CIN (Circumcision Information Network) 2:19

CIN CompuBulletin
Circumcision Information Network 
Volume 2, Number 19, 27 May 1995

CIRCUMCISION VICTIM SAYS PAIN KNOWS NO GENDER
From the "Times Colonist", Victoria, B.C., 7 April 1995
Deborah Pearce

Thanks to the cool spring air flowing over coastal B.C. today, Meserka Ramsey
will probably be spared the worst of the birning pain between her legs, for
which she needs icepacks, as well as medicated gel to control in hotter
weather.

She can focus, instead, on telling her story of genital mutilation to members
of the media covering the annual general meeting of the Registered Nurses
Association of B.C. in Vancouver.

Today, the nurses are being asked to resolve "that this assembly recommend
that the RNABC board of directors and individual members take a leadership
role in raising (nurse and public) awareness with regard to non-therapeutic
circumcision."

Meseraka is in Vancouver at the invitation of one of the nurses who's spent
the past year working on that resolution.

They met in Seattle in November, at a protest targeting the company which
manufactures circumcision boards that "can immobilize the struggling infant
securely...depriving him of leverage...without danger of escape."

In B.C., an estimated 40 percent of newborn boys end up on those
boards--10,000 a year.

In the world, mostly Africa and Arab countries, estimates of the numbers of
circumcised women currently alive ranges from 74 million to 114 million.
 Including Meseraka.

She's 41 now, a nurse who lives in Sunnyvale, California, near San Jose.  She
was six, playing outside with her best friend, Genat, when she and her best
friend, Genat were summoned to their respective middle-class houses in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia.

She was taken to her bedroom; her mother explained the two women there were
going to cut something which would otherwise prevent her finding a husband.

And then Meseraka was held by the arms and legs while the women cut out her
clitoris, sliced off her labia minora and scraped inside her vigina. She lost
consciousness, waking to watch the women heat long needles in a fire, and
feel and hear the hiss of them stabbing through the clitoral wound to destroy
the nerves.

Recovery, such as it was, was slowed by infection; she constantly asked for
her friend during those months.

"When you get better you can go and play with her," Meseraka was told.

It was a lie. Genat had hemorrhaged to death the day after her circumcision.

At 19, a pre-arranged marriage to an Ethiopian man going to Stanford
University took Meseraka to California.  She bore him a son, whom she refused
to have circumcised; three days later, her husband had it done behind her
back.

Because of Meseraka's inelastic scars, three episiotomies were done to
enlarge her vaginal opening while she was giving birth. At no time did any
doctor comment on her mutilation. Perhaps a dozen had examined her over the
years, advised her on controlling the burning, given her exercises to
increase sexual desire - before one finally asked her what happened.

Meseraka herself had no idea what she had lost until she was 33 years old,
training as a practical nurse. She was examining a new mother, and for the
first time, saw an intact woman's genitals.

"I went to the charge nurse and said, 'There's a piece of meat that's just
come out from her inside.'"

When the nurse re-examined the woman, she told Meseraka the "piece of meat"
was the woman's clitoris. "Every woman's got it," the nurse said.

"I ran to the restroom, took my clothes off--I looked and looked, and there
was nothing," Meseraka says. "I sat in the  bathroom and cried for four
hours."

But it wasn't until early last year that Meseraka finally saw a television
program on female genital mutilation and understood she was not alone.

She took a month off work and criss-crossed the U.S., finding hundreds of
women from Africa who has suffered the same thing, some after emigrating.

"I prepared a pamphlet--let's talk about our experiences; that way our
generation can stop this."

Last month she returned to Ethiopia for the first time in 22 years, and
confronted her mother.  Together, they went to their neighbors, convincing
them of the harm they were doing to their daughters, and persuading them to
stop.

Then they located two local circumcisers and agreed to pay them NOT to work,
and to find them other jobs. "I hired someone to spy on them too," Meseraka
says.

At home she's become active in anti-circumcision circles, gender no object.

"Cut is cut, mutilation is mutilation."

NEXT WEEK'S CIN COMPUBULLETIN:  "HALT ROUTINE CIRCUMCISIONS, NURSES URGE,"
from The Vancouver Sun, Monday, April 10, 1995, by Rattan Mall
Back to the News 1995 page.
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