Bernadette Loloju was among the few lucky girls protected from early marriage in her community.
However, she was not lucky to escape female genital mutilation.
Loloju, the Anti-FGM board CEO, underwent the cut when she was just 13.
She narrated her experience during a stakeholders' meeting on FGM in Nairobi on Tuesday.
Growing up in Rombo in Liotokitok, Kajiado county, FGM was fashionable; grandmothers would encourage young girls to be cut as it was part of their culture.
Having been born and raised in the village, whatever the older people told them was the gospel truth.
Loloju does not blame the older people because back then, nobody was preaching against FGM. It was woven into the fabric of society.
They were just ignorant.
“It was something every girl wanted to go through because it was something we were made to understand that if you didn’t go through it then you were not woman enough,” she said.
Education had just come into the villages and she and her sisters were among the first girls to benefit from it.
Her grandmother, however, felt she should be married instead of going to school.
Her grandfather had given her father to the white missionaries to be educated because he was not good at taking care of cows.
“My father became a teacher but the culture did not end. So because he was a teacher he really wanted the best for his daughter,” she said.
At the time, the only schools around were run by missionaries; the Catholic Church had a boarding school for girls.
Loloju and her three sisters were taken to the school to shield them from harsh cultural activities, including FGM and early marriage.
“In our tradition the moment you give birth to a daughter she is booked from the day she is born, so she has a husband and a mother-in-law ready to be taken. The only thing they do is wait for you to grow a bit, they circumcise [you], then your husband takes you away,” she said.
Her father, a teacher, did not want to take his daughters to a village woman to perform the traditional rite, he opted for a retired nurse.
The nurse would go around the village with her circumcision paraphernalia and cut the children of educated villagers.
Unlike the other circumcisers, the nurse would administer an injection to kill the pain.
Loloju was in Std 8 when the retired nurse visited to cut her.
The nurse arrived; needles back then were boiled in cooking pots since one was used on all the girls undergoing the cut, she narrated.
“She used scissors to cut the clitoris. The scissors were not sharp so they would take time to finish the cut,” she recounted.
Being a bright student, she was enrolled at Alliance Girls High School.
She didn’t know the impact of the process until she went to hospital to deliver her first child at the age of 19.
The nurse on duty, when Loloju rang the bell to alert her that hers was an emergency case, scolded her for undergoing the cut.
“She told me not to push because I would develop tears. Within no time, however, the baby came out and caused severe vaginal tears. The nurse, instead of being nice to me, started saying I looked like a kiondo [woven basket],” she narrated.
“That is my story, which means very many others have gone through the same. So I am speaking on behalf of other women.”
Her misery in the hands of the nurse didn't end with her giving birth.
The nurse me her she would stitch my wounds and maybe I would be lucky to get someone who will marry me in my condition, she said.
The experience birthed in Loloju the zeal to fight the vice and to be on the frontline in fighting the practice in the community.
She took over as the Anti-FGM Board CEO in 2016 thanks to the good work she was doing.
Dr Edward Serem said FGM is a concern and the country is fighting the cultural vice, which has a number of health effects.
He is the Head of the Maternal and Reproductive Health Division at the Ministry of Health.
First, it has psychosocial effects later in life on those who undergo it since it is conducted when the girls are young, affecting their sexual reproductive lives and leads to complications during labour, Serem said.
“We have a training package first to sensitise the health workers that this is wrong, to ensure they don’t get involved and to talk to mothers that girl circumcision is medically wrong,” he said.
Dr Jacqueline Chesang said the current focus is on ensuring healthcare providers communicate in a way that they can address the issue of FGM in the community.
Chesang is a public health expert from the University of Nairobi and a member of the Africa Coordinating Centre for Abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation.
She believes that ending the vice starts with the women themselves and the community making the decision to end it.
“What is more important is changing the behaviours towards cutting of girls is totally dependent on the women making the decision to stop and the community itself making the decision. It is about healthcare providers having a discussion with the community to effect change from within the community,” she says.
Loloju said even though FGM is on the decline, there is need to accelerate efforts to eliminate it by 2030.
Overall, in the last three decades, there has been a steady FGM decline among girls aged between 15-19 from 49 per cent to one-third (34 per cent).
According to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022, the prevalence among girls and women aged 15-49 is 15 per cent, translating to one in every seven girls/women having been cut.
Overall, there has been a steady decline in the prevalence of FGM in the last three decades; from 38 per cent in 1998 to 15 per cent in 2022 with the prevalence decreasing with increase in the level of education.