In Benin, West Africa, November is the end of rainy season. Fatouma Baguidi looks up from her work to ask if I will organize an International Women’s Day celebration. She’s the head maternal-child nutrition counselor in a small office at the local community center, sitting at a desk that directly faces mine, a desk I’ve occupied for less than a month since I moved here as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1998.
Distracted from her paperwork, Fatouma tells me it is the coming dry season she fears most. The first months are reserved for excision. During December and January, she says, the harmattan winds that sweep down from the Sahara help wounds bind faster. Wounds stay open in rainy season. She describes her own excision at age 12 when a village matriarch, her great aunt, kneeled beside her with a razor. Fatouma swears if anyone touches her own daughters she will kill them. Later, when we walk the dusty roads together, she spots girls walking bowlegged at a strained and deliberate pace and tells me these girls have recently undergone “the operation;” their rounded steps are a way to get around the pain.
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