Dear everyone and anyone out there, My original post about Mazuka was a little light on the details so I'd like to talk more about what I'm actually doing in Tanzania, Africa! I've been honoured to be chosen on one of the
few paying internships available funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs,
Trade and Development as well as the Get Youth Working Program. I was granted the privilege of being
sponsored through an amazing organization called VIDEA (Victoria International
Development Education Association) who was approved for funding to send me on
this amazing experience. VIDEA works with partner organizations in East and
South Africa and believe in a human rights based approach to development (as
opposed to a charity-based approach). I have the additional privilege of being
the first VIDEA intern (with my roommate) at this particular organization, the
Children's Dignity Forum (CDF).
CDF is
run by a small number of people and is nothing short of ambitious. They are the secretariat for Girls not Brides
Tanzania chapter, called TECMN- Tanzania End Child Marriage Network and have
received international recognition and support from the UN, DFID UK and other
national aid donors. They are also
involved with the Children’s Agenda, Tanzania Child Rights Forum, and have a
program called MenEngage that is a part of the larger network of MenEngage
Africa. The work they do is truly amazing.
They hold community meetings with stakeholders to address children’s
issues, resources and support services for people living with HIV/AIDS and fighting
stigma and teaching law and human rights for people that cannot access the
rights that protect them. They
physically support child mothers and child brides with entrepreneurship skills
and start up working tools to start their own business and earn an income. They
are front-runners in including and promoting children's governance structures
like the Junior Children's Council (JCURT), which aims to put children's issues
on the agenda. They are a partner in the
Children's Agenda that lobbies and advocates for better and clearer laws that
protect children in Tanzania. They are
also leaders in pushing and advocating for ending child marriage and female
genital mutilation (FGM). These two are
very closely related because in Tanzania, and elsewhere, FGM is considered a
rite of passage, and after this rite of passage girl children are ready for
marriage. The ages that girls go through
FGM can be from 9-18 years old. Unfortunately,
there is evidence, probably from such strong advocacy, that more parents are getting
their children cut under the age of 9 and even before 1. The negative attention
this Harmful Traditional Practice (HTP) has garnered in recent decades is
probably a factor in this among others such as being more easily manageable
than an adolescent or pre-teen girl who may or may not have been exposed to anti-FGM
messages like those from CDF. After this
rite of passage, in some areas it is bad luck if girls are not married within
two years hence girls as young as 11 become married. Nationally, 2 out of 5
women are married before the age of 18 making Tanzania have one of the highest
rates of child marriage in the world (UNICEF, 2012). The complications to this
practice are extensive and not just short term but have long term negative
consequences. FGM can cause infertility due to chronic infections in the pelvis,
bladder, trouble urinating or incontinence, shock, septicemia, HIV/AIDS if
proper sterilization is not used, painful intercourse, painful and difficult
childbirth and can be fatal for girls, women, mothers and/or their children. All
of this with no benefits to the woman other than powerful cultural perceptions beauty,
purity and being eligible to marry.
Which, in practically all cultures, is still a huge motivator for a
range of harmful practices that people including adult women all over the world
consensually participate in as children and as adults that can have devastating
and sometimes fatal effects for them. I do not wish to alienate anyone here if
they have undergone FGM. For some girls
growing up with the practice, they were excited about it, they wanted to be a
woman, they wanted to be desirable according to their own standards, they may
have had the procedure with sterilized equipment and not been held down with
extra trauma to the genitals and they may have not had any medical
complications after like incontinence from damage to the urethra. They may also have healed properly without
constant re-infection and recovery time may only have been a month or two. They
had relatively easy births because the type of FGM they underwent was not the
severe type and scar tissue was not built up making delivery hard. They may also still enjoy sex and do not feel
as if that had been taken from them.
There are women who don’t have a negative experience with it, but
because of the risk of negative health consequences, for children who cannot
legally consent, CDF believes that this practice should end. The lack of
benefits to the girl and the overwhelming amount of possible and common
negative effects on her health, psychological and physical, make this a dangerous
practice. At 18, after she has gone through her schooling and not become
pregnant and dropped out and as a grown adult, she can decide for herself if
she would like to go through with a procedure of that magnitude.
I myself am a lowly intern
still frozen in awe from being dropped into a well-established, internationally
recognized leader in children's rights in Tanzania and even neighbouring
countries, and I'm trying my best to help them in any way I can and to get over
my star struck-edness. As a political scientist
interested in a certain kind of social justice, these people are my
celebrities. My official job title is
"Resource Mobilization and Monitoring and Evaluation Officer" and
I've been given some very
interesting tasks so far which I cannot divulge. My co-workers are amazing and work so hard
sometimes they don't even have lunch and often stay until 7 or so at
night. Tell me again what other people's
celebrities do? (other than Angelina Jolie, she is the obvious exception). I wanted to tell everyone about this because
if you have the opportunity, these exchanges (especially with thorough and
thoughtful organizations like VIDEA) are important cross-cultural experiences
that make you learn just as much about yourself and your culture as you do
about someone else's. I also wanted to tell everyone that if you ever want to do something, to
push yourself to do something different to enrich your human experience and
relate-ability to others, to echo the awesome Shia LaBeouf, “JUST DO IT!”
See Shia’s full motivational video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0
See Children’s Dignity Forum website here: www.cdftz.org
See VIDEA’s full website here: www.videa.ca
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