The story of Kenyan woman's escape from genital mutilation

By Marianna Kakaounaki

Everyone who knows her speaks of a kind, low-key woman who only rarely shares her story. The 42-year-old Kenyan, who wished to remain anonymous, just barely escaped deportation from Greece back to Kenya, where she faced the threat of female genital mutilation.

She has spent the past few years living in the central Athenian neighborhood of Kypseli with her youngest son, aged 3. Her two older boys are currently in state care due to her financial woes. The elder of the two just finished third grade and his teachers describe him as a “total sweetheart,” while the younger is about to start kindergarten. The family is reunited on the weekends, attending church every Sunday. The bureaucratic procedures to get the family over to the United States so mother and children can rejoin the father in New York are under way, though the process is both complicated and time-consuming. The 42-year-old's biggest fear is not that something will happen to prevent the trip across to the US but that she may be deported back to Kenya. As she recently told a Greek court, she would face the threat of torture and genital mutilation is she were forced to go back.

The anonymous woman is a Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in the East African country. Her father came from a town called Murang'a, the home of the Mungiki, a dangerous extremist group that has been active since 1980 and branded a terrorist organization by authorities. The woman herself was born in Mombasa, where she spent a carefree childhood. When her father lost his job, the family was forced to move to Murang'a. She was just 10 at the time, but knew that there was one secret she could never share with her fellow villagers: that she had not undergone a cliterectomy, a ritual imposed, often...