Breathe..thepainwas thatIjustpassedout
OF FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION SPEAKS OUT
taken to the home of the “cutter” and she was excited by the festive, party atmosphere.
Aisha’s mother chose not to go but her aunt was there with Aisha’s cousin.
Aisha said: “There were so many girls and women and it seemed happy.
“Then we heard loud screaming but couldn’t tell where it was coming from above the chatter of the crowd. Then I noticed my cousin had gone.”
When she saw a child appear from the hut, limp and her dress saturated in blood, she panicked and ran.
She sprinted towards a nearby river and was about to jump, just as the women caught her.
She said: “I was struggling but I was so little. I just wanted to escape. My mother was not there and I thought they must have lied to her about where I was going.”
They dragged her back to the yard and from the hut her cousin emerged, screaming, her dress soaked in red.
Aisha was pulled into the shed and there was a flood of fear when she saw the razors and scissors.
She was pushed to the ground, her pants pulled off and stuffed in her mouth to muffle her cries.
She said: “I couldn’t breathe. The pain was so terrible that I passed out. The pain was like nothing else, far worse than labour.”
She woke first in a taxi, then on a beach where women splashed her with water until she came round.
Aisha was confused. She said: “They told me that I was now a bride but bride of what?”
When she returned to the family’s house, nothing was said between her and her mother.
Aisha said: “My aunt complained when I filled the toilet with blood. The physical pain was horrible. The emotional pain remains, always.”
FGM leads to many complications, painful menstrual cycles, recurring urinary tract infections and the development of abscesses, cysts, or hardening of scars within and around the genital area.
Aisha developed a cyst after the cutter wrongly sewed the skin to the muscle.
When she attended a gynaecologist in Saudi Arabia, she was advised not to remove it until after marriage in case her husband thought she wasn’t a virgin.
She said: “Removing the cyst would mean losing my life because I would be killed if my husband did not believe I was a virgin.”
On her wedding night, the pain of sex was so violent that she compared it with rape and she bled heavily.
Now in Edinburgh, she will have