Be a Fast Learner!
by Mary Racelis
One feature I had not expected that would become forever present in “life with UNICEF” was the capacity to learn fast. Ability to adapt quickly and appropriately to the latest multi-sectoral, multi-tasking challenge developed in NYHQ or wherever was one indicator of a successful staff member.
That realization of having to know, even if initially you didn’t know, hit me from Day One, 1979. Piled up on my desk were about 65 questionnaires. My first task as Senior Adviser, Family and Child Welfare, as Program Division Director Ralph Eckert explained, was to consolidate a survey which my predecessor, Ms. Titi Memet had initiated. Then to turn it into a Program Directive. The topic? Female circumcision!
I had never even heard of female circumcision before then, yet I was to generate guidelines for country offices on how to deal with the practice. Female circumcision had been gaining some attention among women’s groups in the United States and Europe, some of whom had been badgering UNICEF to do something about the practice. The procedure was especially rampant in Africa although relatively unknown in Asia.
The completed questionnaires awaiting my attention were neatly laid out on my desk, most of them from African and Middle Eastern Country Offices. The contents introduced me to the overwhelming practice with its devastating effects on young girls. My learning curve expanded rapidly as I read through the country office responses. Significant were the apprehensions expressed especially by African program officers as to UNICEF’s tackling an activity deeply embedded in the cultural framing of gender. My anthropological training would have to help figure how UNICEF might address it.
That called for more research into the practice rampant in its most extreme form in countries like Somalia. Nearly 100 percent of women had undergone the excision ceremony as it was sometimes called, often taken to the event by their grandmother. Having gone bravely through the ordeal, these young girls would be greeted with songs and praises as they were now ready to fulfill their future feminine roles as wives and mothers.
For UNICEF the issue had to be framed simply as a threat to children’s and women’s health. Many young girls were dying from excessive bleeding and infections. Its after-effects could have serious consequences, like steady urine leakage when a slip of the knife or blade had hit the urethra. The victim would become a foul-smelling, incontinent pariah in the community for life. The program directive steadfastly limited its language to health threats as legitimately within its mandate.
The first draft of the Program Directive was circulated at HQs for comment. Many of the women program staff and a number of men advocated the need for strong UNICEF action. There was, however, great unease both at headquarters and in Africa country offices owing to the document’s implicitly raising the generally taboo subject of sexual and gender norms. Despite the focus on girls’ health, was UNICEF implying condemnation of long-established cultural norms?
On the advice of the advocates, I arranged a meeting of Programme Division colleagues to explain the document’s guidelines and get their inputs and consent for the document to be released. At the same time the advocates wanted their colleagues, especially the males, to view the actual operation through a video prepared by an NGO working in Africa. The UNICEF audience watched in silence with occasional groans and gasps heard in the darkness.. With some revisions, Ralph Eckert subsequently issued the program directive.
Not long afterwards, I was at the International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, participating in a panel at which I described UNICEF’s breakthrough policy on female circumcision. It elicited high praise especially from the Swedish delegation as well as other European and American participants.
Then Senagalese sociologist, Dr. Marie Angelique Savané, took the floor. She was actually a friend of mine from my social science networking days in the Philippines. In no uncertain terms, she attacked UNICEF for adopting Western women’s ethnocentric views of female circumcision when it should be African women’s groups who addressed the problem. Why were we pandering to value judgments being made about another country’s cultural practices by people who had no understanding of or sympathy with the larger cultural meanings at stake?
African women were indeed concerned about the practice, continued Marie Anglelique, and it is our prerogative and responsibility to address it within our own countries. Already, she informed the crowd, African women NGOs were developing networks across the continent to work on a range of traditional practices physically harmful to women and children. This had to be done carefully in culturally acceptable ways, given the extremely sensitive nature of the issue. UNICEF, therefore, instead of assailing the practice, should support African women’s efforts to deal with the problem. I was roundly chastised along with UNICEF.
After the session, I sought out Marie Angelique, who said she hoped I understood she had to denounce my message even though we were friends. I assured her that I understood totally and agreed with her on ways forward. My messages to the field soon after encouraged African country offices to partner with local women’s NGOs in their efforts to address a range of traditional practices harmful to children and women.
Happily three years later when I was posted to Nairobi as Regional Director, I met some of the African women working effectively in communities, with the medical sector, with government and Parliament to eliminate female circumcision in culturally sensitive ways. I was more than happy to encourage country offices to give them support. The learning process had been a long and bumpy road, but it became a meaningful journey of learning.
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