Growing up in a community where there is the belief that a woman is not regarded
ideal unless she goes through genital circumcision, Matilda Ayripah could not
wait for her turn to be circumcised and be given all the respect due her. She saw her circumcision as one thing she ought to do before associating with men.

At age 18, Matilda ran away from her parents and voluntarily arrived at the compound of the circumciser in her village to become an “ideal women”. Girls who were not circumcised were insulted and ridiculed and she did not want to be the victim of her friend’s desultory comments.

During her turn, she recalls being given a concoction to drink. After she drank it she
was laid down and held firmly by a strong group of men. She became scared at the last minute, and struggled to rise and run away but it was too late, she says. She woke up three days later from a long sleep, restless and in great pain. Her parents sat beside her and gave her a broad smile to signify their pride in her braveness and understanding of tradition.

She was then given food and some herbal medicine, and was cautioned by the
circumciser not to touch or remove anything inside of her because she would become barren. After going through all this pain in the quest to be an ideal African woman, she couldn’t afford to become barren so she obliged. Later in the evening, the circumciser and some strong men held Matilda firmly to remove the large folded cotton which had been inserted into her to protect her womb before circumcision.

As she recounts her story, the look on her face betrays the pain Matilda felt during the removal of the cotton.

In fact, there are many painful memories she lives with every day, from the actual cutting to the post-natal infections. Matilda regrets her decision to be circumcised, but is resigned to the fact that it is too late to turn back time. She would, however, like to advise other girls thinking of going through with the procedure that the lifelong physical and emotional pain of FGM is not worth abiding by tradition. “I feel pain whenever I remember what happened to me, whenever I remember I call my children to encourage them to never go through with it”.

More and more people are coming to realize the disastrous effects FGM can have on a woman’s life, and although the practice is on the decrease, it is still happening in Ghana, says Rierselle Akanbong of the CHRAJ office in Navrango. “There is still cause for concern, I believe there are still pockets of this practice going on, and we must eradicate this heinous crime,” he says. “It is a violation of children’s rights. It inflicts pain on them when their entire clitoris is cut off with absolutely no anesthetic. The ceremony is degrading, and the child is not able to attend school for at least three months, while she heals.”

Akanbong, who comes from the region recalls witnessing FGM ceremonies in the mid nineties. “I saw it with my own eyes. it was horrible,” he says. “The girls were screaming and there was so much blood coming out, one girl even fainted.”

Back then, FGM was openly practiced and even encouraged. After years of advocacy against the practice, female circumcisers have become more secretive, but it is still going on in the remote villages of the upper east region, says Akanbong. “There will be drumming and dancing outside of a mud hut, disguising it as a marriage ceremony,” he says. But inside FGM is going on.

Although he doesn’t get any complaints of FGM, he believes it is because people still do not know that the practice is against the law. “When we embark on educational programmes most often the people become surprised when they hear that FGM is a criminal offense,” he says.

The paramount chief of the Bolga region, Ya Na, is trying to enforce the criminal code. Six years ago he created a law that holds the subchief of a district responsible before the circumciser. Since then he has seen a drastic reduction in the number of FGM cases in the region. He is pleased with the results and works hard to advocate the eradication of all forms of FGM in Ghana.

“When circumcised women menstruate, there are problems, when they want to have babies, there are problems. There is nothing good about FGM, either traditionally or medically,” he says.

Traditionally, the origins of female circumcision are not clear. There are theories, but they are speculative. Some of these suggest that women were circumcised to stop them from engaging in extra marital affairs, or to stop them from being too sexually demanding towards their husband who may have numerous wives to satisfy. Other theories suggest that it is more enjoyable for men to have sex with a circumcised woman. Matilda negates this idea, saying that her husband left her because he did not enjoy having sex with her because of her circumcision.

Matilda also had no pleasure or satisfaction any time she made love with her husband.
“In our tradition it was the duty of a wife to be submissive to her husband so I had
to do what he say and want to make him happy,” she says. “When you are circumcised you hardly enjoy sex with your husband, you just realize some few months later that your love-making yielded a good result with a pregnancy.”

Matilda is a mother of seven, now at age 44; she lives alone since her husband is
married to another woman who is not circumcised.

Medically, the most prevalent problems associated with FGM are post delivery infections, and pelvic inflammatory diseases, says a doctor with Rural Health Integrated, an NGO in Bolgatanga that does advocacy work to stop the practice of FGM.

Although he is pleased with the decrease in FGM in Ghana (between 1995 and 2000 the incidence had fallen from 14 per cent to 2.8 percent), he worries about women inserting herbs into their vaginas; something he says is still widely practiced in Ghana. “Women do it to make themselves tighter,” he says, “But what it is really doing is reducing the elasticity of the walls of the vagina, and causing ulcers which are then transmitted to the their partners.”

Like FGM, it is a practice that is intended to increase the pleasure for a man, but in reality is harmful for both the woman and her sexual partner. It is part of a tradition with no clear origin, and no measurable benefits, the kind of practice that should be abandoned, says the chief of Bolgatanga. “Obsolete customs and traditions should not be maintained, maintain the good ones, but we have to accept change.”

Photo Credit: Sarah Lee

What is happening to the principle of the rule of law?

Could it be said to be losing its core principles?

Many pundits have argued that instant killing of suspected criminals is a gross abuse of fundamental human rights.

Click here to listen.

“It’s 8 o’clock in the morning and Rebecca Churchill is starting her rounds of the malarial ward here at the General Hospital in Accra. Churchill is a senior staff nurse and a midwife. She says hundred of people walk through the doors of the hospital each day. The most common problem they present is Malaria and she says the numbers are growing…”

Click on the link below to listen to the full broadcast:

Malaria taking toll on children. Joy FM (Ghana)

Photography credits:
Vivian

Kids wait to be reunited with relatives

The sun beats down on the small huts in the fishing village of Immuna in southern Ghana. A dozen men chant as they haul a wooden fishing boat onto the wide, sandy beach. Women in colourful dresses line one side of a dirt field, smiling and jostling each other. Men sit quietly under a canopy to the side.

About 90 children in white T-shirts sit under an orange tent on the other side of the field, listless and fidgeting. They’re as young as six, and up to 14 years old, and many are traumatized from years of hard labour and disease.

This is a family reunion of a different sort: children sent away to work in fishing communities across the country are being reunited with their relatives. Some were sold for about $200. The trafficking of children in Ghana is still not a crime.

Kwabena and his mother

Kwabena Mensah was given over to fishermen in Yeji, a town on the Volta River about 500 km away. The 14-year-old stands with his hands behind his back, eyes vacant. He’s already spent half his life working 15-hour days.

“Over there, the working conditions were terrible, even getting food to eat was a problem. It was very tough on us,” he says.

Now, the young man is being returned to the mother who let him go. Her name – Ama Eduaba – is tattooed on her arm. She’s illiterate. To make ends meet, the mother of five sells kenkey (fermented corn dough).

“I’m a widow so I’m financially disadvantaged,” she says. When my husband died, his family refused to support me. That was the reason why I gave my son away to work and bring home money. The people who came for him told me he’d return after two years. But he was gone for seven years.”

Eduaba adds that, in the end, she didn’t get any money. She’s not alone. For the past 60 years, families here have been selling their children for labour, seeking extra money to keep themselves afloat. Many people rely on fishing for income. But it’s seasonal work, so poverty is rampant.

The International Organization for Migration is orchestrating this reunion. It’s saved more than 500 children through the Yeji Trafficked Children Project. Fishermen receive training and micro-credits to help improve fishing techniques, or go into another field of work. School uniforms and supplies are given to the children, and their school fees are paid for. Families get vocational training and loans to support small businesses.

IOM’s Solomon Asare says they’re also educated about the rights of the child.

“They don’t see it being an offence or against the law, because sometimes they are taken away by family members to go and live with them. Sometimes they might be strangers but they usually know the person one way or the other,” he says. So that makes it very, very complicated to draw the line between a trafficked child as somebody who’s been abducted and a trafficked child who’s just been given away willingly by the parents.”

To make sure families don’t resell their children, officials monitor them for two years. But there are reports some trafficked children return to their former work.

Joseph Rispoli is the project’s manager. He says the same 10 to 12 communities in Ghana’s central region are sending children away. Child trafficking, he says, won’t stop until they figure out why that is.

“We have an idea of the root causes – the push and pull factor – but we don’t have any credible or accurate estimates of the magnitude of child trafficking in Ghana in any sector. We’d like to get it in all sectors by next year so that it can culminate in a national plan of action.”

Mothers waiting for their children

Meanwhile, local police officers are stepping in to protect the community’s children. They’ve imposed a curfew: no one under 18 can go out after 8 p.m. District crime officer Patrick Yeboah says police are now also arresting men who impregnate girls under the age of 12. He says it encourages child trafficking.

“She wouldn’t go to school anymore, she would stay at home. She wouldn’t take care of her child, or what she’d do is sell the baby into this slavery. We are doing this to deter them from so doing,” he says, punching his hand for emphasis.

The Child Trafficking Bill is expected to become law this year. Yeboah says it will make his job easier. Then, he won’t just be slapping the wrists of people guilty of buying and selling children – he’ll be arresting them.

Back at the ceremony, an IOM official calls out the names of the children, then their relatives. Kwabena Mensah’s name is called out: once, twice. He stands up and saunters over to receive his plastic package of school supplies. His grinning mother embraces him for the requisite photo. He admits he’s not so sure about this new life.

“The hardship I experienced was so great. I’m glad to be back home, but I don’t know much about my mother since I haven’t lived with her most of my life. So, we’ll just see how it goes,” he says.

The young man looks at the white waves crashing onto the shore. If nothing else, he’s determined to break from the past seven years on the water. He wants to study to become … a pilot.

Colleen Ross is a national news producer for CBC Radio in Toronto. She lived in Ghana in 2005, working with Journalists for Human Rights and freelancing for the CBC and BBC. She has an M.A. in both English Literature and Journalism, winning a scholarship to CBC Newsworld. Colleen is trilingual, and taught at a German university before entering journalism. She is originally from Fruitvale, B.C.

Photography credits: Emilee Irwin (top), CBC news (all other photos)

I left Liberia because of the continuous fighting of aimless civil war, which claimed many human lives. I only thank God that I am still alive today to tell people the story of what I went through as a survivor of violence during the 14-year war in Liberia.

The war started in 1989.

Former Liberian President, Charles Taylor

The Charles Taylor group came beating, torturing, and making you explain what you didn’t know; and if you didn’t know what to say, you would be killed, which claimed many people’s lives.

The first time I went to the Ivory Coast to run away from war was in 1994; I stayed there until 1998 when I went back to school after the elections. They forced us to go back home, but the war did not finish, and another war came. Many of us were attacked, so we ran back to Ivory Coast. But we were caught beaten by the Charles Taylor group.

In 1994, I was just 13 years old. During this time, I would go in the bush, get sticks, sell them, and get gari to eat for the day. What the group gave us was not enough for the day, so we faced a lot of things that human beings should not have to go through. When I first got to the Ivory Coast, there were no shelters–just a large tree. So, when the sun shone, it shone on us; when it rained, it rained on us, so we hadnowhere to go. We prayed to God that we could endure until the end.

In 2002, war broke out on the Ivory Coast, and they said Charles Taylor was behind it. He and his group were beating and killing Liberians, so we were forced to go back to Liberia again. One day, I was coming home from class when the group caught us; they were catching young boys to carry the war on by force. Even if you were not a soldier, you were still caught.

They carried us to a base before going to the war front. One man escaped with us; while he was escaping, others fell, got wounded, or died. We managed to escape again back to Ivory Coast at night, and stayed there. Later on, we went back to Liberia to find our people. But the group caught the three of us on the road. They said we were soldiers, but we were not soldiers–we were refugees. We told them that we were going back home. But they started to beat us. They also said we should carry their heavy loads, but we were not able to do so, and they beat us even more.

We tried to resist them, and they said we were trying to fight them, so they killed one person from our group of three. They put a bullet in his head, and we all became frightened. They said we should get down on the ground, so we laid down flat on the ground. They said we should look straight at the sun without closing our eyes, and we looked right at the sun. Throughout this entire ordeal, they were torturing and beating us. We were begging and crying. One member of the group took out a cutlass and cut me in the stomach.

Monrovia. Photographed by: Carolyn Cole, LA Times. Date: 2004

I was about to be killed when we heard a heavy firing sound that drew their attention, and I managed to crawl into the bush bleeding. I stayed in the bush for a long time with neither proper medication nor food.

After surviving in the bush, I was able to escape to Ivory Coast, and then Ghana, where I stay now. Even now, I still feel a pain in my stomach. My wound never healed completely. For these reasons, I cannot go back to my home country.

Another reason I cannot return to Liberia is that my uncle was a wicked militant. The friends, families, and tribe of my uncle’s victims are there. As a result, my uncle and all his relatives, near and far, are in danger. Due to this tribal problem and my negative past experiences, I do not want to return to Liberia–be it during times of war or peace.

I worry a lot when I think about my people. I have no information concerning their whereabouts. Sometimes I go hungry all day long without eating. I do not have the option to return to Liberia because I have no family, friends, or home to return to. I have survived many hardships, which have left marks all over my body.

I need a place to call home where I can have quality education, and be able to do something for my future. The more I suffer in Ghana, the more I reflect on my past experiences, and the more I want to get out of Africa.

We want to be resettled out of Africa. We don’t want to go back to Liberia. Our houses are burned and destroyed. We do not know where our families are. We have no jobs or quality education. Our lives here are like wasted years. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop. We need to be someplace better, so we can have a quality education and build a future for ourselves.

Our rights have been been trampled upon. We are totally neglected despite being human beings. We are a part of society, so we should have equal rights. Did God forget us? The more I think about my past experiences, the more saddened I get. Once, I was living with a loving family, and went to school; now, I am running here and there just trying to survive.

It is afternoon by the time we arrive. The sun blazes high above a sandy road that leads into the fishing village. Kweku and I had received a text message saying, “Hi – here’s the number” from a contact. But nothing was firmed up. We find Rose at her inlaws’ house. She is wearing a purple jacket. Her dark eyes are bold, determined. A cross dangles from her neck. She agrees to speak with us.

Rose with her students before the attack.

“Last year, the story of a young woman brutally attacked with a machete hit the media, bringing about a national outcry. The First Lady personally paid the victim, Rose Amina Abdulai, a visit at the Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital…;” Kweku and I write these words. We’re making a television documentary about Rose’s path to recovery.

“And like every 26 year old, Rose was looking forward to a bright future“, Kweku narrates.

There was a lot for Rose’s parents to be proud of. She had just started teaching at a district primary school. In a school photo, Rose sits on a wooden bench with her students at Tikobo Number 1 DC Primary. They are clad in brown uniforms and she’s very much looking the part: a teacher-in-charge. Her hands are clasped, resting calmly in her lap.

It started at about 2 o’clock, Rose recalls. She looks directly at the camera. Her brow furrows as she remembers.

It was June 2005. She was residing at the teacher’s quarters. There was a knock at the door to her room and she recognized the voice outside. It was her boyfriend Clement Andwi-Aka, whose baby she was carrying. “He posed me some questions” Rose says, “Why did I involve myself in loving somebody else?”

Andwi-Aka accused Rose of being in a relationship with a man named Innocent Kebir, a national serviceman posted to the district. Rose said Innocent was simply teaching her computer skills at the teacher’s quarters.

Rose shows her hand.

“He held my shirt.”

Andwi-Aka had a machete.

Rose tried to get away.

“He started butchering me.”

A female colleague rushed in. Rose, unconscious and bleeding profusely, was rushed to a hospital in Half Assini, and was later transferred to the regional hospital.

Kweku asks, “Can you point out the cuts that you had?” Rose takes her jacket off. She shows her left hand. Her fingers and thumb are missing. Her right arm ends in a stump at the elbow. She has scars above her eye, on her cheek and at the top of her head.

Andwi-Aka attacked Rose. Then, he went looking for Innocent. Innocent didn’t survive.

Teachers and friends mobilized to help Rose. The Jomoro District Assembly set up an emergency fund. She moved back home. From now on, without the use of her limbs, she would need constant support. Her teaching career was over and she felt confined to home. She had lost her baby. Rose’s father, Abdulai Mohammed, sputters, “I was entirely shocked.”

Kweku Interviews Rose

“Whenever I want to do something, and I can’t do it, I have to shed tears“, Rose confides. “I want my limbs to be fixed for me.”

Rose shows us how she makes do on her own. She struggles to open a CD player. The CD falls to the floor. She bends over to pick it up, balancing it on what remains of her hand. “I want you to help me. But, I have to do it myself“, she says “I’m doing all these things, but I’m not happy.” The imagery speaks for itself.

The documentary is aired on AGOO, the morning show at Skyy Television. Kweku tells me that viewers who called in were deeply moved. Outrage. Tears. Calls for Andwi-Aka to face the death penalty. Rose is struggling for a good quality of life. “I don’t want to be this way at all“, she says.

Kweku and I had brought Rose’s story back into the public eye.

Today, Rose is teaching at a school in Jomoro District. She has been fitted with prosthetic limbs, thanks to the support of womens’ organizations. She is no longer confined to life at home. Rose tells Kweku it’s as if her life has been given back to her.

The Sekondi Court found Clement Andwi-Aka guilty. He was sentenced to death.