Wedding Favour to the Poor

Protecting women, maintain marriage, advocate combating female genital mutilation

Couples must be loyal to each other in a marriage. In some countries, in order to let their future partner feel their loyalty, they do not rely on love and perseverance, but on a physically crippling operation – Female Genital Mutilation – Removal of part or the entire clitoris, labia, or lock the opening of the vagina, leaving only a small hole to discharge urine and menstrual blood. Some poor communities believe that it can reduce female sexual desire and prevent them from promiscuity.

Except men asking unmarried women to have female genital mutilation, mothers and aunts who are deeply affected by this tradition will also perform it to their daughters and daughters-in-law. This not only causes great trauma to them, but it will also cause severe pain to them during sexual intercourse and childbirth, even have complications during childbirth. Under this influence of this tradition, how can women get real happiness in marriage?

CEDAR supports the development committee of Ethiopian Kale Heywet Church (EKHC) to mobilise schools, churches and government departments to promote the message of combating female genital mutilation in the western Ethiopian communities where female genital mutilation is popular. They also group the mothers, hoping that this bad habit will not be passed on from generation to generation. After four years of hard work, the number of women undergoing female genital mutilation there dropped significantly. Among them, we are happy to see Tenaya has got real happiness…

Tenaya and her husband married in 2015. Under the influence of our project, they understand the hurt of female genital mutilation to female physically and mentally and know that the maintenance of marriage is about loving each other. The happier news is that the elders in their family also understand the disadvantages of having female genital mutilation and try to protect Tenaya. Tenaya’s aunt told us because of her previous female genital mutilation, it took her five to six days to give birth in all her eight births. When Tenaya gave birth to her daughter, it just took her 15 minutes, which is a great blessing.