Claudine and Murvelene write each other letters, and Murvelene sent Claudine pictures of New York City, to show her where she lived. Claudine and her children studied these pictures with fascination, as if they were viewing another planet.
Claudine at a Women for Women meeting in Rwanda (Nicholas D. Kristof)
Nine months after sponsoring Claudine, Murvelene was laid off. She laughed when we asked her if she had second thoughts about her sponsorship commitment to Claudine. "I never regretted it for a moment," she said. "If I'm lucky enough to be able to help her, and she can lift herself out of the position she's in, and lift up her family members or other people around her, to me that's really important. And for me, it was a way to get out of myself. A lot of times, you forget how fortunate you are here, never really needing anything."
Since being laid off, Murvelene has had freelance jobs, and she continues to allocate 10 percent of her income to charity. "Any freelance money I get, or if somebody gives me a gift, I keep a running total in my head and think, Okay, I've got to give so much.' It's not so hard."
Claudine is also thriving, and she feels immense gratitude toward Murvelene for giving her and her children this opportunity. It helps that the Rwandan economy is booming, creating more opportunities for Women for Women graduates. But Rwanda is flourishing precisely because it has figured out how to turn people like Claudine into economic assets.
Tears over Time Magazine
Zainab Salbi is thin with olive skin and close-cropped black hair framing large, luminous eyes. She looks like central casting's idea of a free-spirited Middle Eastern princess, and she speaks English with a tinge of a foreign accent reflecting her childhood in Iraq. Zainab grew up in Baghdad in the period shaped by the long Iran-Iraq war, always fearful of attacks, raised by a father who was a pilot and a mother who was an unusually emancipated woman trained in biology. But the crucial factor for Zainab's family was that both parents were close to Saddam Hussein. Her father was Saddam's personal pilot, and Zainab grew up calling Saddam uncle and spending weekends at his house, playing with his children.
That meant privileges and gifts, including a new car from Saddam each year, but also constant, gnawing fear. Proximity did not equal protection, and any slip could mean disaster for the entire family. One of Zainab's friends at school was the daughter of a senior official who was dragged out of a meeting on television and then executed; the daughter became a pariah. Zainab heard whispered stories of Saddam and his sons raping girls and of intelligence agents videotaping women as they were being raped and then blackmailing the victims afterward.
"He was a poison gas," Zainab told Sheryl in a long conversation in Zainab's office in Washington, D.C. "We breathed him slowly, sometimes dying slowly." Yet Saddam was always courtly and helpful to Zainab, even squiring her around and giving her tours of his property. One time, when she didn't have a bathing suit and everyone else was swimming, he offered her his dishdasha, or robe, to wear so she could join in the fun. She demurred, thinking it might be too transparent when wet. He insisted. She kept refusing.
Then, when Zainab was a university student, her mother abruptly and bizarrely pushed Zainab into a marriage with an Iraqi man living in America. "All of a sudden, when I'm age twenty, my mother begs me to accept a marriage proposal from the United States," Zainab recalled. "She begged and cried and said, 'Please listen to me!' I wanted to be a good daughter and so I came to the United States."
Zainab barely knew her husband, who was much older, and who soon proved abusive and distant. After three months of marriage, he became violent, threw her facedown on the bed, and raped her. That's when Zainab walked out on him. The first Gulf War had erupted in the meantime, however, so she couldn't go home. Instead, Zainab remained in the United States, bitterly resenting her mother for having pushed her into a failed marriage and terrified that the American authorities would figure out how close her family was to Saddam. "I decided that I would never tell anyone I knew Saddam Hussein," she said, and she kept her secret.
Slowly, life improved. Zainab met and married a gentle Palestinian doctoral student named Amjad. They planned a delayed honeymoon in Spain and saved up for it. Iraq receded from her life. Then, in 1993, when Zainab was twenty-four and had been married to Amjad for six months, they were visiting a friend. While Amjad and the friend were in the kitchen, preparing dinner, Zainab idly picked up a Time magazine and read an article about rape camps in Bosnia. Serbian soldiers were gang-raping women as part of a military strategy to terrorize the population. The article was accompanied by a photo of some of the women, and it struck such a chord inside Zainab that she burst into tears. Amjad came running in, alarmed. Zainab shoved the article in his face. "We have to do something!" she said. "I have to do something to help these women."
Zainab called around to humanitarian organizations to see if she could volunteer to help women in Bosnia, but she couldn't find a single group working with the rape victims. She started telephoning around again, offering to set up a program. A Unitarian church agreed to hear her proposal. She walked into the church's board meeting with her father-in-law's briefcase, thinking it would make her look older. With the support of the church, Zainab and Amjad turned their basement into the operations center for a new group that they called Women for Women in Bosnia. They frantically began networking and fund-raising, donating the money they had set aside for a delayed honeymoon to Spain. The women in Bosnia needed it more.
Soon Zainab flew to the Balkans and began meeting women who had been raped by Serb soldiers. Her first meeting was with a woman named Ajsa, who had been released from a rape camp when she was eight months pregnant--too late to get an abortion.
For three years, Zainab and Amjad struggled to build their organization while taking university courses. Every dime they raised went to the four hundred women in their organization, leaving them barely anything to pay bills or to feed themselves. Zainab was just about to give up and look for a paying job when a check--for $67,000--arrived in the mail. Working Assets, a phone company that donates 1 percent of its sales to charity, had chosen Zainab to receive the gift, and it rescued the organization. Over time the group evolved into Women for Women International, working with survivors not only in Bosnia but in war-torn countries all over the world.
Zainab Salbi visiting the Women for Women staff in Rwanda (Trish Tobin)
Zainab's next break came in 2000, when Oprah Winfrey put her on her show for the first of seven interviews. Women for Women International began to thrive, building up a major international network of supporters and a $20 million budget. But Zainab still kept secret her association with Saddam.
One day in the spring of 2004, Zainab was in Bukavu in eastern Congo. She was talking to a woman named Nabito, who described how rebels had raped her and her three daughters, the youngest of them just nine years old. The rebels even ordered one of Nabito's teenage sons to rape her. When he didn't, they shot him in the feet. She told all this to Zainab and then said: "I never told anybody but you this story."
Zainab was horrified. "What should I do?" she asked. "Should I keep it a secret or tell the whole world?"
"If you can tell the whole world and prevent it from happening again, then do so," Nabito said. Later that day, on the drive back to Rwanda, Zainab cried. She wept all five hours as her driver navigated the bumpy dirty roads. She cried again back at her room in the guest house. That night, in her room, she resolved that if Nabito could tell embarrassing secrets, then so could she. Zainab decided to reveal her own rape by her former husband, her family's relationship with Saddam, and another secret she had absorbed only recently.
Zainab's mother, in failing health, had come to America for a checkup, and Zainab had finally dared talk about the anger she had nursed since her first marriage. Zainab spoke of how betrayed she had felt when her supposedly liberated mother rushed her into an ultimately abusive marriage with an older man she barely knew. Why, she asked her mother, had she urged that marriage?
Za
inab's mother had lost her voice by then and could communicate only by writing notes. Through tears, she scribbled her response: "He wanted you, Zainab. I didn't see any other way." The "he" was Saddam Hussein. He had lusted after Zainab, and her parents had been terrified that Saddam would seize Zainab and keep her as a mistress until he found a new toy.
So, inspired by Nabito, Zainab began telling her full story, every seedy part of it. "The irony was that I run a program that encourages women to communicate, but I didn't communicate for a long time," Zainab said. "Now, I do."
Women for Women International is effective because it touches people at the grassroots level. This kind of bottom-up approach in development work has repeatedly shown its superiority in bringing about economic and social change. Meanwhile, far away in West Africa, someone else was using a similar grassroots approach to defeat one of the most ghastly and deeply embedded traditions that harms girls, genital cutting.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Grassroots vs. Treetops
Are women human yet? If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels ...? Would our genitals be sliced out to "cleanse" us ...? When will women be human? When?
--CATHERINE A. MACKINNON, Are Women Human?
Approximately once every ten seconds, a girl somewhere in the world is pinned down. Her legs are pulled apart, and a local woman with no medical training pulls out a knife or razor blade and slices off some or all of the girl's genitals. In most cases, there is no anesthetic.
Well-meaning Westerners and Africans alike have worked for decades to end this practice. Yet a growing number of mothers were still arranging for their daughters to be cut. Now, finally, in just the last few years, groups of grassroots activists have cracked the code. Led by an Illinois woman who has lived more than half her life in Senegal, these activists seem to have figured out how cutting can be ended, and their movement is snowballing. Incredibly, it looks as if they will make female genital cutting in West Africa go the way of foot-binding in China. That makes the campaign against genital cutting a model for a larger global movement for women in the developing world. If we want to move beyond slogans, we would do well to learn the lessons of the long struggle against genital cutting.
Today, female genital cutting is practiced mostly by Muslims in Africa, though it is also found in many Christian families in Africa. It is not found in most Arab or Islamic cultures outside Africa. The custom goes back to ancient times, and some female mummies in ancient Egypt have cut genitals. Soranos of Ephesus, a Greek physician who wrote a pioneering book on gynecology in the second century, stipulated:
A large clitoris is a symptom of turpitude; in fact, [such women] strive to have their own flesh stimulated just like men and to obtain sexual intercourse, as it were. Now, you will perform the surgical operation on her in the following way. Placing her lying on her back with the feet closed, one should hold in place in a small forceps that which protrudes and appears to be larger and cut it back with a scalpel.
A German textbook on surgery from 1666 includes illustrations on how to amputate the clitoris, and the practice occurred regularly in England until the 1860s--even occasionally after that in Europe and America. Across a broad swath of northern Africa, the practice is still nearly universal. Worldwide, some 130 million women have been cut, and after new research, the UN now estimates that 3 million girls are cut annually in Africa alone (the previous estimate had been 2 million globally). The custom occurs on a smaller scale in Yemen, Oman, Indonesia, and Malaysia; among some Bedouin Arabs in Saudi Arabia and Israel; and among Bohra Muslims in India and Pakistan. The practice varies greatly. In Yemen, girls are typically cut within two weeks of birth, while in Egypt it can occur in the early teenage years.
The aim is to minimize a woman's sexual pleasure and hence make her less likely to be promiscuous. The most common form of cutting involves snipping the clitoris or clitoral hood (sometimes leaving the clitoris intact and more exposed, an incompetent approach that increases opportunities for orgasm). In Malaysia, the ritual sometimes involves no more than a pinprick, or simply the waving of a razor blade near the genitals. But in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, it is common to see the most extreme kind, in which the entire genital area is "cleaned up" by snipping away the clitoris, labia, and all external genitalia. This creates a large raw wound, and the vaginal opening is then typically sewn up with a wild thistle (leaving a small opening for menstrual blood), with the legs tied together so that the wound can heal. This is called infibulation, and when the woman is married, her husband or a midwife uses a knife to reopen the sealed part so that she can have intercourse. Edna Adan, the midwife in Somaliland who runs her own maternity hospital, has been surveying all the women who have come to deliver over the years: 97 percent of them were cut, and virtually all of them infibulated. Edna showed us a video she took of an eight-year-old girl undergoing infibulation; it is excruciating to watch.
Traditional birth attendants do the genital cutting in some countries, while in Senegal and Mali it is often a woman who belongs to the blacksmith caste. Cutters mostly have learned the technique from their mothers or grandmothers, and often they don't use clean blades or can't stop the bleeding. Some girls die or suffer lifelong injuries, but there is no data; a girl who dies after being cut is usually said to have succumbed to malaria. A World Health Organization study found that cutting leads to scar tissue that makes childbirth more dangerous, particularly with the more extreme forms of cutting.
Beginning in the late 1970s there was a Western-led campaign against cutting. Previously the practice had been referred to as female circumcision, but that was considered euphemistic, so critics branded it female genital mutilation, or FGM. The United Nations took up that terminology, and international conferences were convened to denounce FGM. Laws against FGM were passed in fifteen African countries, articles were written, meetings were held--and not much changed on the ground. Guinea passed a law in the 1960s that punishes female genital cutting with a life sentence at hard labor--or, if the girl dies within forty days of being cut, a death sentence. Yet no case has ever come to trial, and 99 percent of Guinean women have been cut. In Sudan, the British first passed a law against infibulation in 1925 and extended that to all cutting in 1946. Today, more than 90 percent of Sudanese girls are cut.
"This is our culture!" a Sudanese midwife declared angrily when we asked about cutting. "We all want it. Why is it America's business?" The midwife said that she regularly cut girls at the request of their mothers, and that the girls themselves later thanked her. And that's probably true. Mahabouba, the Ethiopian fistula patient who battled hyenas and crawled to a missionary for help, remembers how much she looked forward to her own cutting as a rite of passage.
Edna Adan deplores the cutting and says that international campaigns are ineffective, never reaching ordinary Somali women. As we were driving through the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa, she pointed suddenly to a banner across the road that denounced cutting. "So the UN comes and puts up banners in the capital," she said. "What does that do? It doesn't make a bit of difference. The women can't even read the signs." Indeed, the international denunciations of FGM prompted a defensive backlash in some countries, leading tribal groups to rally around cutting as a tradition under attack by outsiders.
Opponents eventually became smarter and backed off a bit, often using the more neutral term "female genital cutting," or FGC. At least that didn't imply that the women they were reaching out to were mutilated, which made it awkward to continue the conversation. More important, leadership passed to African women like Edna, since they can speak with far more authority and persuasiveness than foreigners.
Perhaps the most successful effort to end cutting is that of Tostan, a West African group that takes a very respectful approach and places FGC within a larger framework of community development. Rather than lecturing the women, the program's representatives encourage villagers to discuss the human rights and health iss
ues related to cutting and then make their own choices. The program's soft sell has worked far better than the hard sell.
Tostan was founded by Molly Melching, a hearty woman from Danville, Illinois, who still looks and sounds like the solid Midwesterner she is. Molly's high school French class led her to a fascination with all things French. She studied in France and worked in a slum largely inhabited by North Africans outside Paris. Eventually she traveled to Senegal in 1974 on a scholarly exchange program that was supposed to last six months. Molly is still there.
A born linguist, Molly began to learn a Senegalese local language, Wolof, and then signed up for the Peace Corps in Senegal. Molly ran a radio program in Wolof. Later, from 1982 to 1985, she found herself living in a village working on education and empowerment efforts with a small grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"Not one person in the village had been to school," Molly recalled. "There was no school. This was a village of wonderful people who were as smart as could be but just had never been to school, and who very much needed information." The experience--plus a stint as an independent evaluator of aid programs--fed in Molly a suspicion of big aid projects. She was living as Senegalese do and flinched as she saw foreign aid workers squired around in SUVs. She also observed aid programs that spent primarily on expatriate staff and didn't know what they were doing. Without local buy-in, a well-meaning group would build a clinic and outfit it with drugs--and then the villagers would divide the clinic's beds among themselves, and the doctor would sell the medicines in the market. "Senegal seemed like a cemetery of aid projects that weren't working," she says bluntly.
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide Page 26