by Aimee Molloy
They climbed from the small plane into the hot, dusty air. A few minutes later, the pilot came over to the UNICEF representative. “Looks like we won’t be leaving anytime soon,” he said.
“What? Why not?” the UNICEF representative asked. “We have important meetings in Bossaso and can’t afford to be delayed.”
“There’s no fuel here.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’d been told they’d have fuel waiting for us, but there isn’t any. I’m sorry, sir.”
Noticing the look of concern on Molly’s face, the pilot turned to her and pointed at the nearby shed. “Why don’t you wait inside the terminal in the executive lounge,” he joked. “Maybe get a cappuccino.”
Molly managed a shallow laugh as she looked around the airfield where civilian men loitered about, machine guns strapped to their thin bodies. Walking to the shack, she took the wide piece of cloth she was using as a head cover and laid it on the sandy ground. As she sat in the dry African air, fighting her fear and panic, a memory came to mind. As a young girl, she had often found solace during afternoons spent at the Spring Hill Cemetery a few blocks from her house in Danville. The cemetery was a large and bucolic setting, and she sometimes spent time sitting at what she found to be the most unusual grave, that of a woman named Minnehaha, who Molly guessed was Native American and had died in 1913. Minnehaha had been buried next to her husband, a man named Vernan H. Stark, and as a ten-year-old girl, Molly loved envisioning how this woman might have spent her days in the then-sleepy village of Danville, illinois. Sitting on the soft earth near Minnehaha’s grave, she would try to picture what her own life would be as an adult, wondering if she’d get the chance to find the adventure she craved even at such a young age.
Looking around her, she never could have imagined this. Remembering the serenity she’d felt as a child, she tried to manage the fear that threatened to seize her. She was not accustomed to feeling this way. “Not once in all of my years in Africa had I ever felt unsafe,” she says. “But that afternoon, sitting on the hot packed earth at that desolate airstrip, so far away from anything I had experienced in Senegal or any other African country I had visited, knowing that I was going to a place considered very dangerous—I understood that this was an important and decisive moment for me. Would I give in to this fear and beg to go home, or could I just accept the idea that whatever was going to happen would happen?” The voice of her father, Al, came back to her, offering a bit of advice he liked to share: “Don’t build dams in your river, Molly. Allow the water to flow and go where it takes you. If you do, you will be okay.”
“I decided to take my father’s advice,” she says. “If I was going to face new challenges on this trip—even if I was going to die here—so be it.”
Another plane arrived a few hours later, and they eventually made it to Bossaso by evening. The descent into Bossaso was stunning. The fading sun bathed the rugged mountains and turquoise sea in golden light. The landing strip itself stopped just short of a small beach, and the airport building was a refreshingly solid structure after the wooden shack at K50.
Molly and the others were met by a few drivers. As soon as they disembarked from the plane and had their passports stamped at a small shed near the airstrip, they were told to hurry to the waiting cars.
“Why the rush?” Molly asked Jeremy as she ran behind the others.
“We’re staying at the UNICEF compound, and there’s a strict 6:00 P.M. curfew,” he said. “For safety reasons, we aren’t allowed on the streets after 6:00, and the doors to the compound are locked then. If we don’t make it there in time, we won’t get in.”
A nondescript rental car waited for them. Climbing inside, Molly noticed a piece of thick fur lining the dashboard and plastic flowers hung throughout. It was quite a contrast from the shiny white UNICEF Land Cruisers she’d grown accustomed to during trips to other African countries. Jeremy explained that UNICEF staff in Somalia never use official UNICEF vehicles, because the chance was too great they’d be hijacked. “It’s best to stay under the radar,” he said.
Molly took a deep breath and concentrated on the view from her window. Women covered from head to toe walked along the dusty street, with only their eyes peeking out from behind their dark coverings. They drove down the dusty streets of Bossaso, lined with colorful shops selling all manner of goods, from tinned tuna to a dazzling array of mobile phones. On street corners, money changers sat beside makeshift tables piled high with bundles of Somali currency. Traffic was light, and donkeys loitered at the side of the road waiting to take their next load to another dusty destination.
The UNICEF compound was simple but comfortable, with rooms where personnel slept and a dining room where they took their meals. Molly had grown to greatly admire the UNICEF staff working under such conditions, knowing the monotony they endured having to remain in the compound each evening, unable to enjoy evening strolls through the city and living with constant concerns about security. On her third night in Bossaso, over a dinner of spaghetti, she watched CNN, where it was reported that earlier that day a thirty-nine-year-old senior producer for the BBC named Kate Peyton had been shot and killed by members of an extremist group outside her hotel in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
The news of Kate Peyton’s death shook Molly deeply. Over the next two weeks, during her travels to the cities of Hargeisa in Somaliland and then to Jowhar in South Central Zone, just fifty-five miles from Mogadishu, she had to remember her decision to remain unafraid. It wasn’t always easy.
While in Bossaso, Molly came down with a cold and needed to go to a local pharmacy for medicine. She was brought to a large market with an array of stalls filling a dusty square, each with a ramshackle shade structure providing some respite from the harsh sun. Crowds of people in search of a bargain picked through the piles of new and secondhand clothes next to vendors selling luggage, cooking pots, and sneakers. Inside the pharmacy, Molly noticed everyone looked at her. Children stopped and pointed, and as she walked back toward the car after making her purchase, stopping to admire a table covered with the beautiful, bright cloth worn by Somali women, she was followed by a woman who started yelling a word Molly didn’t understand: “Gaal! Gaal!”
“Oh, hello!” Molly said, wanting to be polite.
Jeremy came and took Molly’s elbow. “Time to go,” he said.
“What’s going on?”
“Just get in the car,” he said. “Hurry.”
“I thought perhaps they hadn’t seen an American for some time,” Molly recalls, “and I think I also must have looked quite strange to them in my Senegalese boubou. It was only once we were back in the safety of the UNICEF compound that Jeremy admitted that gaal is the word for infidel. Though it’s used frequently for tourists, Jeremy hadn’t felt comfortable. It’s probably better he hadn’t told me that on the spot.”
Each evening everyone made certain that Molly was back at the UNICEF offices where she was staying. At the UNICEF compound in Jowhar, Jeremy announced that a well-known warlord would be coming to the city the next day and stopping at the compound next door. Molly couldn’t resist. The next morning, she stood at the gate, hoping to catch a glimpse. She finally spotted the long procession of trucks arriving. On the back of each pickup truck was a man holding a machine gun. (Some months later, the warlord would return to occupy the UNICEF compound and force the staff to leave at gunpoint.)
But all the danger and fear was forgotten when it came to the people Molly met in the three seminars and the villages she visited. During the seminars, representatives from local NGOs expressed their interest in the Tostan model and their eagerness for it to come to Somalia. After speaking about the number of villages in Senegal that had declared an end to FGC, she was often pulled aside by women. They wanted her to understand what, exactly, it meant to be a woman here. They spoke specifically about their experience with FGC.
“We understand that the way it is done here is far more dangerous and has many worse con
sequences than how they do it in Senegal,” one woman said. “After they cut us, the wound is sometimes sewn shut with thorns pulled from the acacia bush. It is so painful. I suffered so much and then had to watch my daughters go through this same procedure.”
Another woman shyly told Molly that her daughter had been living in great pain since her procedure; it had gotten so bad, a doctor had recommended she be defibulated—cut open and cleaned out. Afraid she would be rejected by the community and not be considered for marriage, the girl had refused the procedure and continued to suffer. “You cannot imagine how desperate I feel, knowing that my daughter is always in pain,” her mother said.
Molly hoped to hear more from the women, but she knew better than to bring up the subject during her visits to villages. Instead, she remained focused on assessing the interest in education and how the Tostan model might be applied. In every village, she was met with great enthusiasm. In one, Molly sat in a shaded circle near the banks of a river. UNICEF had been implementing a health and nutrition program here. As she listened to the villagers talk of their experiences, she asked, “How many villages are in this area?”
“About forty.”
“And with how many would you consult if you were going to make a decision about an important family issue?” Molly asked. Everyone started talking at once, naming several villages where their relatives lived.
“We would never think of doing anything of consequence without including our families in our discussions. Any decisions we made without them would not be followed.”
Molly felt Demba Diawara’s presence as she connected the threads of the pattern; identifying the extended social network and including its members in discussions was just as important here as it was in Senegal.
After two weeks in Somalia, Molly prepared to return home to Dakar. On the plane ride back, she replayed the women’s stories in her head. Her hesitation about working in Somalia remained, but then she would think about one experience in particular that had left her deeply touched. At the end of one of the seminars, a woman from a local NGO had approached her.
“We really need Tostan here,” she said.
“To be honest, I’m not sure,” Molly admitted. “It will be very difficult for us to come here.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s so far. It will come with logistical challenges we’ve never faced before.”
The woman looked at Molly with a stern expression. “Sorry, did I hear you right? We get our genitals chopped off and have spent a life of suffering. The same thing is happening to thousands of girls here each year. And you’re telling me you are not going to come to Somalia and help us because it’s too far away from you? Because it’s inconvenient?”
25
Pas-pas (Perseverance)
In 2007, Tostan was awarded the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. With a cash award of $1.5 million, it is the largest humanitarian prize in the world. By this time, 2,643 villages, affecting approximately 2.1 million people, had publicly declared an end to FGC, and the Tostan staff had grown to 108 full-time employees.
Judy Miller, the director of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, which bestows the prize, came to Senegal to observe the Tostan program. “I was blown away,” she says of her time spent in the villages, where she spoke with residents and observed crowds of girls holding pictures depicting the numerous human rights they now knew they had. “I didn’t believe you could teach someone in a remote village who had never gone to school that just because their country had signed a paper, it could change their lives. But I kept seeing it. It was real.”
In one village, a young woman explained her new understanding of her right to be free from violence. “I shared this with my husband, and he no longer beats me,” she said. Judy was skeptical, and she asked to speak to the woman’s husband.
“What she tells you is true,” he said. “My father beat my mother, and I thought that was what I was supposed to do. But now that my wife has learned about her rights, I don’t do that anymore.”
“But what made you change your mind? How did you come to accept the idea that you needed to change?”
The man thought awhile before responding. “Well, along with her rights, she also learned about her responsibilities. She now also works to keep the peace. Together, we have made a happy life for ourselves at home.”
It was perhaps Judy’s visits to villages where Tostan classes had not been established that helped her truly understand Tostan’s impact. Here, the women remained in the background. When Judy tried to speak to them, most were silent, far too uncomfortable to look her in the eye or answer her questions. The opposite was true in the Tostan villages. She met dynamic women willing to share details of their lives, to speak their minds. In many, a large chalkboard had been erected, outlining the projects currently under way: establishing a health clinic, village cleanup days, creating income-generating projects to support the local women. “I’ve traveled all over Africa,” Judy says. “What I observed in Senegal, in the Tostan villages, it was extraordinary.”
The humanitarian award was bestowed at a private dinner ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, and Molly had invited Ourèye Sall to accompany her. Before accepting the award from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Molly invited Ourèye to speak. “I am sixty years old now and had my first child at fifteen,” Ourèye told the crowd, pulling her scarf more securely over her head. “I have cut many more girls than I can count. It is only when I got into the Tostan classes and started studying the women’s health module that I began to question this tradition. … I was insulted and ridiculed in the beginning, but things have become easier.” She went on to speak about the number of years she had been working, of her continued efforts, to that day, to travel throughout Senegal to convince more villages to join the movement.
After she had finished, Molly spoke. “People often ask me, ‘How is it possible that such ancient traditional practices are ended in such a relatively short amount of time? What is the secret?’ The secret is that in our extended family we are united not by what makes us all obviously different—black, white, American, European—but by the essence of what we all have in common: members of the same human family with a deep awareness of our common responsibility for our fellow human beings. … Together we dare to hope, to love, and to care. And together we are all, along with you, creating a better world for tomorrow.”
When Molly finished speaking, she and Ourèye did not walk off the stage. They danced.
“It was unforgettable,” Judy Miller says. “Listening to this, I kept thinking about a comment made by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who had served on the jury that chose Tostan. ‘If this work is as it seems and can spread beyond Senegal to countries that are more difficult to work in, this could change Africa.’”
MOLLY HAS REMAINED DETERMINED to make this true.
In 2005, a few months after her first trip to Somalia, she returned to Nairobi to create, in partnership with UNICEF, a pilot project entitled Ending FGC in Somalia, through which Tostan classes were established in forty-two communities in the three zones of Somalia over a three-year period. Over two thousand villagers eventually enrolled in the program, and more than thirty thousand people were reached through the process of organized diffusion.
In October 2008, Molly returned to Hargeisa, her fifth trip to Somalia in two years. She was eager to see for herself the transformations that had taken place, and as she’d hoped, she heard stories of remarkable change already taking place in many of the communities where Tostan classes had been established. The facilitators reported new dialogue occurring between men and women around issues never before discussed, and women were now actively participating in, and even organizing, community discussions. In a village called Araf, the Tostan Community Management Committee helped facilitate a series of intergenerational discussions between teenagers and the adults of the community to promote ending child marriage. “We knew that being promised i
n marriage so young was not good for young women,” a teen boy named Moustapha told Molly during a visit to his village, “but we were lacking the courage and the occasion to discuss the subject. Now we are able to talk about it without risk.” In Ayah, a neighborhood in the city of Hargeisa, the women of the Tostan class organized a movement to encourage systematic child vaccination. In Dongoroyo in Puntland, the entire village, wearing Tostan T-shirts, organized a massive cleanup of the town square and surrounding streets.
Molly was most heartened to hear that women in the Tostan communities were coming to a greater understanding of their human rights. One facilitator from the South Central Zone reported an unbelievable occurrence: A man in his small town had previously imposed himself as the mayor in the community. But after participating in the class, the mayor himself called for new elections and a woman had been elected, marking the first time that a woman had held any position of responsibility in the community.
“Is she doing a good job as mayor?” Molly asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “Everyone has always known that she was the most competent person for this role in the community, but it took participation in the Tostan class to allow them to be able to understand that it was now acceptable to elect her.”
On her third day back in Somalia, Molly went to visit a small village called Arabsiyo, located about an hour from the Tostan office in Hargeisa. She was accompanied by supervisors and the ever-present armed guard. Along the way, one of the supervisors looked out the window and pointed.
“See those hills? We think that’s where members of al Qaeda live.”
