Wow 98% of women lose their Clitoris in this moslem society, and your telling me to GFY?
You should be embarresed as a woman and as a human to support any of this human tragedy,but if it is moslem you will make an excuse for this barbaric behavior!!!
I will pray for you -g-
Healing touch
A Sudanese-born doctor helps African women recover from ritual circumcision
By Irene Sege, Globe Staff, 12/9/2003
The tall West African native is subdued when she enters the African Women's Health Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Maybe this doctor, this African doctor whom she heard interviewed on public radio, will understand why she cannot feel pleasure making love with her husband and cannot forget the terrifying day more than a quarter-century ago when she was abducted and forcibly circumcised.
"Until today," she says, "I have nightmares."
That the woman found the clinic is one outcome of the attention that has attended Dr. Nawal Nour since she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in October. The weekly clinic she founded in 1999 is the only one in the country devoted to African women, many of whom have had all or part of their external genitalia removed in ritual circumcisions and have trouble finding physicians who don't gasp when they perform pelvic exams. "I've been trying to get a doctor that will understand the culture and the circumcision problems that I've had. I never came across any," says the woman, who asks that her name not be published. "The things I was being negative about, Dr. Nour spoke to me and made me feel comfortable."
"She really felt ugly," Nour says. "With her, the only thing I could do is tell her she's beautiful."
Both patient and doctor are 37-year-old daughters of Africa, born in countries where the circumcision of girls is widespread, who came to the United States for college. The patient is among more than 130 million African women and girls -- and at least 168,000 estimated to be living in the United States -- who have undergone a ritual that adherents believe promotes chastity, marriageability, and cleanliness. Nour is the child of an American mother and a Sudanese father who opposed the practice. Now the Harvard-trained doctor, a member of Brigham's obstetrics and gynecology department, has won an unfettered $100,000 a year for five years. Her colleagues have posted a sign on her office door that says "Quiet! Genius at work." " `Genius' is really a misnomer. It's an award for creativity," Nour says. "My goal has always been to work in Africa to train health providers. They don't take care of women who've already been circumcised. I'm hoping this will give me the leverage to get even more funding."
The award recognizes a reputation that has spread ever since Nour, during her residency, did outreach work in a Massachusetts community estimated to include 5,000 people from Somalia, where 98 percent of women have been circumcised, and 10,000 from Ethiopia, where 90 percent have. Nour's Somali interpreter, Layla Guled, calls her "a gift from God." When he runs into a Somali refugee in the mall or eats in an Ethiopian restaurant, Ali Sultan, a colleague and assistant professor at Harvard's School of Public Health, is often asked if he knows Dr. Nour once he mentions he is Sudanese. "If they know I'm from the Sudan," he says, "they mention her name."
One recent afternoon, Nour, wearing a white doctor's coat over a short purple dress, sheer stockings, and sling-back heels, strides briskly from room to room. Several Muslim women in the waiting area cover their heads with scarves and the rest of their bodies under robes or loose pants and long-sleeved shirts. One husband sports a Red Sox cap and a Patriots jacket. Most Wednesdays, Nour, a secular Muslim, dresses in a modest, long, flowing skirt and boots, but on this day she spent the morning making a presentation to hospital administrators.
"I wanted to look a little bit more elegant," she says. "I am Western, and I am Eastern. Sometimes a day will clash, and I need to show my Western side more."
`A constant thread' Born in Sudan, Nour moved to Cairo when she was 4, returned to Sudan at 12, moved to London at 14, then crossed the Atlantic to attend Brown University. In Khartoum, Sudan, where the White Nile meets the Blue, living in a house cooled by air filtered through wet grass, she overheard middle-school classmates chatter and giggle about the rite of passage they had undergone that summer. Later, in London, she read a harrowing account in "The Hidden Face of Eve" by Nawal El Saadawi.
"I wrote book reports about it in high school and went to college and wrote some little paper about it," Nour says. "I didn't remember I did all this until later, when people said to me, `Oh, I remember when you role-played this in medical school.' I guess it was something that was a constant thread throughout my life."
The circumcisions -- and women's feelings about them -- take various forms. What one African woman experiences as the removal of all or part of her clitoris, another, in a different tribe or other place, experiences as the excision of her external genitalia and the sewing closed of most of her vaginal opening. What one woman accepts as the way of her people, another despises. "It's torture," Nour's patient says. In her tribe, she says, weeping, the rite is kept secret from the uninitiated. When she was 10 and her parents were away, an aunt and other women, strangers, took her to a jungle area and, without benefit of anesthesia, circumcised her.If she couldn't be stoic enough not to cry, she was told to fill a dish with tears or be beaten. The wounds may have healed, she says, but she never recovered.
"Sexually there's no feeling whatsoever. Being a woman and hearing other people talk about how you can sexually express yourself, it's emotionally hurting to not be able to experience the same thing," she says. "I've never exposed my body to my husband. I'm always afraid if he finds out he will leave and find somebody who has what I don't have."
Nour's memories of her 12-year-old classmates are more benign. "All I remember is being puzzled by it and being puzzled by their giggles," she says. "About a year later, a couple of girls said, `You were lucky you didn't have to go through it.' They said they wouldn't do it to their daughters. There were other friends who were really proud of being circumcised."
Nour, the youngest of four children, was a "half-half" girl in a community where her father was one of a number of men who left Sudan for a university education and returned with a Western wife. Her sister Johara, 45, reached in Nigeria by telephone, recalls asking her father if she could be circumcised like other Sudanese girls. He said no. "I had the sense that I was dirty," she says. "I had to almost hide the fact that I wasn't."
Protected as the Nour girls were by an American mother and liberal father, that was no guarantee against circumcision. "I had a lot of friends, expatriate wives of Sudanese, whose daughters were spirited away," Nour's mother, Jane Nour, 70, says by telephone from Pennsylvania. "Their daughters were taken away, or maybe invited over by a grandmother. The mothers were furious. In a sense there could have been a danger for our kids. The family was supportive of my husband's view, but that didn't mean it couldn't have happened."
A shining light Nawal Nour, a dual citizen of the United States and Sudan, has let her Sudanese passport expire, and last year, after almost two decades in New England, she bought a condominium in Charlestown. Yet she considers herself a perpetual outsider.
She has another sister in Canada, her brother in Rome, her father in Cairo, and a boyfriend in New York whose parents were born in India. Despite her US-born mother and years in American schools here and abroad, a trace of British accent occasionally slips into her speech.
"I still don't belong," she says. "People used to ask me, `Where's home?' Well, home is where my bed is."
Between patients, Nour dashes to the computer in her office. Near the door is a copy of Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural speech in which he says, "As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same." On her desk is the Eileen Fisher ad in which she wears shimmering gray as part of the clothier's "Women change the world every day" series.
Nour's mission is not only to help end the practice of female genital cutting but to care for women who've undergone the ritual, women she fears are forgotten in campaigns against circumcision, and to teach Western doctors about them. Even a routine pap smear is often impossible to perform on women who've been sewn up. Urination, menstruation, and intercourse can be painful, and childbirth more difficult than usual. Nour performs a surgical procedure called deinfibulation in which she opens closed women.
In Guled, Nour finds not only a Somali interpreter but a refugee advocate who, like many patients, has survived trauma beyond genital cutting. Guled, 35, stylish in a long gray pin-striped jacket and long pencil skirt, covers her head in a colorful turban in observance of Ramadan. On her neck are scars from the day in 1990 in Mogadishu, in a country ravaged by civil war, when she witnessed her brother's decapitation and had her own throat slashed with a bayonet.
Guled was 6 when she underwent the most extreme form of circumcision. "I remember it like it was yesterday," she says. Not until she was 18 and visiting a newlywed friend did she oppose the practice. "She's on the couch, not moving," Guled says. "I said, `What happened to you?' She had tears in her eyes. We were all crowded around her. She said her husband couldn't open her, and he refused to take her to the hospital. He said, if we do it every day and every night he will open her. Then I started crying. I break down so hard."
The friends sneaked the bride to a hospital, where a doctor surgically opened her. The woman's husband promptly left her.
Guled also remembers her first visit to an American doctor. "She jumped back and said, `Oh, good God! What happened to you?' " Guled says. "I was so mad. I just put on my clothes and never went back."
Three years later, Nour coaxed Guled into accepting a checkup. "Layla really does represent the circumcised woman with long-term complications," Nour says. "That's what I'm trying to alleviate."
In 2001, Nour returned to Sudan. There, listening to her aunt talk about her own circumcision, she learned her grandfather had opposed the practice. "He went away on a trip, and when he came back he found out that my aunt had been circumcised. He was absolutely furious," Nour says. "She had the most severe form. She hemorrhaged right through her bedsheets. My grandfather was very upset. And he was a military man, so he was very strict. Despite all of that, she got circumcised against his will."
Yet Nour left feeling hopeful. "Every generation is heading toward the milder form," she says. "I really do believe this practice will stop. It may take some time, but it will stop."
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
© Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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