Desert Flower (29 page)

can guarantee this practice would stop. How can you want to be with a woman physically when her pain is severe and never-ending? This story has brought me to tears and I am writing the Equality Now organization for information on how to help.

Another letter addressed to me read:

There are a lot of tragic stories that have been told, and there will be more told in the future, but Waris, there are not any more to be told of an entire culture that can be more horrifying than what these people are doing to their children. I cried and felt deeply when I read this. I want to do something to change things, but I don’t know what one person can do.

I was relieved by the letters of support; I received only two negative responses criticizing me, and not surprisingly they came from Somalia.

I began giving more interviews and speaking at schools, community organizations, and basically anywhere I could to publicize the issue.

Then another stroke of fate occurred. A makeup artist was on board a plane flying from Europe to

New York; she picked up Marie Claire and read my interview. During the flight she showed it to her employer, and said, “You should read this.” Her employer happened to be Barbara Waiters. Barbara later told me that she couldn’t finish the article because it was so disturbing. However, it was a problem she felt needed to be addressed. She decided to do a segment for 20/20 using my story to make viewers aware of female circumcision. Ethel Bass Weintraub produced the award-winning segment titled “A Healing Journey.”

While Barbara was interviewing me, I wanted to cry; I felt so naked. Telling the story in an article somehow put a distance between me and the reader, I only had to tell Laura, and we were just two women in a restaurant. But when they were filming me for 20/20, I knew the camera was doing a close-up of my face as I revealed secrets I had guarded my entire life; it was if someone had cut me open and exposed my soul.

“A Healing Journey’ aired in the summer of 1997. Soon after that I received a call from my agency saying they had been contacted by the United Nations. The UN had seen the 20/20 segment and wanted me to contact them.

Events had taken another amazing turn. The United Nations Population Fund invited me to

join their fight to stop female circumcision. Working with the World Health Organization, they had compiled some truly terrifying statistics that put the extent of the problem in perspective. After seeing those numbers, it became clear that this wasn’t just my problem. Female circumcision, or as it is more aptly referred to today, female genital mutilation (FGM), occurs predominantly in twenty-eight countries in Africa. The UN estimates that this practice has been performed on 130 million girls and women. At least 2 million girls are at risk each year of being the next victims that’s 6,000 a day. The operations are usually performed in primitive circumstances by a midwife or village woman. They use no anesthetic. They’ll cut the girl using whatever instruments they can lay their hands on: razor blades, knives, scissors, broken glass, sharp stones and in some regions their teeth. The process ranges in severity by geographic location and cultural practice. The most minimal damage is cutting away the hood of the clitoris, which will prohibit the girl from enjoying sex for the rest of her life. At the other end of the spectrum is infibulation, which is performed on 80 percent of the women in Somalia. This was the version I was subjected to. The aftermath of infibulation includes the immediate

complications of shock, infection, damage to the urethra or anus, scar formation, tetanus, bladder infections, septicemia, HIV, and hepatitis B. Long-term complications include chronic and recurrent urinary and pelvic infections that can lead to sterility, cysts and abscesses around the vulva, painful neuromas, increasingly difficult urination, dysmenorrhea, the pooling of menstrual blood in the abdomen, frigidity, depression, and death.

When I imagine that this year two million more little girls will go through what I went through, it breaks my heart. It also makes me realize that each day this torture continues, angry women like myself will be produced, women who can never go back and recapture what was taken from them.

In fact, instead of dwindling, the number of girls being mutilated is growing. The large numbers of Africans who have emigrated to Europe and the United States have taken the practice with them. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 27,000 New York State women have had or will have the procedure performed. For this reason, many states are passing laws to make FGM illegal. Legislators feel that separate laws are necessary to protect the children

at risk, because the families will claim it is their ‘religious right’ to mutilate their daughters. Many times an African community will save enough money to bring a circumciser, like the gypsy woman, all the way from Africa to America. Then she’ll cut a group of little girls all at once. When this is not possible, families take matters into their own hands. One father in New York City turned up the stereo so his neighbors couldn’t hear the screams. Then he cut off his daughter’s genitals with a steak knife.

With great pride, I accepted the UN’s offer to become a Special Ambassador and join its fight. One of the highest honors of my position will be working with women like Dr. Naris Sadik, the executive director of the UN’s Population Fund. She is one of the first women who took up the fight against FGM, raising the issue at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. I will travel back to Africa again soon to tell my story, and lend support to the UN.

For over four thousand years African cultures have mutilated their women. Many believe the Koran demands this, as the practice is nearly

universal in Moslem countries. However, this is not the case; neither the Koran nor the Bible makes any mention of cutting women to please God. The practice is simply promoted and demanded by men ignorant, selfish men who want to assure their ownership of their woman’s sexual favors. They demand their wives be circumcised. The mothers comply by circumcising their daughters, for fear their daughters will have no husbands. An uncircumcised woman is regarded as dirty, oversexed, and unmarriageable. In a nomadic culture like the one I was raised in, there is no place for an unmarried woman, so mothers feel it is their duty to make sure their daughters have the best possible opportunity much as a Western family might feel it’s their duty to send their daughter to good schools. There is no reason for the mutilation of millions of girls to occur every year except ignorance and superstition. And the legacy of pain, suffering, and death that results from it is more than enough reason for it to stop.

Working as a UN ambassador is the fulfillment of a dream so outrageous that I never dared dream it. Although I always felt I was different from my family and fellow nomads when I was growing up, I could have never foreseen a future for myself as

an ambassador working for an organization that takes on solving the problems of the world. On an international level, the UN does what mothers do on a personal level: it gives comfort and provides security. I guess that’s the only past inkling of my future role with the UN; during my early years my friends constantly referred to me as Mama. They teased me because I always wanted to mother them and look after everybody.

Many of those same friends have expressed concern that a religious fanatic will try to kill me when I go to Africa. After all, I’ll be speaking out against a crime many fundamentalists consider a holy practice. I’m sure my work will be dangerous, and I admit to being scared; I’m especially worried now that I have a little boy to take care of, But my faith tells me to be strong, that God led me down this path for a reason. He has work for me to do. This is my mission, And I believe that long before the day I was born, God chose the day I will die, so I can’t change that. In the meantime, I might as well take a chance, because that’s what I’ve done all my life.

THOUGHTS Of HOME

because I criticize the practice of female genital mutilation, some people think that I don’t appreciate my culture. But they’re so wrong. Oh, I thank God every day that I’m from Africa. Every day. I’m very proud to be Somali, and proud of my country. I guess some other cultures might consider that a very African way of thinking you know, being proud for nothing. Arrogant, I guess you’d call it.

Other than the circumcision issue, I wouldn’t trade with anyone the way I grew up. Living in New York, although everyone talks about family values, I’ve seen very little of them. I don’t see

families getting together like we did, singing, clapping, laughing. People here are disconnected from one another; there’s no sense of belonging to a community.

Another benefit of growing up in Africa was that we were part of pure nature, pure life. I knew life I wasn’t sheltered from it. And it was real life not some artificial substitute on television where I’m watching other people live life. From the beginning, I had the instinct for survival; I learned joy and pain at the same time. I learned that happiness is not what you have, because I never had anything, and I was so happy. The most treasured time in my life was back when my family and I were all together. I think of evenings when we’d sit around the fire after we’d eaten, and laugh about every little thing. And when the rains began and life was reborn, we celebrated.

When I was growing up in Somalia, we appreciated the simple things in life. We celebrated the rain because that meant we had water. Who in New York worries about water? Let it run from the tap while you walk away and do something else in the kitchen. It’s always there when you need it. BOOM, you turn on the faucet and out it comes. It’s when you don’t have something that

you appreciate it, and since we had nothing, we appreciated everything.

My family struggled every day to have enough food. Buying a sack of rice was a big occasion for us. In this country, however, the volume and variety of food is astonishing to anyone who comes here from a Third World nation. Yet, sadly, so many Americans are preoccupied with not eating. On one side of the world we’re struggling to feed people. On the other side of the world, people are paying money to lose weight. I watch commercials on TV for weight-loss programs and I scream, “You want to lose weight go to Africa! How about that? How about if you lose weight while you’re helping people? Do you ever think about that? You’ll feel good and different, too. You’ll accomplish two powerful things at one time. I promise you, when you come back you will have learned so much. Your mind will be much clearer than when you left home.”

Today, I cherish the value of the simple things. I meet people every day who have beautiful homes, sometimes several homes, cars, boats, jewels, but all they think about is getting more, as if that next thing they buy will finally bring them happiness and peace of mind. However, I don’t need a diamond ring to make me happy. People

say, oh, that’s easy for you to say now that you can afford to buy what you want. But I don’t want anything. The most valuable asset in life other than life itself-is health. But people ruin their precious health worrying about all kinds of pointless little irritations “Oh, here comes that bill, and another bill, and bills flying in from every direction, and..” oh, how am I going to pay them all?” The United States is the wealthiest country in the world, yet everybody feels poor.

And more than bankrupt of money, everyone is bankrupt of time. Everybody’s got no time. No time at all. “Get out of my way, man, I’m in a hurry!” The streets are packed with people rushing here and there and chasing God only knows what.

I am grateful that I’ve experienced both lives the simple way and the fast way. But without growing up in Africa, I don’t know if [ would have learned to enjoy life the simple way. My childhood in Somalia shaped my personality forever, and has kept me from taking seriously trivial issues like success and fame that seem to obsess so many people. Frequently I’m asked, “How does it feel to be famous?” and I just laugh. What does that mean, famous? I don’t even know. All I know is that my way of thinking is an African way, and that will never change.

One of the greatest benefits of living in the West is peace, and I’m not sure how many people realize what a blessing that is. True, there is crime, but that is not the same thing as having a war raging around you. I have been thankful for shelter here and the opportunity to raise my baby in safety, because Somalia has seen constant fighting since rebels ousted Siad Barre in 1991. Rival tribes have fought for control ever since, and no one knows how many people have been killed. The beautiful city of white buildings that the Italian colonists built, Mogadishu, has been destroyed. Nearly every structure bears the marks of seven years of nonstop fighting, with buildings bombed or shot full of bullet holes. There is no longer any hint of order in the city no government, no police, no schools.

It is depressing for me to know that my family has not escaped this fighting. My uncle Wolde’ab, my mother’s brother who was so funny and looked so much like Mama, died in Mogadishu. He was standing by a window when his house was sprayed with gunfire. The entire building was shot full of holes, and a bullet came through the window and killed my uncle.

Even the nomadic people are affected now. When I saw my little brother, All, in Ethiopia, he

had been shot also, and narrowly escaped getting killed. He was walking alone with his camels, when poachers ambushed him and shot him in the arm. All fell down and pretended to be dead, and the poachers made off with his entire herd.

When I saw my mother in Ethiopia, she told me she was still carrying a bullet in her chest after being caught in crossfire. My sister had taken her to the hospital in Saudi, but they said she was too old for them to operate. Surgery would be dangerous, and she might not survive. Yet, by the time I saw her, she seemed strong as a camel. She was Mama, tough as always, and cracking jokes about getting shot. I asked her if the bullet was still inside her, and she said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s in there. I don’t care. Maybe I melted it down by now.”