Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult.

When I went to school, I had a dream. I wanted to become a teacher.

Teachers looked nice. They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes.

I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it.

(Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board -- not hard work, that's what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. So I wanted to become a teacher.

I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor.

In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood.

And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school.

This was the crossroad. Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. So I talked -- I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out.

I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done.

I told my father, "I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school."

The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn't go through the ceremony.

It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life.

So he figured out. "Well," he said, "okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony."

I did. The ceremony happened. It's a whole week long of excitement.

It's a ceremony. People are enjoying it.

And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep.

The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in.

Yes, we danced and danced.

We walked out to the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. They were all in a circle.

And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there.

There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. I was the first.

There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down.

And I sat down, and I opened my legs. As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife.

And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off.

Table of Contents