Real lives

" My name is K.S. I attend a secondary school here in Ouagadougou and I am in the final year. I was born in Côte d’Ivoire and had never visited Burkina Faso. During the summer of 2000, when I was nine, my father sent my brothers and me to spend the vacation with our grandparents in Burkina.

One morning in August 2000, my grandmother asked me to come with her to visit friends who lived not far away from her house. When I arrived in the yard, I noticed several other old women and some girls about my age. When I asked my grandmother why there were so many people there, she told me to behave and everything would be alright. She left me there.
I panicked and tried to run away, but two women caught me and took me to an old woman who circumcised me.
I bled a lot after the excision. Every morning for a week my grandmother washed the wound with a preparation made from roots and dressed it with a black powder. When the wound had scarred over, we went back to Côte d’Ivoire.

After war broke out in Côte d’Ivoire I came back to Burkina Faso, and it was at school during a sensitization class on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) that I realized that something was wrong with my vagina.
I spoke about it to my mother, and she took me to the Permanent Secretariat of the National Committee for the Fight against FGM. I was referred to El Fateh Suka Clinic for a consultation with Dr Michel Akotianga. It was decided that I would undergo surgery to repair the damage caused by the FGM. On June 22, 2005, I had the surgery. All the costs were paid by the Committee".