Cut (17 page)

‘I don’t think I can keep this up,’ I’d tell Yusuf, utterly worn out. But we needed the money from my teaching-assistant job and I wasn’t going to cut down on my
talks when I was making such amazing progress.

However, there were still some who were opposed to my work, even within my own family. In the summer of 2014, one of Yusuf’s elderly relatives came to stay from Canada. We looked after
her, ferrying her to visit people and making delicious food at home, but my work meant I wasn’t around that much and sometimes she had to come along in the car while Yusuf took me to talks in
the evenings. One night, as Yusuf was driving her home, she asked him what I was doing, and he told her that I was speaking out against FGM. It was only when I got home that night that Yusuf told
me about her reaction.

‘She couldn’t believe I was letting you campaign against FGM,’ he said. ‘She was furious. She said I wasn’t the man of the house, that I was under the
thumb.’

I laughed then. ‘Let her think what she likes,’ I said, and we went to bed.

But in the early hours the phone calls from Somalia started.

I leant over, still sleepy, to grab the phone. It was Yusuf’s family calling.

‘It’s for you,’ I said, passing him the phone.

I heard the muffled sounds coming through the receiver, the shouting, the rambling as Yusuf tried to reply. But he couldn’t get a word in. When he hung up, I asked him what it was
about.

‘They’re saying that our girls should have been cut,’ he said. Obviously, the old woman had called them and told them about my campaign, and putting two and two together
they’d realised we’d never got our daughters cut. I had waited twenty years for this, and all I could think of was that conversation I’d had with Yusuf all those years before,
that he had to stand up to his family just like I had mine.

I sighed. ‘We had this conversation before you got into my pants,’ I said.

‘Don’t put it that way!’ Yusuf said, but he knew exactly what I was talking about.

‘Now it’s your time for action,’ I reminded him.

I wasn’t tense, I wasn’t worried. I was adamant, and Yusuf knew that. He’d promised me all those years ago he’d deal with his family, and now he had to do just that.

The phone hadn’t been back in its cradle for five minutes when it rang again.

‘It’s four in the morning!’ I wailed to Yusuf. ‘Tell them to stop.’ And in the end I did it for him, by pulling the phone out of the socket.

I don’t know what he said to them, I didn’t want to know. But a couple of days later the phone calls ceased, and my work continued.

Then, in March 2015, I received a letter from my local council to say that I had been nominated for their annual Love Your Borough awards, and the winner would be announced at a gala dinner at
the town hall. I had to wipe away tears as I read the letter – to be recognised and nominated for an award was such a huge compliment. I took Abdilahi and Aisha along with me on the night,
carefully applying the kohl under my eyes and dressing in a deep-blue
abaya
and a black headscarf trimmed with delicate silver thread. Not that I thought I would win. We sat through the
ceremony, watching each winner go up to collect their award. And then, finally, it was time for them to announce the Leader’s Individual Award. I sat patiently as they started to talk about
the winner’s story, a woman who had survived against the odds and now used her experience to educate others. It didn’t sink in, not at first, and then Aisha turned to me across the
table.

‘They’re talking about you, Mum!’

‘. . . And the winner is Hibo Wardere!’ the council chief announced.

Suddenly the room burst into applause and I was up on my feet, being directed to the stage. Abdilahi and Aisha were hugging me and clapping, brilliant smiles lighting up their faces. I was
speechless. For once in my life I didn’t know what to say because the sheer emotion spilling from my heart stole my voice from me, and all I could do was let tears run down my cheeks. As the
audience rose to their feet to applaud my work, I realised that no other award would ever come close to the one that was presented to me in my local community. I held it up in my arms and left the
stage, feeling so proud of myself and how far I had come.

And my luck wasn’t over. Just a few weeks later, I got a call from the community-safety officer at the council. They were making funding available to tackle all aspects of FGM in the
borough, from protecting children to treating survivors, and they’d created a special educational role: FGM Mediator for Waltham Forest Borough.

‘I’d like you to apply,’ he said.

I’d never wanted anything so much in all my life.

I was nervous. As I waited outside the meeting room, I wiped my clammy hands over and over on my
abaya
, yet they were instantly sticky again. Then the door opened and I was shown in.
Behind the desk sat a panel of three people who grilled me for more than an hour. I knew I was the perfect person for the job, I had to be, and yet they didn’t make it easy for me. The
interview was tough, but I did what I always had – I told my story and talked about the passion I felt for the campaign.

A few days later, the post arrived at home, one letter marked with the borough council logo.

‘This is it,’ I told Yusuf.

I ripped open the letter and then burst into tears.

‘It’s mine,’ I sobbed, looking up at him. ‘The job is mine.’

I left Mission Grove School for the last time on a light summer’s eve at the end of the school term and, as the gates closed behind me, hot tears welled in my eyes. I knew I was doing the
right thing but it was still a wrench to leave. If it wasn’t for the support I’d received there, if it wasn’t for that first assignment, none of this would have been possible.

But as I sat down at my desk, in my new office, in my new role as an FGM mediator, it became harder to picture the little girl who had lain in that hut all alone, tears streaking her face,
burning with just one question: why? Because not only had I answered it for myself, I was now able to answer it for so many others. The result of that is here in these pages; this is how far my
journey has brought me. That first day I thought back to the conversations I’d had as a six-year-old at my mother’s skirt – how I’d quizzed her about why she was so content
to be at home cooking and cleaning, why she didn’t want to go out and get a job and change the world – and it occurred to me that I’d achieved my goal: I had indeed become more
than my mother.

14

A
s I’ve watched my three daughters growing up, I’ve seen how they’ve fretted and worried about a great many things. At
six years old, they were worrying about who was going to play with them at school, or about whether their best friend would be able to sit next to them in class, or about why their friend was
playing with someone else at playtime. My youngest daughter, Ikram, now worries about what toy she’ll get for her ninth birthday. My fifteen-year-old, Aisha, worries about whether
she’ll pass the GCSE exams she’s got coming up at school. And my eldest daughter, Amal, who is nineteen, worries about her university studies. Although every life decision might be a
cause of concern for my girls, each milestone is a delight for me to witness, because it is so far removed from my own anxiety, and that of my peers, at that age. It is a world and a generation
apart. The only thing we talked about in the playground at six was who had been cut and who needed to be cut.

To bring the brutal tradition of FGM to an end, education must begin first and foremost within the practising communities. In Somalia, we were brought up by women, we were fed by women, bathed
by women, put to bed by women. It seems so contradictory to me that these women are the same people who perpetuate the myth that FGM is valuable to a girl. If they wield such influence over
children, and girls in particular, if they know the pain that each and every one has to go through in order to be cut, how can they continue to facilitate such abuse? Given the very basic instincts
of being a mother, of wanting to protect your child from pain or fear of death, how can you order the mutilation of your own daughter? How can you see her suffer like you yourself have suffered?
Tradition to them appears to be far more important than blood ties. Maintaining custom and ritual among their people outweighs the horror of the suffering that they are prepared to see their
daughters undergo. Being judged by their community seems far more important than the risk of losing their little girl.

The answers to these questions lie in the simple truth that these women have no idea that the mutilation that has occurred between their legs is abuse and that they themselves are victims. These
are the women who will tell you that they were cut and it hasn’t done them any harm; but that is because they don’t know any different, not because they haven’t lived with the
same painful and uncomfortable side effects as other FGM survivors. They just haven’t made the association between the constant infections and the cutting they received as a child. They think
all women suffer like this; this is just what it is to be a woman.

To these women it is a rite of passage to be endured on the way to womanhood and it is also a security, a form of protection. The cutting will keep you clean; it will strip you of your natural
desire; it will mean that your family is not judged; and, one day, it will hopefully ensure that your own child marries well, into a family just as upstanding as your own, thereby reinforcing the
security of your family. To these mothers, FGM is not about needless pain, it is about survival. That is why my mother was cut, and her mother before her, and so on.

It is a tradition so entrenched in such communities, an act and a belief system passed down from generation to generation, that most women in these cultures don’t even think to question
it. Those mothers who do challenge the practice face ostracism and isolation – a 2013 UNICEF report acknowledged that women who don’t repeat the same procedure on their own daughters
may be liable to ‘social exclusion, criticism, stigma, inability to find their daughter suitable marriage partners’.
⁵
In a small community, that is a lot to risk.
Even in cases where there are laws to prevent FGM occurring, the report went on to state that the fear of social exclusion for not conforming to the norm may be stronger than the fear of fines or
imprisonment. Legislation alone cannot make families give up a centuries-old tradition.

According to the report, a massive 93 per cent of women and girls in Ghana wanted to see an end to FGM. That’s the kind of figure you’d expect to see – in fact, it’s the
other 7 per cent that it is surely harder to fathom. And yet, as you go down the list of countries, support for the abolition wanes, with just 33 per cent of Somalian women and girls in favour of
its eradication, and just 19 per cent of females in Guinea. I find these figures disappointing – without women themselves saying no to FGM, what hope do we have of saving children?

Agnes Pareyio co-founded the Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative, which runs a rescue centre in Kenya for girls fleeing FGM. The initiative is supported by British charity Equality Now, using funds from
Comic Relief, and aims to educate Kenyan communities about FGM. Not only does it provide shelter for girls running away from their families and mediate in their reconciliation, but it also runs a
very successful Alternate Rites of Passage project which carries out all the ceremony associated with the cutting but without the actual FGM itself. Since it started six years ago, it is estimated
to have saved almost 1,500 girls from undergoing circumcision. Agnes is from a Maasai community and was cut herself, so no one is better placed to understand how to combat FGM in her region. She
feels the project is a valuable way to preserve important elements of her culture, while abandoning the mutilation.

The programme has been designed for the Maasai community because different tribes practise FGM for different reasons, and something that works for one won’t necessarily work for another.
Over a period of four days, the programme takes the girls and their mothers and teaches them everything that they would expect to learn from village elders after the cut – about reproduction,
taking care of themselves and their family – but it also teaches the girls about the process of being cut, and that they don’t need this to happen in order to be a woman.

The programme is working because the parents have been involved in its design – in fact, they often bring their girls to the Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative without active interference from the
organisers. Agnes’s charity also targets boys: ‘When we talk boys through sex education, we tell them the importance of the clitoris; how if we interfere with the clitoris, we interfere
with the pleasure,’ explains Agnes. ‘And when we tell them that, they are the first people to decide against FGM.’

Other strategies offered to FGM-practising communities include targeting the cutters themselves. Alternative income-generating schemes have become popular over the last few years, although
opinions differ as to the effectiveness of these programmes, the suspicion being that some cutters simply take the new income but continue to cut. However, research carried out by 28 Too Many
– a British charity set up to study FGM in the twenty-eight African countries where it is most prevalent – has discovered that, when combined with education to challenge belief, such
initiatives can be a very successful way to turn people away from cutting.

‘One of the things that reinforces FGM is that the people who traditionally carry it out are older women, and these women are very dependent on their role as cutters – it’s how
they get their status in the community and quite often it’s how they earn their living as well,’ explains Louise Robertson, the charity’s communications manager. ‘To break
the cycle you need to get them to agree to stop cutting, but in order to do that you have to offer them another way of supporting themselves, otherwise they have no incentive to stop.’ Often
a ‘soft loan’, linked to animal husbandry – goats, chickens and rabbits – is provided. For example, a cutter may be given five goats and a ram – goats reproduce
relatively quickly, so the cutter can sell the goats’ milk and slaughter any extra animals to sell the meat, and eventually return to the scheme the number of goats she originally
borrowed.