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“I spent my teenage years moving all around in Somalia. We were always on the go to be as far from the war zones as possible but still, I have seen more death and violence than a teenage girl should have to handle… I think I was 16 when we got on the Riot bus which took us to Ethiopia and there we applied for Refugee Status. They didn’t ask me anything, just transferred me to Ireland. When I arrived in Dublin I had to go through a lot of medical and health checks. At one of the checks the nurse, with obvious shock on her face, asked me, ‘what happened to your private area?’ It felt really weird that I had to explain a thousand-year-old tradition to a seemingly intelligent nurse… That was the first time I realised that Female Genital Mutilation is actually not a tradition all over the world. In Somalia, 98% of women go through some form of this horrific procedure. It felt horrible to realise that all the struggles and pain that I had felt growing up were so meaningless. When I became an Irish citizen in 2006 I realised that I was not only given a home and freedom but also a voice. So I decided to use it.”
This is my friend, Ifrah Ahmed, from Dublin, she is one of the world’s top international FGM/C eradication advocates and activists. She has received many humanitarian and other awards for her work and campaigns relentlessly for legislation to ban FGM/C around the world as well as funding and implementing programs to eradicate it in East Africa, with a focus on Somalia. Find out more about this wonderful woman here: https://www.ifrahfoundation.org