The secret is out

Her name is Doris. She has a story she wants to tell me.

I’m sitting on the steps of the Catholic Mission, my home for the last week. Her twin toddlers are sitting in the backseat of a beat up SUV, her husband cradles their newborn up front. Doris shifts her fitted bright skirt until she’s more comfortable and sits down beside me. She’s here to talk about FGM – a topic I’ve been urged to avoid.

When she was 17, Doris was brought from Freetown to her mother’s rural village. She was greeted by a group of women banging pots, singing and dancing. The mood was celebratory, like a surprise party. She was showered with attention and love, given generous portions of food including expensive dishes of meat.

But when darkness fell so did her spirits. The women including her mother stripped her down and tied a white sheet around her body. Doris says she started to scream and kick but they dragged her into the dark bush.

She says they pinned her to the ground, one woman sat on her chest two others sat on each of her arms that had been stretched out like a cross, and another woman straddled her waist. Her clitoris was then removed with a knife. She says ash and the dust from a ground up bottle were patted into her wounds.

She was taken into a hut where she stayed for seven days to heal. The teenager was then led to the river to bathe, white clay smeared on her body to make her skin soft. The initiation was complete. She was now part of a sacred society: the Bondo society. A society she says she never wanted to be part of.

Doris describes every little detail. I wince at every turn of her personal narrative, squeezing my legs closer together as she describes the burning pain. She waves her arms around when she talks and takes long pauses. I listen. I just sit and listen.

I’ve been warned by some aid workers and locals it’s too dicey a topic to touch. It’s too polarizing. I would never be able to begin to understand this rite of passage performed for centuries.
For Doris it was a nightmare, an absolute violation- she says it was torture and has forever scarred not only her body, but her self-image.

A few weeks later I run into a different woman. She is successful, bright and well-dressed, sitting behind a large desk. I ask her question about the “forbidden” topic. She doesn’t hesitate and dives right into it. Proudly pronouncing she is a member of the Bondo Society. I am intrigued. What and how? She doesn’t hold back.

The details of her experience are very similar to what Doris went through only without the terror and fear. This woman requested it be done and says it’s a sisterhood she couldn’t wait to join. But didn’t it hurt? Wasn’t there pain? “Oh it was painful,” she assures me.

She says they gave her a shot to numb the area and used ash and herbs to disinfect the wound. She says she was surrounded by women that loved her and supported her all the way through. She too was led to the river to bathe and be rubbed down with soft white clay-an initiation she’s never regretted.

A wide variety of health problems has been blamed on female circumcision or Female Genital Mutilation. Other areas of a girl’s genitals can also be cut. Sometimes scar tissue can form and women are unable to give birth naturally, sometimes their vaginas are sewn shut. There have reportedly been cases where girls as young as five have died during the operation.

Doris, who now advocates against FGM, says when girls die, their mothers are told they were witches.