This is an essay about hope. In our first years of sponsoring girls to protect them from FGM, many dropped out of school or could not concentrate on their studies. Many did not perform well enough for us to send them on to tertiary studies, which would have prepared them to support themselves. Of course there were many personal reasons for the girls' lack of persistence. After a few years, however, many of them became outstanding students and were qualified for university study. When I asked some of the girls, they told me that they had not initially believed anybody could help them. Once a few brave and motivated girls showed the way up the mountain that lay in front of them, resisting being cut and studying successfully, the others were also able to believe in themselves and forge ahead.

In 2005, the Ugandan government announced the launch of Universal Secondary Education, intended to serve the graduates of the Universal Primary Education program started in 1997. Uganda was the first African country to attempt to provide universal education, and everyone was excited about it. From the outside, an ideal state of affairs seemed to appear on the horizon. Educating all the girls (and boys) in Uganda would change the country enormously. In particular, from our perspective, if young people in the Sabiny and Pokot areas had free access to secondary school, the power of female genital mutilation in their cultures would naturally diminish. FGM would eventually disappear with exposure to the world, just as other harmful traditional practices had. I vividly recall speaking to girls at Ugandan secondary schools and hearing their gasps of amazement when I told them we did not practice FGM in America, and many of us had not even heard of FGM.


With free education, student sponsorship from outside the country would no longer be necessary, I thought. In my crystal ball, I thought I detected the end of the need for the Godparents Association's education-sponsorship project.


When I suggested my view of the future, our wise Uganda country coordinator (and Godparents co-founder) shook her head and pursed her lips. And she was right. Ideal education has not yet arrived in Uganda. We are still climbing the mountain.


The Universal Secondary plan was started without enough planning or funding. Only 800 government-aided secondary schools (compared to 1,898 private schools) are currently participating in the program because of the low tuition paid by the government and the other restrictions imposed. But in 2009, 11,850 primary schools had already signed on to provide Universal Primary Education, and it was easy to see that the 800 publicly funded secondary schools could not possibly absorb all of the students who graduated from Primary 7. The government promised to build a new secondary school in every sub-county, but that has not happened. So the secondary schools remain overcrowded, operating double shifts taught by exhausted and discouraged teachers with inadequate facilities. An automatic promotion policy is also in place, undermining achievement and perhaps raising expectations unrealistically. 


Parents are still responsible to provide the required uniforms, books and school supplies, lunch and transportation, a financial burden many families cannot manage, especially for daughters. As a result, a third of the first USE cohort -- more girls than boys -- dropped out before reaching their S4 (O-Level) exams this fall. Shadow Education Minister Alice Alaso called even those students who finished S4 "half-roasted potatoes," because of the low quality of their education.


At the same time, private secondary schools announced in February they were raising their entrance requirements, and their tuition, for prospective A-level students who wanted to continue after S4. This means that fewer hopeful students will be able to continue their education, and many will join the very large number of unemployed and discouraged youth. This is the most painful part -- to have had hopes raised and then dashed. To have been turned back halfway up the mountain.


The Godparents Association will continue to help some young people with their education into the foreseeable future, increasing the number of pioneering young people from FGM-practicing cultures. But we have no answer to the lack of jobs for graduates, the next step in helping them build successful lives. We are thinking about ways to approach the problem, though, with our eyes still fixed on the horizon.
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Pokot girls preparing for thieir 'coming out' celebration after undergoing FGM several weeks earlier
How has Uganda’s new Prohibition of FGM law affected the people who practice it? 

The number of Sabiny girls cut in Kapchorwa, Bukwo, and Kween Districts greatly increased during the last circumcision season (November/December 2010). Because of Kampala media interest, and the relative accessibility of the Kapchorwa area, Ugandan newspapers were full of articles about Sabiny FGM and the people’s “outrage” at the new law. 

Far less information has been generally available about the Pokot, another major Ugandan cultural group that practices FGM. Getting to the Pokot home areas requires two days’ hard travel from Kampala, on sketchy roads frequented by bandits and armed cattle raiders. Few reporters go there unless they travel with politicians, as on President Yoweri Museveni’s visit to Amudat last fall. Even researchers sometimes refuse to complete studies that require them to travel in insecure Pokot areas.

So we are left with general reports that "many" Pokot girls were cut in 2010, starting in the summer. We do not know if their numbers were extraordinary, or if the people were "outraged" at the new law. 

An alarming anecdote was posted as a comment February 2 on Wildugandablog.com by Tityon Ambrose, a Makerere University researcher. He reports that he found two Pokot girls in the bush attempting to cut themselves because traditional surgeons had been scared away by the new law. The girls were literally taking their lives into their own hands. They might easily have bled to death if the passerby had not intervened. 

Similar things happened in Kenya in the 1950s when Kikuyu local councils (at the urging of colonial officials) banned clitoridectomy. A number of Kikuyu girls defiantly cut their own genitals with razor blades, and for the next several years they pressured other uncircumcised girls, some as young as 8 or 9, into cutting themselves. However, these “Ngaitana” ("I will circumcise myself"), as they were called, were not considered properly circumcised by older women who had gone through the authentic rituals themselves. The girls were obliged to be re-cut by professional circumcisors. (It turned out that the Ngaitana had no idea of what the operation really entailed and had left the clitoris intact.) The struggle against FGM continues in Kenya today, even though it has been illegal since 2003. 

Clearly, culture trumps law. What the self-circumcisors are seeking is to be “proper” women, exercising the personal right to cultural expression. We want to see all girls and women freed from FGM, but we think the way to do it is to provide education and lifestyles that give freedom of choice and promote culture change.
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In early December our Country Coordinator, Hon. Erinah Rutangye, wrote that many girls had already undergone FGM in Kapchorwa and Bukwo Districts of Uganda. "This is a very bad sign, considering that the law against FGM has just been passed," she said. "It's a nightmare." Naturally she worried that some of our girls might get caught up in the intoxication that pervades the atmosphere this time of year and submit to female circumcision.


In December of even-numbered years, the Sabiny circumcision season returns to Kapchorwa/Bukwo. Both boys and girls are circumcised in traditional rituals, which initiate them as adults into their tribe and qualify them for marriage. If you are present in the area during this period, you cannot avoid all the sights and sounds of traditional circumcision, as boys run together in groups along the roads, collecting circumcision gifts from friends and relatives, and every night the darkness is filled with sounds of singing and dancing. Nobody has challenged boys' circumcision; indeed, it has the imprimatur of international health officials as an HIV-protection step. However, the genital cutting of girls has been the focus of international opprobrium in Kapchorwa since the mid-1990s. The number of girls cut has been fluctuating, and many observers thought that FGM was slowly declining among the Sabiny. However, it turns out that an unusually large number of girls and women were cut this year -- more than in any year since the great controversy among the Sabiny in 1998, when the backlash occurred to the United Nations Population Fund's anti-FGM project, REACH.


Spurred by media interest, some Sabiny announced that they didn't know or care about the new law prohibiting their ancient practice. Elders declared that the people were willing to go to jail, indeed to die, for their culture. Some very public circumcision events were staged for the press. Bystanders noted that the women being cut were married women, and that presumably protected them from punishment under the new law, though some women, their husbands, and their circumcisors were being sought for arrest. Staged or not, for the married or not, removing the genitals cannot be undone, and the women will suffer the effects for a lifetime.


There will be no way to deny that the 900 or more girls who were cut this year in Kapchorwa/Bukwo were in one sense casualties of the new law. The Sabiny were "outraged," according to a Sabiny blogger, that outsiders had pushed the Parliament to pass the Prohibition of FGM law without due consultation with the people affected. The anti-FGM activists were purportedly discouraged by the slow rate of change in Kapchorwa/Bukwo and decided to make the practice illegal, punishing the people for the practice instead of persuading them to give it up. For the Sabiny, a proud people who have endured, and still endure, a very difficult life, this law was one thing they could defy.


The government has not succeeded in preventing raiding by tribesmen that forced many Sabiny from their homesteads into internal refugee camps, no one has been able to stop the flooding and environmental degradation resulting from farming on cliffsides to feed the burgeoning population, and nothing has remedied the invasion of diseases destroying bananas, Uganda's staple food. But the people could display their will to keep their culture, even in the ace of the law.
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