Hospital for victims of FGM stands idle
Providing just a few short paragraphs here doesn't do this article justice.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26577358
16 March 2014
The unopened 'Pleasure Hospital' of Bobo
By Sue Lloyd-Roberts
BBC Newsnight
(excerpt)
...And yet, Adjara says, "We might be poor but, sexually, things are changing." As she shows me around, she tells me that every woman used to be genitally mutilated. "I was five when I was taken to be cut. The old woman used the same knife for us all. It was so painful. I cried and cried."
Adjara takes me to her home, a dark hut some 8m wide, where the shelves are weighed down with heavy, clay pots. "It was part of the wedding package," she explains. "When you get married, you get given these pots to take away with you by your mother. But if you weren't cut, you didn't get the pots and you couldn't get married."
Then, about 10 years ago, health workers came to the village and explained that the problems which used to be blamed on witchcraft - the death of girls after the mutilation and problems in childbirth which resulted in more deaths - "all were because of the cutting, they told us, and so we stopped"...
..."I [Dr. Marci Bowers] came because I believe that Female Genital Mutilation is a crime against humanity and I am on a humanitarian mission. I am not a Raelian but I think it is a wonderful thing that they are doing." The five American medics are all giving their time voluntarily and they now have nowhere to operate....
