A safe haven

Jet, April 29, 2002

Mary Solio, 16, play with her 2-week-old son Paul at the recently opened V-Day Safe House for Girls outside Narok, some 93 miles south of the Kenyan capital Nairobi. The safe house is a haven for girls who are fleeing forced circumcision and arranged marriages. A year ago, Solio's parents forced her to undergo circumcision, a Maasai right of passage.

Within weeks she was married to a man more than three times her age, another common Maasai tradition. Four months later, she fled into the forest, alone and, though she didn't know it at the time, pregnant. Now she lives at the safe house, where her baby will be cared for while she attends school. The project was launched by Agnes Pareyio, a 45-year-old Maasai woman who began visiting villages throughout southwestern Kenya a decade ago to educate women about the dangers of female circumcision. An estimated 130 million women, most of them in Africa, have been subjected to ritual genital cutting. The procedure ranges from clipping or burning the clitoris to cutting off all the outer labia and sewing closed the remaining tissue, leaving only a tiny opening. The practice is illegal in 18 countries, nine of them in Africa. It was outlawed in Kenya earlier this year but is still widespread.