However Long the Night

by Aimee Molloy

Similar efforts were organized around domestic violence, also a common occurrence in many communities. In Dialakoto, a village in southeastern Senegal, class participants responded to a case of spouse abuse by organizing a peaceful march against violence. Dozens of women invited members of the local media to join them in their march through the village, during which they banged pots and pans and sang songs they had composed in their Tostan class, making it publicly known that domestic violence would no longer be accepted. Even rape and incest—issues that were previously never discussed publicly—were being addressed. In the past, women felt pressure to remain silent if a family member was known to have raped a girl; they were too afraid to risk trouble within the family. But throughout the villages of Senegal, Tostan participants declared that rape and incest were not only against the law, but that there would no longer be any “family arrangements” in order to keep the peace. The social norm of maintaining silence was over. Should any man be found engaging in these violent acts, the women vowed they would alert local authorities and take every measure to ensure punishment.

  “With every instance I heard of—and there were so many—I began to think differently about what was going on as a result of the human rights curriculum,” Molly says. “We were witnessing something so significant—the act of people coming together to collectively reflect on their deepest values, to question if current attitudes and behaviors were, in fact, violating those values. This, among all else, felt so powerful to me, because for the first time I began to understand the possibility that our approach to ending FGC might be applied far beyond this one practice.”

  TOSTAN FINALLY BEGAN TO receive the recognition it deserved. In 1999, Molly was awarded a University of Illinois Alumni Humanitarian Award, and three years later, the Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service, which honors a Peace Corps volunteer’s continued work on humanitarian causes. The following year, the World Health Organization chose the Tostan Community Empowerment Program as a model of best practice for ending FGC, calling for its extension into other African nations, and in 2005, Tostan was bestowed Sweden’s Anna Lindh Foundation Award for its work in human rights.

  The success pulled Molly further into her work, adding to the already seemingly endless hours she spent at the office. In fact, Molly now lived at work, literally. In 1999, she had moved to Dakar, where she’d established a regional Tostan office, and since 2003, Molly had been living in a small room on the upper floor of that office. It was sparsely furnished with a bed, a table, and a hot plate where she’d sometimes cook meals for herself. When Zoé came home to visit—she was attending Concordia College in Montréal by this time—she’d sleep in a small room in the Tostan building.

  “It didn’t seem that strange to me at the time,” says Zoé. “My mom would just say, what was the point of wasting money on renting a house when she was always at the office anyway.”

  While managing a staff of fifty-five full-time employees, nearly five hundred facilitators, and a budget of more than $2 million, Molly accepted as many invitations as she could manage in order to share the work of Tostan and what was happening across Senegal. The greater Tostan’s success, the more uncomfortable Molly became with taking the credit herself; she was adamant that the achievements were due only to the efforts of villagers. As her friend Carrie Dailey says, “She had built an empire though a series of selfless acts. She never takes the credit for what she does. She never brags.” Rather, she would insist on bringing along at least one Tostan village participant to international forums to speak of their experience, and she traveled frequently with both Demba and Ourèye. While they had once rarely traveled beyond their own villages, now they were accompanying Molly to places like Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Egypt, the United Nations, London, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. Christian Schneider, the director of the German National Committee for UNICEF, recalls one visit in particular. “Molly and Ourèye came to speak before the German Press Club. It was the first time any of their speakers stood before the room and danced at the end of their presentation. It was unforgettable.”

  It was also at about this time that Tostan began responding to requests to extend its program into what would come to include six other African nations. In 2002, Tostan began to prepare to implement classes in Guinea, a resource-rich but extremely impoverished nation to the south of Senegal that had been under a dictatorship for twenty years. With this expansion, Molly took the opportunity to re-evaluate the program, revising it to make democracy and human rights the foundation of the Community Empowerment Program. “Prior to this,” Molly says, “we had introduced human rights later in the curriculum, but we’d learned that in order for people to feel confident in their right to make changes, they had to first understand that they had a choice and a voice. Once that is established, there is potential to take up whatever problems they choose.”

  Perhaps the most significant breakthrough at this time was the support from the UNICEF international headquarters in New York, helping to bring Tostan’s work to the world stage. While Tostan had been collaborating with the UNICEF country office in Senegal since 1991, Molly had long tried to get the attention of senior staff in the New York headquarters of UNICEF. That attention finally came with the creation of the position in 2002 of Project Officer on Gender and Harmful Traditional Practices and the hiring of a brilliant and deeply committed woman named Maria Gabriella De Vita, who had previously held the position of country representative of the UNICEF office in Mongolia. By the time Gabriella, as she was known, discovered Tostan’s work in 2004, she had spent two years investigating strategies to end the practice of FGC in places around the world. “When Tostan’s accomplishments in this area were brought to my attention by a colleague in Kenya, I knew I had to go and see this for myself,” Gabriella says.

  She arrived in Senegal in May 2004 to join Molly at a public declaration—the fifteenth of its kind to date—organized by ninety-six communities and held in the village of Medina Samba Kande in Kolda, a conservative region of Senegal where FGC was practiced by 94 percent of the population. They were joined by three others: Neil Ford, the UNICEF regional director of communications in East Africa; Gerry Mackie, who was working at this time as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame; and Gannon Gillespie, Molly’s nephew, who had recently begun to volunteer with Tostan. The team spent three days in Kolda, joining thousands of villagers who arrived piled in the back of large trucks and packed in local transport vans. Many walked for miles to witness the historic celebration. Lively traditional musicians, singers, and dancers from the Pulaar ethnic group performed throughout the night as one by one women ran into the middle of an enormous circle pounding their feet, flinging their arms, and chanting to the rhythm of the drums. A mood of community and purpose permeated the air, and after speaking with many villagers and visitors who had come to witness the event, Molly and her colleagues left feeling electrified.

  “After taking part in the declaration, I understood that everything I had been reading about Tostan was real and important,” recalls Gabriella. “It was a novel model whose elements might be applied in other parts of the world where the practice was in place. And I wanted to understand more.” The team retreated to a small hotel in Kolda, and they talked continuously for three days. Gerry Mackie presented his theory on social norms. As Mackie explained, understanding why and how communities were abandoning the practice—and to get at the core of Tostan’s success—first required an understanding of the factors that perpetuated the custom and how those factors interacted with processes of social change. At the time, particularly when it came to efforts to improve the health of people in developing nations, the big thrust was so-called messaging campaigns—ads, posters, and social marketing efforts designed to tell people to stop what they were doing and do something else. However, the messaging strategy would certainly not work when attempting to change deeply entrenched social norms like FGC, held in place by the expectations of an entire group of pe
ople who believed the practice to be necessary.

  Mackie’s theory, on the other hand, emphasized the idea that to encourage people of the same group to stop a behavior, one needed to understand and appreciate the complex factors behind their decision to practice it. As he explained to the group in Kolda, crammed into a small hotel room, families carry out FGC to ensure the marriageability and status of their daughters within their intra-marrying group. For marriage and for status, what one family chooses to do depends on what other families in that community choose to do. Therefore, no one family can abandon the practice on its own; to change the social norm, it is necessary to coordinate abandonment by the intra-marrying community as a whole. Only if the decision is widespread within the practicing community can that decision be sustained, thus bringing into place a new social norm that ensures the marriageability of daughters and the social status of families that do not cut their girls.

  That is why public declarations are so critical, he argued. Only if the decision to abandon is collective and explicit can each family be confident that others are also abandoning the practice, alleviating the fear that no single girl or family would be disadvantaged by their decision.

  Another important element of the social norm theory was what Mackie referred to as “organized diffusion”—meaning that communities that are abandoning the practice engage others to do the same, thereby increasing the sustainability of a new social norm that rejects female genital cutting, even creating sanctions against those who continue to practice it. It was exactly what was happening in Senegal with people like Demba and Ourèye, who to that day continued their efforts of spreading the news of declarations to hundreds of additional villages across Senegal. And their efforts led to similar efforts by others. Villagers had even started traveling to surrounding African countries to reach their families, and increasingly people from villages in nearby Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and The Gambia were crossing the border to take part in public declarations. “I heard so many stories of people willing to make the great effort to travel because they were excited to be part of a positive movement for health and human dignity that included them in the decision-making process,” Molly says.

  Mackie’s concept of organized diffusion also confirmed Molly’s belief that what mattered most was not ensuring that every person in every village abandoned the practice immediately, but rather that a growing core group of activists was committed to and making a change with those who mattered most in their networks, at a regional, national, and even international level. “At the outset of the movement, whether in foot-binding or FGC, you don’t suddenly find 100 percent abandonment across a country or region,” Mackie says. “Rather, abandonment proceeds through clusters in social networks and often follows very predictable patterns. It is then, at the end of the process—when most people know that others are ending a practice—that you find more comprehensive abandonment. That is how the neighborhood-to-neighborhood model worked in China and why you see declarations leading to other declarations in Senegal and beyond; for the host village it is an end, but for some of the invited guests it means their work has just begun.”

  At the end of the three days, the team could not help but focus on one specific point that Mackie had returned to again and again: what was happening in Senegal could very well be like the change that led to the abandonment of foot-binding in China within a single generation. If things continued as they were going, Molly thought, and the theory was truly accurate, perhaps they would see similar results in Senegal. Perhaps it really was possible to end the practice of female genital cutting in Senegal in one generation.

  IN 2005, MOLLY WAS invited to a meeting at UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, to discuss the Tostan approach to ending FGC with UNICEF staff throughout Africa—a far cry from the days when the organization was overlooked in the field. After she finished her presentation, she was approached by Wendy Carson, the child protection officer for UNICEF in Somalia, a highly impoverished and volatile nation located on the Horn of Africa.

  “I really believe your program would be successful in Somalia,” Wendy said.

  “Somalia?” Molly said. “That’s a million miles from Senegal.”

  “A disadvantage, perhaps,” Wendy said. “But with Tostan’s respectful and nonjudgmental approach, I think you could have results similar to what you’re seeing in Senegal. People will welcome this program. So many women have never had the opportunity to go to school, and as you may know, they practice female genital cutting at an astounding rate.”

  Molly was aware of just how dire the situation was for Somali women. With more than 98 percent of women having undergone the procedure, Somalia has one of the highest prevalence rates of FGC in Africa. Most girls are cut before the age of ten, enduring the most invasive and dangerous type, referred to locally as pharaonic infibulation and defined by the World Health Organization as Type III, meaning that after the removal of the external genitalia, the vaginal lips are sewn shut. This type of cutting is extremely painful and dangerous, often bringing a lifetime of physical suffering. Plus, babies born to mothers who have undergone this procedure have a significantly higher chance of dying at birth. Yet the custom is so widely accepted and the obligation for young girls to have it done so entrenched in Somalia, that even many NGOs advocating for women’s health were not promoting an absolute end to the practice but rather a switch to Type I, the sunna, meaning the cutting of the clitoris without cutting the labia or sewing shut the lips.

  “I honestly believe that people will respond to the way you work,” Wendy said. “I feel it in my bones.”

  “I’m not sure,” Molly said. “I know so little about the culture. It would be very difficult.”

  “How about this?” Wendy said. “Come to Somalia for a few weeks and allow me to set up workshops with the local NGOs. You can explain how you work, and we’ll see if they agree with me that this can bring about great change. Please, Molly. Come share your program with Somalia.”

  DESPITE WENDY’S ENTHUSIASM AND persistence, Molly was hesitant about working in Somalia, knowing it would come with a host of challenges. In the early 1990s, the country was ravaged by a devastating famine, which had killed nearly three hundred thousand people, and a brutal civil war, which had brought an end to the central government and resulted in the creation of three separate zones within Somalia: Northwest Zone, or Somaliland, a territory once under British control and not currently recognized by any nation or international organization; Northeast Zone, or Puntland, once an Italian protectorate but now considered an autonomous state; and South Central Zone, where the city of Mogadishu is located. Violent conflicts between warring factions were frequent, particularly in South Central Zone, including the use of heavy artillery. By 2005, fourteen peace conferences—each an attempt to reestablish some sort of central authority—had all failed.

  After giving it a lot of thought, Molly agreed to travel to Somalia for two weeks. “I remained very unsure about bringing the program to a country like Somalia—so far away from Senegal, so different—but I agreed to make this trip,” she says. “At the time, I didn’t really understand the realities of Somalia. I knew there were turmoil and problems and had read about the security concerns, but when I made the decision to travel there, I didn’t truly understand what that meant. When I asked UNICEF staff if it was safe to go, they assured me it would be fine.”

  It was only later, after she left for her first trip to Somalia on February 6, 2005, that she came to a realization: UNICEF staff members were so convinced that the Tostan approach would work, they weren’t telling her exactly what she was getting into.

  24

  Bàyyil Dex gi Daw (Let the River Flow)

  Molly left for Somalia with Jeremy Hopkins, one of the child protection officers for UNICEF Somalia who would be accompanying her to the seminars. When Molly saw the small, eight-seat plane they would be taking to their first stop in Bossaso, a port city located on the southern coast of the Gulf o
f Aden in Puntland, her heart sank. While she had traveled a great deal by this point, she’d never grown comfortable flying in small planes.

  “How long is the flight?” she asked Jeremy.

  “I’m not quite sure,” he said as they walked across the windy tarmac to board the plane. “But don’t worry. It shouldn’t be too long.”

  Molly slid into a seat behind the cockpit, trying to steady her nerves. Two hours later, she turned to Jeremy. “How much longer?”

  “Six hours, perhaps?” he said.

  “Six hours?”

  “We just have a few stops to make.”

  “You didn’t say anything about stops.”

  “Well, we must refuel at K50 airport and then a quick stop in Somaliland before we arrive in Bossaso,” Jeremy said. The K50 airport, he explained, had been put into use after the Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu was shut down due to the ongoing war in Somalia.

  The UNICEF representative for Somalia, who was also traveling on the small plane, turned around. “Actually, K50 was also recently closed. It reopened just two days ago.”

  “Why was it shut down?” Molly asked.

  “Lots of fighting going on,” he said nonchalantly. “But luckily we’ll only be there for an hour or so to refuel.”

  The news did nothing to calm Molly’s nerves, nor did the fact that she had begun to notice the two pilots checking and rechecking what seemed to be a map book, which seemed strange. How silly to be concerned, she thought. Certainly they’ve made this flight many times.

  “I’m sure you’ve made this flight many times before, right?” she eventually leaned forward to ask over the deafening noise of the engine.

  “Not quite,” one of the pilots yelled back. “This is our first time to Somalia. We’re trying to figure out where we’re going.”

  Before long, Molly noticed the plane descending, and one of the pilots alerted them that they’d finally arrived at K50. From her window, Molly spotted what she guessed was the terminal—a crude wooden shack near a dirt path, which had been cut through what seemed to be the absolute middle of nowhere: a vast expanse of dry land dotted only with a few scraggly shrubs and a herd of about a hundred camels strolling lazily along the makeshift landing strip.