. I want to see what’s going on.”
“They’re here because of you and your delegation.”
“What do you mean they’re here because of me?”
“They know about the meeting you arranged with the women.”
“And?”
“They think you are here to ask the women to make a public declaration to end FGC.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Molly said.
“I know that, but they’re convinced that is why you’ve come, and they’re very angry. Please, don’t go out there.”
From where she stood, Molly could see just how extensive the crowd outside was. “But they need to understand that they’re wrong,” she pleaded. “There’s been no talk of a public declaration of any kind. We’re just here to speak to the women about their experiences.”
Just then, one of the men from the crowd entered the hotel lobby and quickly approached Molly. “You and your friends should not leave this hotel,” he said. “If you come outside, you’ll be sorry.”
“Is this a threat?” she asked.
“Take it any way you want. But you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be talking to our women. We can assure you of one thing. There will be no declaration in Ourossogui.”
Despite the sinking disappointment she felt, Molly decided, for the safety of her guests, to abandon the meeting with Mère Habi and the other women, and they left Ourossogui right away.
Back in Thiès a few days later, she discussed with the Tostan staff and UNICEF officers whether they should remain or leave the region. Had the threat of violence and of being run out of town made the work there too dangerous? Were they bringing more harm than good to the women? Molly knew that the Tostan program in the Fouta had reached a critical point, and the organization now had a very important, and difficult, decision to make. They could either pull out, as many other NGOs had done, or they could continue to believe that change was possible.
“I was unwilling to give up on the area,” Molly remembers. “There was so much momentum in other areas of Senegal. By this time, 392 villages had publicly pledged to end FGC in their communities, and we chose to trust that despite the hardships, the same thing could happen here. This made the next decision a lot easier. We weren’t going away. We were going to create an even greater presence in the Fouta.”
MOLLY’S FIRST ORDER OF business was to find a skilled and experienced staff member to lead the efforts in the Fouta. She knew exactly the right person for the job. A tall, intelligent man with a serious composure, Khalidou Sy was born in the region of Kolda. When he was five years old, his grandfather requested he come live with him and his wives in the Fouta, where he could properly study the Koran. His parents agreed, but when Khalidou arrived at his grandfather’s home, he soon discovered that the story had been a ruse. He wasn’t going to Koranic school; he was being put to work. From the age of five, he worked every day as a shepherd, responsible for his grandfather’s large herd of cows. At home, he was treated differently than the other grandchildren—made to do the hard work, always feeling marginalized. Whenever his mother sent him clothes or shoes, his grandfather’s wives would confiscate them and give them to the other children of the house.
One day, not far from a field where he took the cows to pasture, Khalidou came across the public schoolhouse. He snuck over to the window of a schoolroom and peered in at the students. He was mesmerized by the sight—boys his own age, with open books on their laps, learning to read letters and numbers written on a large board in the front of the room. Desperate to join them, Khalidou began to spend his days standing at the window watching the students, often leaving the cows for so long he’d later have to chase after them. Before long, the director of the school took pity on Khalidou watching them from outside the window and invited him to join them inside the classroom. Sitting with his long, thin legs scrunched up against the small table, Khalidou was hooked. He arrived at the school early each morning, knowing it would take him hours to gather the herd afterward.
In time, his family heard news of his antics. They showed up at the schoolhouse and caught him in the act. That night he was whipped, as he often was, with knotted ropes or branches from a tree and forbidden from returning to the school. Frustrated and angry, he began to get into many fights with other children.
When Khalidou was about ten years old, an aunt from Kolda came to check on him and to see how he was faring at Koranic school. She was livid to find that for all these years he’d been kept from school and made to work, and to see how unhappy and unruly he’d become. She packed up his few belongings and immediately brought him back to his parents in Kolda. Khalidou was very happy to return home, hoping this was his opportunity to have a more stable life and, most of all, to enroll in school. But to his dismay, his father was impressed with the idea that Khalidou had been trained as a shepherd, and he was immediately put back to work, taking care of his family’s cows.
Khalidou refused to abandon his hopes of being educated. Not long after returning to Kolda, he discovered that the director of the local school lived near his parents’ house. Taking a chance, he walked to the director’s house one evening, daring to explain why he had come.
“I want very badly to go to school like everyone else,” he said. “It saddens me to see other children my age walking back from school every day. Whenever I can, I ask them to tell me what they studied that day. I no longer want to hear about the lessons from them. I want to go to your school.”
A few days later, the director arrived at Khalidou’s house and asked to speak to his father. He explained his belief that his son might ha
ve a special gift for learning, and he convinced him to allow Khalidou to give up his work as a shepherd for a few years and enroll in school. At the age of ten, Khalidou entered his first official year of school, where he was placed in a classroom alongside six-year-olds. He proved to be very smart, and he advanced quickly through the grades, skipping several entirely. In the evenings, he cultivated his own field, selling the vegetables to earn money for school supplies. Eventually transferring to a private school, paying for the tuition himself with money he earned cultivating his field, he paid his way through the eighth grade. He passed his exams two years later, and in 1982, at the age of twenty, he received his diploma. Within three years he had earned his baccalaureate degree, much like a junior college degree, and soon after graduating he took a job as a village facilitator with Tostan. He quickly moved up in the organization, promoted from facilitator to supervisor to regional coordinator, and then to national program officer.
Molly had always respected Khalidou’s work ethic and attitude, and she knew that with his experience living in the Fouta as a child, and his quiet intelligence and confidence, he was the right person for the difficult work that lay ahead.
Within weeks, Khalidou moved the existing Tostan office to Ourossogui, to the heart of the opposition. He hired additional staff, brought in office equipment, and hung a large Tostan sign out front. In the weeks since the protest, Molly had come to believe that part of the resistance the organization faced might be due, in large part, to a misunderstanding about what Tostan did and what the classes were out to accomplish.
“It was clear that the religious leaders and others believed Tostan had come to impose their own ideas on the residents of the Fouta, the women in particular, forcing them into decisions they did not want to make, encouraging them to move away from their long-held traditions,” Molly says. To counter these stereotypes, Khalidou established a weekly radio program on local stations and began to issue open invitations to public meetings about the Tostan program and its mission. He was always sure to invite the local religious leaders. At these meetings, he or a facilitator would explain exactly what Tostan was: a development organization established to bring education to rural communities. They were not, he made plain, out to destroy any traditions against the will of the people. Khalidou also made it known that the content of the modules had been approved by religious leaders such as Thierno Amadou Bah.
