“I used a razor blade. Sometimes I didn’t have it when I was called to cut girls. So I would take old pieces of iron and sharpen them on both edges. Then I used them in place of a razor.”/KEVIN GITAU
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 28 – “As I cut pieces of the flesh around her vaginal area, the girl is in a lot of pain. When the body moves, the knife keeps on sliding and even the piece of flesh you are holding slips off the fingers and so I end up cutting other places down there.”
“Sometimes I accidentally cut the place where a woman passes urine and the girl overbleeds. Some of them faint.”
This is the memory that Epanu Doros has to live with as she recalls her life as a female circumciser two years ago.
The wailing sounds and screams of the over 100 girls she cut are like a sting in her heart with the memory of every single girl she laid her blade on.
“I used a razor blade. Sometimes I didn’t have it when I was called to cut girls. So I would take old pieces of iron and sharpen them on both edges. Then I used them in place of a razor.”
She remembers her pride of excising young girls’ vaginal flesh and throwing it away to rot at the salivation of maggots.
“I used to cut off a piece from inside there and throw it away as the girl cried and screamed through.”
FGM means partial or total removal of female external genitalia.
Referring to the cutting knife as ‘mabati’ (iron sheets), Doros remembers that many times that she cut girls at the wrong places as they fought hard to save themselves from the blade.
Though death was never her goal the 45-year-old regrets that she exposed the girls to near death.
“One time I cut a girl, she didn’t stop bleeding. The blood was everywhere. We had to rush her to hospital and she was stitched. The girl almost died.”
One of the victims to suffer the cut was her own daughter who also seriously bled.
“I have three girls, I cut the older girl, I called another woman who helped me to pin her down on the ground. We removed about three pieces of her flesh, a lot of blood came out because she is chubby. The wound was too big and it took long to heal,” she recounted.
Loise Kapande like Doros was a popular ‘female cutter’.
She cut more girls than she can recall.
Her payment after cutting the girls was in form of about Sh2, 000 per girl and a traditional reward of a sheep’s tail after every occasion.
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