Clitoraid reaches out to MENA region's women

December 28 2009, category: Clitoraid NEWS
Mon, 21 Dec 2009
By:Farah AlHashim

KUWAIT: "My elder sister woke up very early that day and started boiling water on the wooden fire. When the women arrived, my sister tricked me and asked me to go and give a bar of soap to the old woman in the bathroom; so silly of me. I ran there to do it fast and once in front of the toilets, two of the women grabbed me by the arms and put me down on the floor. One was seated on my belly holding my two wrists on my chest, the two others were holding my feet and the old one was in the middle and they excised me and cut my clitoris away without anesthesia. It took me two months to heal ..."

The goal of Clitoraid's program is to create real, long lasting changes for women who have been forced to experience clitoral excision or genital mutilation against their will by rebuilding the female clitoris. A local anesthetic is applied so no pain is experienced. When the surgeon uncovers the root of the original clitoris left after the excision, the root and tissues will become the new clitoris. The procedure takes 6 weeks for a woman to completely heal, with sexual pleasure and genetic normality being the end result.

Most of the women in Burkina Faso cannot imagine having the money for such an operation. For most of them, it would be like spending two year's salary!

Clitoraid is committed to provide these operations for free to as many women as possible whether in Europe or Arab world. But in order to provide such a service to the millions who have been mutilated, they will minimize their operating cost to the minimum having mainly benevolent people involved in the whole process. In addition, they need the help of others financially.

More than two years ago, following the success met by the project Clitoraid, its founder Raël had declared that instead of using the money collected by Clitoraid to only operate on some women, the teams should create the first "Pleasure Hospital" and operate on all African women who would wish to be operated on, free, with the assistance of volunteer doctors. Immediately the association's volunteers were put to work to realize this fantastic idea thus answering the significant number of Burkinabé women candidates wanting to undergo the operation and the offer of many doctors wishing to rebuild the clitoris of all excised women.

This organization is trying to reach out for every woman who is suffering from this problem wither in the Arab world or Africa, so Al Watan had the chance to speak with one of its representatives in Saudi Arabia.
Donna Grabow is one of those thousands of volunteers who shared their goal in order to spread the goal of this organization. She said that Egypt is known one of the most countries that practices female circumcision as she called for awareness in order for these people to understand that it's a crime against humanity.

She also said that Clitoraid is trying to expand their campaign outside the American and European borders by organization events, lectures and conferences that concentrate on this topic and get people closer to fight a human cause.
For more information you can stay up to date with all the organization events and news through their website.

http://www.alwatandaily.com/articleviews.aspx?id=64581&cat=1