Then, my time came.

I was six years old when it happened to me. I knew what was going to happen, I knew they were going to cut me because a lot of my friends had had it done and I’d had a look – it was quite normal for girls to have a look at each other. My friends had told me that it was really painful, that it was horrible, so I was terrified. It happened when my mother was away and relatives were looking after me and my sister.

In the morning, when I was at school, they told me it was ‘my time’. My uncle and aunt came to take me from the school. It was my sister’s time too – she was eight years old. The woman who cut us was my grandmother’s sister – and she was going to cut us in a tent near a huge tree. They used ropes to tie our legs apart and there were lots and lots of girls there. I could hear screaming, lots of horrible screaming and there was so much blood. Girls were crying.
They tied me down, I was fighting as hard as I could, but they were stronger. I was screaming. The old woman, my great aunt, used a razor blade – it was clean and new, but there was no anaesthetic when she cut me. I have no memory at all of her cutting me – it’s blank. But then another woman came, she was from a different city, and she gave me an injection before they stitched me up. They tied my legs together the whole way down so I couldn’t open my legs, I was like that for three or four weeks.

I remember my grandmother taking me home and telling me I had to pee, I was terrified. Because my legs were tied I couldn’t sit to pee, so I leaned over on one side and the pain was unbearable. I jumped, and some of the stitches opened. My neighbour, she was in her 30s, said I would have to be sewn up again but my grandmother refused.

I had to go to the doctor and they opened me, so everything is much better, but there are still some problems. Lots of people from my community believe that if you are ‘open’ (haven’t undergone FGM), no man will want to marry you, and they keep telling me that.