By Mark Sumner | lead admin, NA
If you have read our previous reports you know that we never knew what success would look like when we supported a brave Kenyan woman who protected a young girl from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in 2009.
We started to fund a program in 2010 with no limits and by 2013 we were protecting 72 young girls from FGM and a lifetime of sexual slavery.
Our initial oversight and transparency meetings with our local partner, Carole, required lots of translation. None of what we were told made sense to us -- that it would take years to make this barbaric custom go away -- or that the Kenyan state had limited powers to patrol their hinterlands. Absolute bullshit! (I think swearing about this is OK, right?)
The cutting out of a young woman's private parts is globally illegal and anyone who permits it should be locked up for life. This is our stance. We will not waver. We will not go away and we reject the notion that FGM is "culture".
Fortunately, we continue to receive small donations from hundreds of donors at GlobalGiving who feel the same way.
But "success" is a difficult concept in a land where everyone is looking for a way to survive. More and more mothers came to us year after year with a "crisis" FGM situation. How could our team differentiate a true case of threatened FGM from a case of dire economic need.
It was too much! We were about to give up until something really strange happened last week.
Our founder (a really nice guy) ordered our transparency manager in Nairobi (also a really nice guy) to determine true need among the young girls who were applying for support and he got the answer he feared, "they are all in true need."
Our founder, grief stricken with only a few hundy left to wire, said a prayer that night.
He woke up the next morning to a $200 GlobalGiving ACH and a 2K grant from the Chan/Zuckerberg foundation -- enough money to keep all of the Maasai girls we support safe!
We have 46 Maasai girls under our care and four of them are at college.
Please see the attached speadsheet for hard numbers...
Thank you for your ongoing support.
One of the college-aged Maasai women we support plans to atttend law school so that she can return to the Maasai Mara to protect young girls who either don't have the courage that helped her run away when she was 12 or have been actively thwarted from doing so.
Help us stop Female Genital Mutilation in East Africa and one day, in the world.
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