activists-against-female-genital-mutilation

"“When we come together our voices are heard, today all of us in this room play a role in ending FGM in our communities.""

"I promised myself, on the day my vagina was mutilated, that I would never let another girl be mutilated."

"When women stand up and defend themselves, it works."

"some things must change now if the Maasai people are to succeed in the future"

"the age-old practice of female circumcision is one of the traditions that have kept the tribe mired in deep poverty and social inequality"

"In Narok district, or Maasailand, we have a very high dropout of girls from school"

"They drop out of school because their parents marry them off. After female circumcision, the girl is married off"

"being ready for marriage has always been more important for a young Maasai girl than staying in school. And to the girl and her family, being fit for marriage has traditionally meant only one thing - undergoing a brutal form of circumcision in which every part of the female genital is cut away, without anesthesia"

"All the clitoris go, the outer part of it and the inner part of it go"

"And then an old mom comes with her two dirty fingers to make sure there is nothing. It's only the bone that is left. What they use to wash the wound is your urine"

"My life has always been in danger since the beginning. The first one was when old men from my village got together to curse me because I arrested my uncle. They had a big ceremony to curse me and they expected me to be dead in the next hour. But few days later, weeks later and years later I am not yet dead"

"Even the elites… I get insulted on Facebook, I get insulted everywhere even on Twitter. They create something and say that Josephine is portraying our culture negatively. But they don’t realise these are kids in trouble and whose rights are being violated"

"https://www.peacetalks.net/pt/josephine-kulea/."

"Every day they walked in the health facility, they were very young girls carrying babies, and I would think they are their sisters but they were their children. Sometimes they would invite me to their weddings yet they are young girls. Anytime I saw the young girls I knew they were at risk. Sometimes I would ambush their weddings and rescue them."

"My cousin was getting married. She was only 10 years old. I rescued her from the marriage on the day of her wedding. I was with her so I didn’t care even if the wedding ceremony went on. However, I was shocked that her younger sister who was seven years was married in her place"

"If girls go to school, we can have so many breakthroughs for girls' success and we can also stop mostly these harmful cultural practices"

"I was able to go to school though I always watched as my classmates dropped out of school to get married at the ages of nine to 11 years"

"FGM is practiced in my community as a rite of passage to womanhood and accounts for 97 percent of Kenya’s FGM cases. This is why I decided to rescue young girls from early marriages and the cut and return them to school"

"I was eleven when we were woken up at around 6 a.m. by noises outside,” she said. “The previous day we had learned that my older sister was to be married to a 50-year-old man who had paid two cows as dowry"

"We were bundled outside by my mother, where we met a large crowd of women… there was not a single man in sight. I knew what was coming"

"We were stripped naked, that is when I knew I was also being married off to someone… They poured very cold water on us to ease the pain of the process"

"Then I saw the old woman bend in to cut the private parts of my sister who was sitting legs apart"

"My sister let out a terrifying scream that made my flesh crawl. She was bleeding out of control. They tried to apply traditional herbs to the wound but this did not stop the bleeding, it was during that confusion that I made my escape to a relative"

"What to a foreigner may seem to be a gift from Santa Claus traumatizes a Samburu girl because for a Samburu girl that means sex at a young age with an old man"