Malicounda Pics

Here are pics from my visit to Malicounda for the commemoration of the day 10 years ago that 35 village women announced they were abandoning female genital mutilation...

And the article is at: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73680

This is the woman I quote in the article, who said she had conducted female circumcision on about 500 girls in her lifetime, but she gave it up after learning the health risks... Funny thing about this woman - she's a traditional villager: only speaks Wolof, 60 years old, wears booboos, etc. But she carries around a cell phone! (Only when it rings, she lifts up her shirt to find it in her waste bag and doesn't even notice that she's exposing her breasts in the process.) Quite a few older, bigger women don't wear bras here, and their tops are very loose... I'll leave it at that.

To the right is a picture of the main square where all the commemmorative speeches were taking place. All the villagers sat under tents on the outside, and all the media on the inside. Below left are some of the signs they created for the event, which read "Malicounda Bambara village symbole dans le processus d'abandon de l'excision."

And of course, no party would be would be Senegalese without some dancing and singing, so that explains the last picture.