« Every moment is a reminder of the pain I endured. »

Standing in her vegetable garden, Salomone* (not her real name), 18, has eyes that sparkle with pride as she talks about her dream for the future. 

“If God gives me the means, I'd like to study and become a great wedding planner in 10 years. In the meantime, I do some gardening to help my family get by,” she says. 

Yet on this December morning, the young girl from a commune in south of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, still feels the weight of a painful past. She bears the scars of an excision she underwent as a child. The mutilation of her genitalia left a deep and irreparable mark on her. “I was only two years old when I was taken to the “excisor”, without understanding what was in store for me,” she recounts.

At the age of 16, acute pain and itching hit Solomone hard during sexual intercourse. While her friends blossom in their relationships and experiences, Solomone is cut away from others, always plagued by feelings of shame and low self-esteem. Every attempt at intimacy becomes an ordeal, leading her to drop out of school and withdraw from the world, unable to find her place among others. “From then on, every micturition was a torment, every moment a reminder of the ordeal I had endured,” she recounts.

And Salomone was to experience this ordeal a second time. “My parents, thinking they were doing the right thing, took me back to the same “excisor” for a second operation, unknowingly worsening the effects of this violence,” she recalls with great bitterness.

The sharp pain of this mutilation remains engraved in Salomone's body and mind forever. She never received an explanation for the mutilation, and the memories became nightmares, haunting her nights and darkening her days.

Without early psychological support, Solomone was unable to overcome her trauma, unlike Yiribatou*, now 28 and the mother of a baby girl, who is calmly beginning the rebuilding process on the other side of Ouagadougou.  “I have a partner who knows what I've been through. So, he's in tune with my sensitivity and my pain, and he's helping me to rebuild,” she recounts.

The young woman who, in a few years' time, will be a specialized environmental engineer, also benefits from psychological support provided by the association « Voix de Femmes ».

“The psychological support I receive enables me to accept my body, to love it and to make my partner accept it, and to suffer less during our intimacy,” explains Yiribatou.

Today, Salomone and Yiribatou share weekly sessions with a psychologist, enabling them to discover how to express their anxieties, learn to love each other again and rebuild their lives. Both are now open to a life with a more appeased relationship and see healing at the end of psychological support.

Welcomed by the Voix de Femmes team, they each find a place where they are listened to and understood. The specialists explain the need to not only repair the physical after-effects, but also the psychological impact of their injury. “The sessions with the psychologist are a mixture of hope and fear, with the possibility of healing, even if there's still a long way to go,” says Solomone.

What Salomone and Yiribatou have in common is a strong commitment to raising awareness among the community on the need to change behaviours and abandon female genital mutilations. The message has already touched Salomone's mother: “Since Salomone's unfortunate experience of excision, I have stopped the practice for good, so that none of my four granddaughters has been excised. In our women's group, I often talk to my friends so that they can change their practices ,” she recounts.

Since 2022, technical and financial assistance from UNICEF with the support of multiple partners, has enabled Voix des Femmes to implement the «UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation» in the Centre and Centre-Est regions of Burkina Faso, by consolidating the commitments made by communities through public declarations and support for the activities of monitoring cells.

The project lays particular emphasis on ensuring that girls have access to and remain in the education system, and that adolescents enrolled in the clubs acquire life skills.  Girls, women and adolescents at risk or victims of violence, are also identified and referred to, where appropriate, to the Centre for Women's Welfare and the Prevention of Genital Mutilation.

*The first names Salomone and Yiribatou are used as aliases to keep these survivors of female genital mutilation anonymous and to protect them from stigmatization