PODCAST: Molly Melching's Breakthrough in Senegal

Solveig Rennan
Welcome to Under-Told: Verbatim. I’m Solveig Rennan for the Under-Told Stories Project. We report from all over the world for PBS NewsHour, we’ve talked to experts and people making a difference in their communities. In this podcast, we’re revisiting those under told stories, to share extended interviews we’ve done with changemakers around the world.

The celebrations are called declarations. Rural communities have come together to declare that they are abandoning the deeply rooted practice of female genital cutting or FGC. In the sea of faces is a tall white woman from Illinois. Molly Melching arrived in Senegal and 70s as a student for what was supposed to be just six months… She’s still there. The organization she founded, Tostan–which means breakthrough in the Wolof language is behind the declaration event.

Molly Melching
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would be sitting here years later saying that 4,792 communities in Senegal had abandoned

Solveig Rennan
that number of villages has since grown to 8000 across eight countries.

Molly Melching
In the beginning, it was just thought of unbelievable because it was so taboo.

Solveig Rennan
The success she’s found is rare. Each year, the World Health Organization says up to 3 million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 200 million women live with its consequences. FGC dates back 2000 years across many African and Middle Eastern countries but the practice goes back hundreds of years before Islam or Christianity, and is also practiced in both faiths and religions native to this region. As we watch the COVID-19 pandemic unfold, it’s clear that public health is dependent on more than doctors and hospitals. community outreach is key whether that means convincing community members to wash their hands or stay at home. Tostan is a prime example of the importance of engaging local communities in public health through education and empowerment. It has saved thousands of girls from female genital cutting. Our director Fred de Sam Lazaro spoke to Melching in Senegal in 2011 about her efforts to put the health of communities into their own hands.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Why don’t we begin

Solveig Rennan
Stay tuned after that conversation to hear how Tostan is responding to the COVID-19 crisis in the six West African countries it operates in

Fred de Sam Lazaro
when you started to scale this project up you were seeing some progress during the late 90s, I believe before you started to see a momentum, tell us a little bit about about your workings at that time.

Molly Melching
When we started to work on female genital cutting, really, this was, as you know, not a an objective of our program. And I had been originally against even putting this in our program, because I worried as a white American, touching upon culturally sensitive issues. Taboo issues, issues that people actually got furious and angry over, I thought what am I doing as an outsider, even though I had lived for 30 years in Senegal, what am I doing, touching on subjects like this that are that are so deeply entrenched in the culture, and I talked to my staff about it. And I said, I’m not sure we should get involved in in this, even though it’s a women’s health module, and we were doing human rights. Human Rights was a very important part of the module because we realized without human rights, people couldn’t really address health issues. So the women looked at me and they said, What do you mean, we should not talk about this issue because you’re American? What about all the rest of Tostan, all the rest of Tostan isn’t American? Therefore, why would we be doing this for you? This is for African women. We have all suffered from this practice, because the team that was working on the women’s health module had all undergone female genital cutting. They had experienced problems from it. And they said it is time that we talk about it. The good thing about it was that the way we did it was very respectful. Like all the other sessions in our module, we tried to take into into account the culture, the religious beliefs, and try to be very sensitive about approaching this. We went to many, many women and to men and to the religious leaders, and we got their opinions before we actually put this in the module we were working on. But when we did do it, and then actually, were totally shocked, we were totally shocked when the women of Mali Kunde Bambara after doing the women’s health module, told us that they had decided to abandon this practice. I was the most surprised at all. It had never been our intention in 1996 when we did this module on women’s health and we put in the human rights we had never had as an objective that people abandon, we thought we’re going to inform them, they will become aware and on their own, they will see how to take do move this forward, but never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would be sitting here years later, 13 years later, saying that 4,792 communities in Senegal had abandoned. In the beginning it was just thought of unbelievable because it was so taboo. So in the beginning, there were lots of problems. There, the first village that stood up and decided to abandon when we asked them if they would be willing to talk to journalists about this, they said, after thinking quite a bit, it was a big decision that those women those brave, brave women made. They said, okay, we’ve made the decision. So why should we be afraid to share this with our sisters and brothers and our community? Little did they realize what reaction they would have when they stood up. The day that we invited journalists to come and listen to why they had decided to abandon this practice. None of the other villagers showed up. And it was amazing because when I had first gone, we had the whole village come out and talk about how the Imam the village chief, the men, the adolescents, everybody had decided to abandon and suddenly when the journalists came, there were only the women and just one or two men and we went, uh-oh, something is going on. And it was only when we realized that one village alone cannot stand up without the others that they’re that are part of their social network the other villages with who they intermarry. It was because of a villager named Dembe Jawara that we were actually able to understand how this is so important to have the people themselves we should have asked the women to reach out to all those villages where they intermarry, to, to listen to them to talk to them to dialogue with them to understand the negative health consequences of this practice, and to join together unite and be one group that decides to abandon together. And we didn’t know then. It was only Dembe, who came afterwards and said the reason that the women are having so many problems is because they did this alone. And in Africa, you don’t do anything alone, you don’t go against the group.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
What possessed these women to do it unilaterally then?

Molly Melching
I think the reason the women decided initially the first community decided to abandon is because they had probably seen negative consequences of the practice in the, in their own children with their own children. I have found throughout these last 13 years, as the movement has unfolded in Senegal, throughout these hundreds and thousands of villages, that often the leaders of this movement at the grassroots level have been women whose daughters have died, or who’ve hemorrhaged, or who’ve had terrible pain in childbirth and have suffered the consequence through fistula or other problems that they’ve had, sexual problems. It’s sterility, and I think that that has a lot to do with it. I think that’s somewhere in their mind, even though they were told that the consequences of of of this practice, when there were negative consequences, it was bad spirits that caused it at that time. They had not gone through the health module, many people and they didn’t understand germ transmission, and they didn’t understand what actually happened with the cutting and why they would have problems. Why did these women stand up? They stood up because when they heard the health consequences of the practice, and they started connecting the dots and saying, okay, we’ve seen our girls get fevers two weeks later, and maybe they had tetanus, but we always thought they died of tetanus maybe not. That it was the FGC operation that led to this. Rather, you know, when a child or girl gets a fever two weeks later, they don’t associate it with what happened to her two weeks before. So suddenly, as they started learning the germ transmission and the consequences of FGC and how these infections occur, and why they had more problems in childbirth and other women who have not been cut. They started saying wait a minute and discussing among themselves and saying, look, together we have decided to, to to move towards practices which help us to improve our health and our well being, and to move forward in the community and our girls and our sons. Everyone will be healthier and happier, there will be more well being this is what we’ve said our goals for the future and these practices are not helping us achieve these goals. And I must say the two that what has been key in all of this has been the Human Rights sessions, where people learn for the first time that they have the human right to speak out. They have the human right to health and the responsibility to make sure their daughters and their children and their families are in good health, their communities are in good health. And so they really discuss this profoundly deeply. It touched them as human rights education has touched hundreds of thousands of villagers that we have reached with this kind of education. It’s very moving when they learn that they have the right to be free from all forms of discrimination, that they are born equal. And that it’s, it’s amazing how it it changes people and gives them confidence. They learn they have the human right to speak out and voice their opinions. And I think this is what gave the women confidence. They say yes, this makes sense. We should have the right to decide to abandon and a practice that has done harm to our girls, when they did not have confidence to do that before and going through the program, learning how to speak out, how to express their their their problems and their fears for the future and their goals for the future led them to be courageous enough to stand up in front of the nation and abandon the practice on July 31, 1997.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
What, what did you set out to do when you started Tostan. You say this was not part of the program? What were you thinking? You know, when you began

Molly Melching
I came to Senegal for six months as a student. And I had no intention of staying when I got on the plane to come over here. But when I got off that plane, I realized, uh-oh, I think I’m going to be here for a long time. It was immediate feeling of being very happy to be in Senegal. And as I lived here, and I went to the University of Dakar, I started talking to people of course, and I learned the language I learned to speak in Wolof, and I found out so many things that I could never have imagined when I was in the United States, studying at the University of Illinois. You hear of things but and when you see a friend that you have known for several months, and you’ve gone to her house for lunch, and then she tells you her her child has, has some problem that, that it’s someone who’s cast an evil spell on on the child, the baby, and that she’s going to take them to a religious leader to get the spell taken off. And you don’t know what to say. And it turns out the baby was dehydrated. And I should have known that because the soft the fontanelle was sunken. And these are things I should have learned, perhaps in school, but I didn’t. And I didn’t tell her that and then that baby died. And I had a lot of things like this happen. And I realized that people like this woman had never been to school. They did not have basic information. They did not speak French, which is the language of the formal schools and so I sat and thought, my goodness, these people need to be able to learn in their own language. The women, particularly who particularly had not been able to go to school, they were not able to learn French at age 40 or 45. But they could easily learn in their own language. And so I thought, wow, if there were only a program that allowed them to get the information they needed to make really important decisions. In other words, maybe it is important to still go to the religious leader and get his blessings. At the same time, she knows that I must immediately give the oral rehydration therapy to my child the solution is available. If I if I if she would have done that when the child started having diarrhea, this death would not have occurred, the diet the baby would not have been dehydrated, she would not even have gone either to the hospital or to the religious leader for those special blessings. So, I started then, to live in a village and working with people and listening to their beliefs and seeing how working with them and listening to them and what their concerns, their fears, their their deepest beliefs were, how we could work through this together and maybe get them the information. Lots of times I didn’t have the information I had to go find out also. So it was really a very collaborative process of putting this program together. And up until 1996, when we were working on the women’s health module, we really have not confronted these very controversial issues of things like family planning, very controversial here. female genital cutting child marriage. These are very deep, deeply entrenched traditions that are difficult, difficult to talk about, and to bring up and to dare to Discuss within a program in a way that will not make people defensive, that will not make them, you know, say what are you doing? What are you talking about this for? We don’t want to talk about this. This is our tradition, you know, we don’t need to talk about this. So we found a way to do that, so that people could talk about it in security and safety, without judgment. Because as you know, many people tend in the west to be very judgmental about certain of these practices. What we found is that being judgmental did not allow people that space they needed, that nurturing comfortable space where they could say, okay, we’ve been doing this and we do it because we love our daughters, and we do it because we’ve had seen no alternative to doing it really. We know that if we don’t do it, our daughters won’t have a husband. They won’t be respected, they will be marginalized. No one will eat their food. No one will wear the clothes, they wash, they will be considered impure and dirty. So they have no choice, really. So it was through the sessions that people could actually discuss these issues in a very safe space without being judged, and being fully respected as loving mothers, and be able to come to a consensus around the fact that if these were harmful social norms, perhaps it was time to change them in a way that would guard those things that were truly important to them, which are happiness and peace and security and health, well being. Those were the things that were really important, and before they had practiced FGC to achieve that goal of belonging of social identity, and seeing now that maybe this practice was having just the opposite of what they were seeking, the goal they were seeking, they then made the decision that it’s time to abandon this because it’s not helping us achieve our true goals in society.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
The impetus for the change has to come from within the community that can’t be shamed into changing this behavior that that seems to be in the obvious inference from all of this, the moral of the story, but has that historically, been the approach of agencies and other organizations? To try and change this, has that historically and does that continue to be the modus operandi for organizations that want to change this, this practice

Molly Melching
Tostan found that using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changing social norms. Being judgemental, coming in and or either messaging and saying, stop this now this is really bad we we will not tolerate you’re doing this. We found that this was having just the opposite effect of what you would want to have. What do you want to have? You want to open doors to dialogue. You want this to be a decision that is made from within and not from without. You want people to understand, when they do decide, so that when they do understand and they do make a decision and they do stand up together as a as united community, you know it’s sustainable. If it is imposed from the outside, often you will see that it is not sustainable. They’re just doing it to please others. In the past, there have been attempts from from very well intentioned people who, who really want to see this practice end and know how women have suffered . And people have done so much in the past; other organizations have worked to, to to find a way to end this practice. And they have made great progress in getting people to talk about this for the first time; in getting the heads of state the politicians, the lawmakers aware of the need to protect girls and women. I think were Tostan had a real advantage in this whole process was that we had years of experience of working within communities, hundreds of communities, in Senegal, in Guinea, where this was practiced, and of listening. I think one of the biggest probably the advantages of our team is that they they really listen to people and respect people. And the facilitators in our program, all those Africans who live near the community or in the community and who are facilitating the classes and the discussions for three years, they were the ones who came to us to and said, there is a certain approach. There’s a way of talking about this, and we can do this. You can’t just come in and tell people stop this now, they won’t listen to you. But there is a way of when people are educated when they have the right information. When this is not done in a way to make them feel like they’re backward or uncivilized or barbaric, then people will listen. When you say to someone, you you do love your daughter, we know you love your daughter, and you’re doing things because you love your daughter. But let’s look at this. And let’s try to understand together exactly what are the consequences of this practice, but you are the ones that will have to make the decision. Then suddenly people are willing to listen, they don’t get defensive. They don’t say wait a minute, who are you to be coming in here and talking to me about this?

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Were these people to listen, what would they have heard from the community on this issue?

Molly Melching
Were… I’m sorry?

Fred de Sam Lazaro
You say, you know, one of the things that distinguishes Tostan, from Tostan’s approach from others is that is the ability to listen, which I assume means learning more about the community and its norms and where they’re coming from. What would they have heard, had people have chosen to listen. What did Tostan hear, coming back from the community, that informed your approach?

Molly Melching
Every lesson that we have learned in this entire process, moving forward towards accelerated abandonment of this practice throughout the country has come really from the people themselves. They are the ones who have led this movement. They have told us what needs to be done. They themselves have gone from community to community and they know what to say to people because they come from that ethnic group. We have never, for example, I would never be a person who went into a village that practices FCC to talk to them, that would be unheard of, thinkable for us. The people who do go into those villages are participants of our program, who have learned, who have become experts, community experts on health on human rights, who have come together made decisions and want to share this. They don’t they always say it’s interesting. They always say, when we go to communities, we don’t impose on them either. We don’t say you have to do this, because this is we know now this is really bad. No! They talk to them, and they tell them about what they went through; how difficult it was for them, in the beginning, how much they discuss this, whether they should or they shouldn’t, or what would it mean in terms of their respect for their ancestors. But the whole idea was that it was they were the ones who were showing us the way forward. They were the ones saying we need to go to this and this and this this village, because that’s where we’re connected. This is where we have relatives. Without them, we will not be able to end this practice. But we need to spend four days in this community. And we can only spend one day in this community because we know them very well. And we know that it will be much easier here, than it will be over there. And we need for example, perhaps to do the program in some villages, because people will be very willing at that point to reach out to their whole social network. So they have always been the ones informing us of where to go next. Where the resistance would be, why they need to go there, how long they need to spend there, and it’s just amazing; their passion, their devotion, and their commitment to this movement. So really, what Tostan has done has pretty much supported them and let them move forward and lead that movement and this is what has worked. They have gone across borders. They’ve met their, their families, of course, do not know boarders. Their extended family is in Mali, it’s in Gambia and it’s in Guinea, Guinea Bissau, and they go and work with the members of their community, wherever they may be in the diaspora. They have gone to France to Italy, to Spain, to the United States, and talked with the community members living overseas to say, we want you to be part of this movement too. We don’t want to abandon without you, you have to be part of this movement.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Tell us a little bit about how all these light bulbs went off to inform this approach. I mean, what how did you learn that this was the way to go.

Molly Melching
This This approach has been difficult to get other people to understand often, because it is sometimes counterintuitive. People think, Oh, these people need to stop this practice. Let’s go tell them to do that. We just send out a message and say, you got to stop this, and why aren’t they doing this? What’s wrong with them? And so saying, no, this has to come from the people. They it has to be something that comes from within and is understood. People have to have the information, be well educated, and they have to be the ones that then reach out. Really, I guess it was it was making so many mistakes myself, I lived in a village. I lived in a village for four years, and I made lots of mistakes in my efforts helping people. But I found the main thing that would help if I really wanted to contribute to the people and their goals for the future. Not my goals, but their goals, was to listen, I learned that by making mistakes. I’ll give you an example I wanted to do to help them with health, they said that one of their goals was health. And we discussed nutrition and they said, We don’t have vegetables. So we were discussing how a garden would help with providing vegetables for improving nutrition and the community. I said fine. Why don’t you write a proposal in Wolof, they had learned to read and write in the national language of Wolof, and they did the proposal, they were very excited. And then I said, Okay, now what we’re going to do, we’re going to set up the garden. And everybody is this is Africa. Everybody will participate. Everyone will be involved, everyone will come. And I was with someone who was actually from Dakar as Senegalese, also, two Senegalese in our team. And we all said, Oh, yes, this is how we’re going to do this. So the villager said, Okay, all right. And Then we started the garden, there was a well built. We got the seeds, we everything was ready. And so the first day, about 40 people came and worked in the garden. The second day, maybe 30 people came the fourth day, less people came. And then a week later, maybe two people came. And finally there was no one to work in the garden. And we couldn’t understand what happened. So we went over to the to the village, and we said to people, you know, can we have a meeting and discuss what what’s going on? And they said, Well, this is this is not how we do. This is not how a garden will succeed. And we said, What? And they said, No, I mean, this is not how it will work for us. We said, Well, how would it work for you? They said, well, you would have everyone have their own row and a family would be owned by one row. And they would be responsible for that not everybody just coming and working in the garden, who knows who’s responsible and who knows who that produce is going to. And we don’t do things like that. And we said, But why didn’t you tell us? And they said, Well, you didn’t ask us. And we said, but why would you let us go through all this and set all this up? And they said, We didn’t want to hurt your feelings. You were so enthusiastic. We didn’t want to make you feel bad. We appreciate you’re trying to help us. So

Fred de Sam Lazaro
it’s as simple as that and as complex as that.

Molly Melching
It is as simple as that and as complex as that.

Solveig Rennan
Fred caught up with Molly again virtually this march to see how she and Tostan have pivoted to face the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
So Molly, let’s get rolling. How are your operations affected by the coronavirus?

Molly Melching
We have a staff of about 700 people out in the field working with communities firsthand. And unfortunately, with the coronavirus, we felt it really critical to protect our staff that was so important to us so that we thought we should get them back into their families because we know how important it is to do early prevention. So all of our facilitators who are in the communities working directly on with the three year program, with the communities in their huts in their homes, they have gone back to their own villages, the supervisors are no longer in the fields and our national coordinators and our international office, all of us are now back in our homes, working from home, we’re all working. And of course, we’re all very concerned about the villagers and making sure that We do all that we can to get the information they need about the symptoms with the virus is the coronaviruses and what to do if there are symptoms in the community. So that is our major concern right now. And that’s what I’ve been working on ever since I have been in isolation here and in my house.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Most of the people have gone home to working from home. I mean, how feasible is that in especially rural areas?

Molly Melching
This poses a big problem in the communities because most people don’t have internet some of them do. Some of them can get WhatsApp and they can get information off of WhatsApp. And they only have the radio really is the radio is what we’re using a lot to get information out to them and national languages. It’s it’s very hard to to think of what will happen there because if it were to be the case that the the the coronavirus were to come to one of the communities and people were asked to self isolate, it would be almost impossible. And this is what we’re most concerned about. Even the preventive measure measures that people have been saying to do to wash your hands all the time, well, that takes lots of water, or it takes the hypoalcoholic solutions that people don’t have, they cost a lot of money. And so we’re worried about all that. And we’re worried about handshaking, which is a social norm here and it’s very difficult. People are still not sure exactly what this is, what how dangerous it is, and something that they have felt as being one of the most important things you can do is to greet another person to show them respect and what we call here in Senegal, ranga. The welcoming that you give to someone, it’s just so important. And so to tell people to stop doing that, it’s very hard. So, you know, we pretty much have adopted this way of saying hello. So that, you know, you continue with the greeting and we say, you know, we know how important it is to greet others, but you just can’t touch you, the other things that have come up are people eating out of the same bowl. Of course, that would be difficult also, to get people to stop and a lot for economic reasons, because people don’t have plates and, and silverware like we have in the West. Um, also drinking out of the same cup, the same issue. They don’t have lots of cups for 25 people who live in the same house to have their own cup, just so many challenges that we are faced with and how to deal with them. Another issue, lots of issues, so people here don’t have refrigerators. A lot of villagers of course don’t have refrigerator. So if you tell them to stay home and not go out, how can they stock food? And how can they put things in the refrigerator? They they’re used to going to the market every day to get their food. Now suddenly they’re closing the markets. They’re closing down early here. restaurants have closed. They’ve been closed for a week or 10 days. It’s very hard and of course, for people like me who are over 60 I can’t really go out and people are all saying to me you’re under house arrest you’re not gonna go out. So I what I’m trying to do is get out videos, short videos, to get information to people. So with of course our staff and always in national languages. That’s so so important to get it out on the radio, perhaps to get the videos out on WhatsApp, for those who have YouTube or Facebook, that they could at least see people whom they respect. For example, we’re using religious leaders. We’re getting, you know, last week there was a big problem because they were told not to go to the mosque. And you can imagine how that would make people feel.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Has that ever happened before?

Molly Melching
No, never. People have said is the first time ever that on Friday, they had not gone to Friday prayers. And there were protests, they protests all over Dakkar, in the neighborhoods. And luckily, we have wonderful religious leaders who after they really understood, they really got very good information. The Senegalese government has been extremely proactive. They very early on, started these preventative measures. And then they worked with religious leaders to let them know how important this was. So this this last Friday, it was much better. There were only two places where the police were right there and stopped them from coming into the mosque. But it is difficult. And of course, the hard thing is of course, it affects older people more. And we’re very worried about that. I mean, luckily here in Senegal, one of the beautiful things is there is this great respect and love for older people. And their, the youth are very concerned and they really want to help them. So, you know, we’re we’re using that actually, and they really don’t want to see elders disappear as they are in other countries, which is so sad. So we are appealing to their emotions around that and saying that you may not have symptoms, but you will be able to carry those symptoms. You’d share them with others and this is very dangerous. So We are using all we can to try to get people to understand

Fred de Sam Lazaro
What’s raising your spirits? Hopefully there’s something that’s raising your spirits among, amid all of this.

Molly Melching
I’m, I’m very lucky because we have a wonderful staff that is so dedicated and determined to do something to help in any way they can. And so they are reaching out many of them have, even though they’re back in their villages, they’re calling their communities every day and asking them we’re trying to find out what do they need.

Solveig Rennan
Our interview with Molly Melching was originally featured in our story called Abandoning Female Genital Cutting, which aired on the PBS program, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on July 15, 2011. To check out the full story, go to under told stories.org This episode was hosted and edited by me Solveig Rennan and produced by Simeon Lancaster. The interview is conducted by our director Fred de Sam Lazaro. You can find every Under-Told: Verbatim episode, virtual reality 360 experiences and our entire library of Under-Told news reports from around the world at under told stories.org. Under-Told: Verbatim is brought to you by the Under-Told Stories Project based at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. As always, thanks for your support.