by Aimee Molloy
Molly wasn’t sure if he was kidding.
“Don’t worry,” he said, noticing her look of concern. “They’re only looking for Americans.”
“But I’m an American.”
“Oh, of course. I keep forgetting you’re not Senegalese.”
Upon her arrival in the community, every member of the class was there to meet her, singing beautiful Somali songs they had written, and eager to talk about the changes in their village and their new participation in the activities of the community. Four women explained they were running for office in the national assembly in the upcoming elections.
“This is because of our Tostan classes,” one said. “Previously we didn’t even realize we had the right to vote. Now we are candidates. It was not so long ago that I wouldn’t have spoken in a group. Now I am campaigning, promising that I will work to promote health and education in our community.”
What surprised Molly the most was how many women were eager to speak about their work to bring an end to the practice of FGC. One woman named Shamis, a grandmother from the village of Arabsiyo, spoke with passion about the great suffering women undergo not only during the cutting, but also on their wedding night. As she explained, the traditional cutter must come and cut open the new bride, who is often so traumatized by what awaits her that she must be held down. Despite her pain afterward, she is expected to consummate the marriage that night.
Shamis was in tears while relaying the story. But she quickly wiped them away. “We have finally found a way to end this practice,” she said. “And it is because of Tostan. Many of us women are now spending our days traveling to the surrounding villages. With many of my friends, we are always talking, talking, talking!”
“What do you say?” Molly asked.
“We explain our human rights and the health consequences of the practice,” Shamis said.
“Are people responding well?”
“Not always,” Shamis said. “But we will not stop. We are determined to do what they have done in your country. We are determined to convince our people to end this practice in Somaliland.”
MOLLY’S WORK IN SOMALIA would continue to come with great risks. Two weeks into this trip, she was invited to the presidential palace in Hargeisa to meet with the wife of the president of Somaliland, who told Molly how much she supported the program and appreciated the Tostan approach, promising further involvement and a vow to visit classes in the communities.
The next day, Molly was meant to go into town for a meeting with the Ministry of the Family, but she received a call from an American reporter who was researching an article on FGC. While on the call, Molly heard a loud explosion from outside. The facilitators came running down the stairs from their training session, confused about what had happened. In the distance, they heard another explosion.
“Wait just a minute,” Molly said into the phone. “I think there might be bombs exploding outside.”
“Just one more quick thing—”
Molly hung up the phone just as a third explosion went off. From the window, she saw clouds of smoke billowing in the morning air.
Guillaume Debar, a young French volunteer who worked in the Dakar office and had come to assist with the training, appeared behind her.
“What is happening?” he asked.
“I have no idea. But move away from the window.”
A few minutes later, her cell phone rang. It was her contact at the Ministry of the Family telling her to stay put. The explosions she’d heard were a series of three suicide car bombs detonated at three different locations—the president’s palace, where Molly had been the day before; the Ethiopian Embassy; and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) office, in charge of all security for the United Nations.
“It’s very serious,” her contact said. “Many people have been killed or seriously injured. Remain inside.”
The Tostan team remained locked in the office for several hours, too afraid to venture outside for more news. Many of the staff from South Central Zone were particularly concerned they might be in danger, as it was being rumored that people from the south were responsible for the bombs. That evening, Molly received a call from a UNICEF security agent in Hargeisa.
“I don’t want to have to tell you this, but I think you and Guillaume Debar should leave the Tostan office immediately,” he said.
“How come?”
He hesitated. “As white people, we think you create a real risk for the Africans in the room. It’s best for everyone if you leave.” He suggested they somehow find their way to the nearby Mansour Hotel, where staff from the UN and other international NGOs had gathered.
Molly hung up the phone and quietly explained the situation to Guillaume. As evening fell over Hargeisa, she and Guillaume slipped as quietly as they could to the mostly deserted street below, flagging down the first taxi they saw. They climbed into the car and slid down to the floor of the backseat. Molly took her wide scarf and covered them both as much as she could.
“Keep it over your head,” she said to Guillaume.
Shaken, they arrived at the Mansour Hotel. Dozens of UN staff had gathered in a large conference room, where it was being announced that plans were in place to evacuate all UN personnel to Kenya the next day.
Molly approached the speaker. “We need to get out as well,” she said. “Can we be included on the plane?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We only have room for UN personnel.”
Molly felt desperate. “Can you please make an exception? Can you find room for one more?”
“One more?”
“Yes. I’m with a young man who is only twenty-one years old. Please. I want him to get home.”
“It’s doubtful, Molly.”
“Please,” she begged. “See what you can do.”
The next morning, after a sleepless night, Molly and Guillaume were taken with the UN staff to the Ambassador Hotel nearer the airport. The plane for Kenya was scheduled to leave that afternoon at four o’clock. A staff member arrived to read the names of the people allowed on the flight, and Molly’s heart sank when Guillaume’s was not on the list. She spoke to anyone who would listen to her pleas to find a spot for Guillaume. Eventually her persistence paid off. Guillaume was given passage out.
“What are you going to do?” he asked her before walking out to meet the UN bus to the airport.
“I’m not sure,” Molly said. “I’ll stay at the hotel until I find another way out.” Someone had brought her bags from the UNICEF compound where they’d been staying, and she took them inside the hotel. Unsure how she would eventually find her way back to Senegal, she booked a room, telling the clerk that it could be several days, maybe even weeks, that she’d need to stay. She then walked outside and took a seat on the hot steps in a garden overlooking the city of Hargeisa.
It’s okay, she thought. This is the work I chose to do, and I will find a way to cope. She thought about her meeting at the presidential palace the previous day, just twenty-four hours before the bomb had exploded there. Everyone who had been outside waiting to enter had been killed. She shook her head in sadness and wished she could call her daughter. Zoé, I do hope you will one day understand if anything happens to me, she thought. I’m so grateful to have had you and your love in my life.
She saw the bus preparing to leave and walked over to say her goodbyes. She was about to head back into the hotel when she heard a woman calling her name from the bus.
“Molly, Molly! You can come, Molly!” she yelled. “We found another seat on the plane. Hurry! Get your bags. We have to go.”
26
Jant bi Dina Fenk (The Sun Will Rise)
The sun rose over Dakar as Molly walked the path along the beach, taking in the vast views of the Atlantic. She and Zoé, who had returned to Senegal after graduating from Concordia College and now lived with Molly, typically walked this path together each morning, hoping for an hour or so of exercise. But today, Zoé had wanted to sleep in and Molly was alone.
Enjoying the calm of the morning and the salty air, she stopped to appreciate the view—the very same view she’d first encountered thirty-five years ago at the age of twenty-four—and tried to absorb the news she’d just received from a staff member in Hargeisa.
Two public declarations were going to take place in Somaliland and Puntland. The first was scheduled in a few weeks’ time, on October 6, 2009; the second, just a few weeks later.
Molly’s cell phone rang, startling her. It was her sister, Diane. She was preparing to come to Senegal and was calling to see what Molly wanted her to bring from the United States. Diane was working in the interdisciplinary arts and sciences program at the University of Washington Bothell, and she and her husband, Michael, came to Senegal every other year—not just to visit Molly and Zoé, but also to volunteer for Tostan. Two years earlier, Diane had spent her sabbatical in Dakar, writing about Tostan’s work on human rights education and had continued to publish articles on the topic.
Molly interrupted her sister. “Diane, it happened.”
“What are you talking about? What happened?”
“In Somaliland. They’re doing it. They’re having a public declaration. Thousands of people are ending the practice.”
“Molly. Are you kidding?”
“No, I just got the call.” Molly felt the breath catch in her throat. “They did it. The women there … they did it.”
“You had something to do with it too, of course,” Diane said. “How did it happen?”
How did it happen? Looking at the ocean, Molly thought back to the mornings, thirty-five years earlier, when she had stood at this same spot, wondering what to make of her six months in Africa. Since then, she had gone on to travel the world. She’d met presidents, first ladies, famous artists, and thinkers. She had won many awards and received great recognition. But most of all, she’d had the great opportunity of doing this work.
When she’d started, all she knew was that she desperately wanted to bring education to people from whom it had been kept, to hopefully change the lives of the 300 villagers of Saam Njaay. She never could have imagined it would become what it did. Nearly 3,500 villages in Senegal had declared an end to FGC. So had 58 villages in The Gambia, 43 in Guinea-Bissau, 332 in Guinea, 7 in Mali, and now 34 villages in Somalia.
She had made many mistakes. She had, at times, considered giving up. It was too difficult to be the female director of an NGO working in Africa. She had often doubted her abilities and felt deep frustration trying to balance her life as both the director of Tostan and a mother to Zoé. And yet she had persevered.
Why? It wasn’t only a belief in herself; it was a belief in education. During her last trip to Somaliland a facilitator named Abdi had asked Molly what it was that she wanted to be remembered for a hundred years from now. Molly thought hard about her answer.
“I want to be remembered most for having made empowering education—particularly knowledge of human rights and responsibilities—accessible to millions of people at the grassroots level, helping them achieve their full potential.”
“From where does your commitment to education come?” Abdi asked.
Molly didn’t hesitate. “My mother.”
Ann had died two years earlier, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. In the months leading up to her death, Molly frequently spoke with her on the phone, although Ann often hadn’t any idea who Molly was. Even so, Molly took the opportunity to thank Ann for all she’d done for her as a mother. As she told Abdi, she knew that she was led to this work because of what Ann had instilled in her—a deep belief in education, unwavering persistence, and an unceasing willingness to create something better for herself and others.
“I’m crying,” Diane said, when Molly shared this story with her.
“I know,” Molly replied. “So am I.”
“You know, but I’m having this thought right now …”
Molly knew what it was. She was thinking the same thing.
“Mom would be so proud.”
EPILOGUE
New York
January 2013
As of this writing, over five thousand Senegalese villages have declared an end to the practice of female genital cutting in their communities. Drawing on this momentum, in February 2010, the government of Senegal announced a national action plan to end FGC by 2015, adopting a strategy based on the community-led, human rights approach developed by Tostan. It’s fair to say that the end of FGC in Senegal is now in sight. Similar efforts are currently under way in the seven other countries where the Tostan program is in place. And on December 20, 2012, the same day that forty communities in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau publicly declared their commitment to respect all human rights, including an end to FGC, the UN General Assembly passed an international resolution that calls for intensified global efforts to end the practice worldwide.
But this historic grassroots movement to end FGC in Africa is not the end of the Tostan story. Rather, it may be just the beginning.
During my visits to Senegal while writing this book, I knew that I was witnessing an unfolding tale on the power of human rights education. As I traveled throughout the country, I spoke with villagers who are using what they have learned through the Tostan program to address many other issues critical to the well-being of their communities. I saw community facilitators using an innovative program developed through Tostan to teach literacy through SMS texting. I met African grandmothers who, with Tostan’s support, had left their villages for the first time to travel to the Barefoot College in India to learn to construct and install solar panels, bringing power and light to their remote communities. I met a Tostan team bringing together extended family networks across borders to work on promoting peace and security throughout West Africa. And I spoke with members of Community Management Committees who, after completing the Tostan program, officially registered as their own independent organizations and are now successfully running their own projects.
Molly’s current obsession is something new entirely, the results of which may bring about a change as extraordinary as the end of FGC.
In 2009, in eleven regions of Senegal, a study was conducted on the reading levels of children who had attended three years of formal school. The results were highly disheartening: only 7 percent of girls and 11 percent of boys evaluated were found capable of reading at a minimum level.
Many attempts have been made over the past decades to improve the Senegalese school system—including reforming the school curriculum, constructing new school buildings, and increasing teacher training. But as the study showed, these attempts have not been working, and Molly has set out to understand if something that is essential to helping children learn better is being overlooked.
Through her experience, she knew that children enter school at the age of six with many disadvantages. A majority of rural Senegalese children have never been exposed to written letters or words in their village environment. Few have ever seen or held a book, and fewer still speak a word of French, the language in which classes are taught. Furthermore, since most parents in Senegal have extremely limited education themselves, they often feel inadequate in helping their children with schoolwork.
In 2010, Molly enlisted the help of a creative emeritus professor from Tufts University, Dr. Marian Zeitlin, who had spent more than forty years researching best practices for supporting early childhood development in Africa. With Dr. Zeitlin’s help, Molly came to understand that another significant, though highly underreported, phenomenon is at play—a belief system prevalent in some parts of West Africa that discourages parents from actively engaging with their infants and young children through speech. Doing so, it is believed, can be dangerous to a child. Through interviews with parents and other caretakers, Molly, Dr. Zeitlin, and a team of Tostan staff found that mothers who talked frequently to their infants were often ridiculed for doing so. They were called crazy for speaking to “nobody,” and some expressed fears that speech could summon evil spirits wishing
to steal a baby or cause him or her harm. When mothers were encouraged to increase the amount they speak to their children, especially to children from birth to three years, when the brain develops most rapidly, some said they were afraid to do so, citing a belief that a child who talks before it walks will develop poorly. They also expressed concern that speaking freely or frequently to children under eight years of age may cause them to become “too intelligent,” cunning, or dishonest.
Armed with this new understanding, and knowing that change would not come about by simply telling parents to speak more frequently to their children, Molly became committed to finding a way to apply social norm theory to help parents more clearly understand the importance of cognitive stimulation for children, beginning at birth. For the majority of the past two years, she has spent time researching this issue and meeting with authorities on neuroscience and cognitive development to better understand—and be able to explain—how talking to children will help them become stronger learners.
The result is a new five-month module that Molly and her team have developed with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It is designed to help newly literate parents who have been through the Tostan program introduce their infants to learning with colorfully illustrated and engaging children’s books in national languages, much like those she had developed at the Démb ak Tey children’s center so many years earlier. The books will not only reinforce Tostan participants’ reading skills and help children understand what reading is and how enjoyable it can be, but will also serve as a tool to encourage adults’ interactions with young children. Included in the module is the latest information on brain development, allowing for in-depth dialogue on how to change the social norms that discourage speaking with children. The module will be implemented in 232 communities that have completed the three-year Tostan program, reaching 11,500 parents and adolescents and improving the learner outcomes of approximately 30,000 children. The program will reach thousands more through Tostan’s organized diffusion model.
