December
2002/January 2003
Bogaletch
Gebre: A “Flash of Light”
Empowering Ethiopian Women to Fight for
their Rights
By Christine Keyser
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Bogaletch Gebre will never forget the unspeakable day when her aunts
led her trembling to the circumciser’s hut in their rural village
in Ethiopia, like an innocent lamb to slaughter. The terrified six-year-old
girl cried out again and again in excruciating pain as the rusty knife
slashed her genitals, mutilating her young body to bind her to a life
of servitude to men. In the background beyond her own muffled screams
she heard her mother pleading, “I wish they would do away with
this!”
But even though other village girls—including her two sisters—had
died from infections from female genital mutilation, “we both
knew it had to be done to make me a whole woman. It is called ‘removing
the dirt,’ not circumcision,” Gebre told a hushed, sold-out
auditorium at the Bioneers Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area
in October. It was the first time she had ever publicly discussed the
personal horror that had shaped her ambition to dedicate her life to
the empowerment, education and training, and public health of Ethiopian
women, and the eradication of female genital mutilation.
Through her own stubborn determination and the sacrifices of her mother
who took on her household chores, Gebre became the first girl ever in
her village of Zato to be educated beyond the fourth grade. She attended
Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a full scholarship and became the
first woman invited to join the science faculty at Addis Ababa University.
Years later, as a Fulbright Scholar in epidemiology and public health
at the University of Massachusetts, Gebre awakened from her physical
and emotional numbness and experienced rage and horror over what was
done to her as a child. “I understood the purpose of female genital
excision was to excise my mind, excise my ability to live my life with
all my senses intact,” she said. “I was never meant to be
educated, to think for myself, because I am a woman from a small village
in Ethiopia. It’s a system that looks at a woman as an object
of servitude. She starts serving her family at the age of six—before
she even knows who she is. When she marries she is literally sold to
the highest bidder. From one servitude to another servitude, we are
exploited.”
Now Gebre—whose name Bogaletch means “a flash of light”—is
determined that other Ethiopian girls have the same opportunities for
education and self-fulfillment. “In Ethiopia we have as much an
education famine as a food famine. To finish high school in rural Ethiopia
is really like getting a Ph.D. in this country,” she explained.
In 1997, Gebre founded the Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Center in
Ethiopia (KMG), a seven-acre women’s community in Kembatta, where
she grew up, a district located about 265 miles south of Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia’s capital city. “I began to dream of integrating
health, livelihood, and environment for women. For once we will see
women as whole people,” she vowed.
To raise funds she ran five marathon races in Los Angeles, where she
had earned a Ph.D. in epidemiology from UCLA. In 1985, she had founded
Parents International Ethiopia to raise funds for Ethiopian famine victims;
she now shifted the group’s focus to women’s public health
and education. The European Union funded most of the Kembatta Women’s
Center, which includes the first public library in the region and the
first women’s dialogue house for women to congregate and discuss
their concerns.
KMG is establishing community-based health clinics, organizing women’s
work cooperatives, and constructing potable water projects to relieve
women of the backbreaking task of carrying water on their backs so they
will have time to attend school. “Poor women don’t like
breaks. They like opportunities. Once you give them that they run with
it,” Gebre said. “They asked us for a library, water, bridge,
school, women’s center, women’s health clinic. When we provide
that they create their own solutions.”
KMG focuses on three interrelated areas to give Kembatta women and their
families the skills they need to survive and transform their communities:
· Health: reproductive health rights, including elimination of
female genital mutilation and prevention of HIV and AIDS;
· Livelihood: vocational training and women’s entrepreneurial
skills;
· Environment: restoration of damaged watersheds and other environmental
degradation.
A major thrust of KMG’s community organizing is to eradicate customary
practices, such as female genital mutilation and abduction and rape
of girls, that keep women in bondage. Female genital mutilation is a
leading source for spreading AIDS because girls and young women are
easily infected from open vaginal wounds. In Ethiopia, girls 15 to 19
years of age have a five to seven times higher rate of AIDS infection
than boys their age. “Until we restore the health of our women
we cannot restore the health of our communities,” Gebre said.
KMG has established legal clinics to teach women their legal rights
under Ethiopia’s constitution and is making inroads in empowering
women to fight for their rights.
“When women discover who they are they literally wake up,”
Gebre said. A growing number of mothers are refusing to allow their
daughters to undergo female genital mutilation, either by village circumcisers
or at medical clinics; traditional circumcisers are throwing down their
knives; and young girls are standing up for their rights and saying
NO! Gebre showed videos of village girls proudly holding placards declaring
that they have refused to be cut, and happy intact brides at their weddings,
who previously would have been shunned by their entire villages for
refusing circumcision.
Three years ago when a 16 year-old student who was working on KMG’s
AIDS project was abducted, the community organized and enlisted the
local police to secure the girl’s release after three weeks. For
the first time her abductor was arrested and sentenced to four years
in prison. “To us she was Rosa Parks,” Gebre said. The girl
proudly addressed 4,000 people at an HIV/AIDS rally in Kembatta and
told other girls to never accept being forced into a life of servitude.
In the past, the police and courts looked the other way when girls were
abducted and raped if they refused to marry their abductors. But KMG
has launched a community-based movement to reverse that trend and has
enlisted the police as their allies. Since 1999, ten girls have come
forward to charge their abductors, who have been imprisoned. “What
is good for women is good for the community,” she noted. With
KMG, Gebre has discovered that their work “is not changing the
whole society at once, but one person at a time. And it works.”
Christine Keyser is a freelance journalist who
lives in the Bay Area. Her articles have been published in In These
Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe,
San Jose Mercury News, and other publications. Keyser is also
an environmental and animal activist and rescues homeless animals. For
information about KMG, contact Parents International Ethiopia at (213)
833-6314, pie.kmg@verizon.net,
or P.O. Box 7643, Mission Hills, CA 91346; or directly at kmg.selfhelp@telecom.net.et
or KMG, P.O. Box 13439, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
