The silence in the air was deafening as pairs of eyes focused on me. The hall was filled with prominent people from the town. My mind wandered to five weeks ago when a woman had stumbled into my house in Owerri during my service year as a corps member, clutching her child, her hair dishevelled and her eyes wild. It was after I had delivered the first explosive lecture on female genital mutilation during a presentation at the hospital.
“They want to take my baby. They want to make her a complete woman’ she stuttered.
She made a swift cutting pattern in the air and I understood, staring at the young lady with intense pity.
“They say it is their tradition, she cannot be an heiress or next in line to the family fortune unless she is marked like others. This is 2030, who still gives up her daughter to be sawed with a blade and go on to live an unhappy life? ”
It was the reason I stood before the crowd trying to explain the harmful results of female genital mutilation. I spoke in English and had an interpreter for the indigenous Igbo language.
“This practice has no benefits. It can cause severe bleeding, urinary problems, infections that can kill, wound healing problems, problems during childbirth, menstrual problems, and sexual problems”
“This is something that has been handed over from our fathers to us. It makes the woman close her legs, to not be promiscuous” one person argued.
‘Look around you, be sincere to yourselves, tell your sister or wife to open up to you, a lot of women are living in silent pain, unable to speak up for fear of shame and embarrassment, there are thousands of recorded cases in the General hospital alone.”
After that meeting, I knew I had poked the beehive and I got lots of mail in my inbox. Lots of tears in the letters I got; there had to be an end to this. I started the movement with my pet project giving lectures printing fliers and making illustrations with women with varying degrees of pain. I left Ako village with a sigh of relief, I had touched lives there and curbed the menace that was turning innocent beautiful babies into sad, unhappy women. The gospel was planted on fertile soil and we saved the future. The future is female.
Very nice!