Eleven years ago I traveled to Kenya, but it was as an ambassador for no humanitarian organization as some celebrity images we are accustomed, but to build a school in Masai land, particularly in the town of Olopikidongoe, and in my backpack I wore were all colored boxes to distribute to children.
I would remember a glamorous image, but the only images that I keep are those of a woman doing a mason in precarious conditions: exhausted sweaty and dusty, as having no we had no concrete, and we had to prepare the mortar by hand more than 35 degrees in temperature, watching the monkeys so they do not attack us to steal the water, because that year had been extremely dry and the animals that were dying of thirst, came in droves when sensed water.
I met a wonderful land far surpassing the pictures of my favorite movie "Out of Africa", of infinite horizons impossible to cover his eyes, blue skies unlimited impossible to imitate even the best painter universal. Simple and rich people while in their own beliefs and ideals. I learned to count in Swahili and some other words, I found out that Simba was not the name of a Disney lion but a lion in this language, hakuna matata means no worry. Known words and phrases, but now took on a different sense than I attached them to become real, but mostly I noticed that there is a universal language: the eyes and the smiles that speak and never deceive, the language conveys the true feelings and does not need an interpreter.
remember with pain the day as we join the work a woman cried for her dead daughter, crushed by an elephant when he went to fetch water from a well, and his joy in the misfortune, because he been one of his daughters and not one of their sons who had died under the feet of the elephant. I could not believe what I heard, until I remembered that the day before another woman had pity on me for having only one daughter and no sons, for they, when they are older, are welcomed at home with their children, never his daughters, who become the property of the husband and the family of this and where the mother of the woman never will be accepted. The poor woman felt sorry for me because I would not have anyone to take care of me when he could no longer fend for myself, is that in their "knowledge" was I who deserved punishment and not her. I went
gaunt and exhausted, and that during those days I had some bleeding due to the efforts carrying bricks and mortar prepared with a shovel, with his hands full of sores, and sunburned skin, but above all, with the firm conviction that if I ever could, used all my strength and my resources to help eliminate some practices there I met and considered inhumane. Today, many years later, I am very pleased that my work allows me to disclose this barbarism, and contribute some of the proceeds from my books to the fight against female circumcision.
In recent years, female genital mutilation has been known around the world, began to persecute and condemn in many countries where it is considered an illegal practice, this is only the beginning, much remains to be done, hopefully one day only the memory of a bad dream so many other practices were before you get to become civilized beings such as cannibalism, impalement and many others.
Hopefully, someday we get to create a world where women no longer be humiliated, discriminated and abused with impunity by the mere fact of being female, and can develop their potential to help create a better world. Nobody like Wario Dirie, Special Ambassador for the UN in the fight against genital mutilation female can transmit the consequences and pain a woman feels mutilated.
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