“It may be said that any time a heart opens, the entire creation sings,” say the Q’uo group, channeled through L/L Research on February 10, 2008. The creation must be singing a lovely song, because Agnes Pareyio’s heart is open and streaming with love for her fellow women of Africa.
This unique Difference-Maker has squared off against an issue which is unpleasant to consider, but which has occurred for at least the last 5,000 years, and currently happens to at least 2 million women per year, mostly Africans, and mostly against their will, according to UNICEF. It is called FGM - Female Genital Mutilation – also sometimes called Female Circumcision or Female Cutting.
Agnes Pareyio was born in 1956 in the Maasai village of Enaibor Ajijik, in the Narok District of Kenya. She finished secondary school in 1973. Although untrained, she taught school from 1975 to 1984. She was nominated a councilor of the Narok County Council and served in that capacity until 1994. She also served as treasurer of her district until 2001.
During the late eighties, she was employed as the district coordinator for a campaign against harmful traditional practices. It was in this capacity that she began to educate women concerning FGM.
Her campaign against FGM eventually resulted, in 2000, in her founding the Tasaru Ntomonok Centre, a rescue house for girls fleeing FGM. Here, she created a rite of passage for girls as an alternative to FGM. Wendy Flick of the Pond Foundation says in an article on the www.adventuredivas.com site that “Agnes’s staff is devoted to the education and protection of the girls. They house them, negotiate with their parents, clothe them, feed them, protect them, and allow them to stay until they have the direction to move on to a higher education, or marriage.”
Agnes herself was a victim of this procedure, which removes the clitoris, the hood and the outer and inner labia, leaving nothing but bone, when she was just 14. Her legs were bound together after urine was poured over the surgical wound to sterilize it, and she was left in that state for several days to allow the wound to close. Almost immediately thereafter, she was married. Her husband opened the wound then, with a knife, in order to permit marital relations. Needless to say, with no anesthetic and no skilled surgeon in residence, the procedure was incredibly painful. It is not called mutilation for nothing!
The rationales for this procedure lean heavily on tradition. Advocates claim, with no supporting evidence, that it is good for female hygiene and cures depression, hysteria, insanity and kleptomania, according to the Wikipedia site on Female Genital Cutting. It is regarded as a means of preservation of and proof of virginity and a prerequisite for an honorable marriage. Tribal men and women explain these rationales with perfectly straight faces, their sense of what is right dulled by generations of dogma and the fear of what their fellow villagers will say about them. They have accepted this savage practice for millennia.
Interestingly enough, Agnes says that when she takes the wooden model of the vagina which she had made when she began her campaign against FGM, and demonstrates to the tribal elders exactly what takes place in this procedure, they are horrified and often put a stop to the practice themselves.
When the anti-violence group V-Day America heard about Agnes’s work, they donated enough funds to build her centre, which opened in 2001. Now Agnes keeps it running with her fees from speaking. The centre has a dormitory which houses 48 girls. It is non-profit and non-political. To make a donation to aid her work, you may go to solidsaltspring.ca.
The rite of passage which Agnes created as an alternative to FGM is a two-week-long ceremony that celebrates nine- to fourteen-year-old girls, according to the adventuredivas site. The girls are given gifts of beads and traditional clothing and are “exposed to values and information that direct them toward health and education first, before marriage.”
Agnes uses Maasai women volunteers to sponsor the girls in her clinic. When the rite of passage ends with singing and dancing, they have been mentored, given much information and are left with a whole new array of choices to make – choices that will make them happy and useful in ways beyond being a wife and mother.
The practice of FGM flourishes in cultures which feel that the place of a female is completely circumscribed by marriage and children. It is part of the systematic subjugation of women as an sex inferior to men and worthwhile only as an adjunct to men which is thousands of years old in many world cultures.
Agnes’s success is due, in part at least, to the global trend towards seeing women as having value outside of child-bearing. As women are educated, they become aware of how they can aid their villages and families by the work they do, and consequently there is a snowball effect, creating a more rapid spread of these new and humane ideas.
Agnes admits readily that her work has made only a small dent in this situation, so far. However she views “even the smallest way forward as a victory against a tradition that has harmed and killed countless girls and women needlessly.”
The Q’uo group, talking in the same session about the “Hundredth Monkey Effect”, so-called by Lyall Watson in describing the phenomenon in which a learned behavior spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number is reached, say,
“From the hunger of a few who wished to seek the truth, there has been given as gifts from person to person and group to group, that same hunger. It is an infectious hunger, and it spreads because the nature of third-density entities is to have that hunger. And so that hunger keeps surfacing, no matter what else is occurring within your culture.
“And as the energies of repression and fear have moved heaven and earth—literally—to bring the planetary population to a point of permanent fear and submission, they have, in effect, shot their bolt. They have come to the end of what they can do with fear, violence and war, whereas the voice of love has only just begun.”
I like to dwell on the thought that “we’ve only just begun”, as The Carpenters song says it. Often I hear from people who look at the disastrous way we have manhandled Planet Earth and each other. They want to give up hope. They feel that there has been too much damage done, damage we cannot undo. I understand their pain. I can read the statistics given by learned men who predict that global warming will kill the oceans in our lifetime while the ozone layer’s depletion creates more and more damage to humans with increasingly toxic sunlight. It sounds very bad.
But then, third density in general is pretty rough! It is boot camp here! The illusion is thick. The ethical decisions come often and plentifully. We are not likely to remain comfortable here if we are alert and awake.
However, perhaps we might think a bit differently on this point. As Q’uo says in the same session,
“Shall you in one fine, strong moment be able to change the face of the Earth? Naturally, it is extremely unlikely. It is likely that those who are polarizing towards negative graduation shall continue to hog the news, the headlines, and the avenues of power on this planet. And yet the vast majority of the population of Planet Earth lives without regard to the avenues of power, looking for truth, justice, liberty, beauty and all the fourth-density values within the humble pages of a humbly-lived life.”
It is to this very boot camp that we wanted to come so badly! We wanted to come because we can do work here. Q’uo says,
“In a way, the beauty of this density is its very sharpness of suffering and difficulty. For the extremely harsh conditions create ways in which one may change one’s polarity or emphasize one’s polarity very quickly, indeed, almost instantaneously. You may do in fifty years, or twenty years, or even five years that which it would take us a million years to do, because of the fact that we see the whole picture. We understand all that there is to understand in terms of the Creator’s plan for us. Therefore, it is an open-book test, and that which we learn, we learn in painfully slow increments, gradually refining, and refining again, our choice.
“You are making that choice. So the energies of your density may well seem very, very difficult, not so much that of a prison as of a testing field or a fiery furnace, as it is called in the Old Testament of your Holy Bible.
“By faith alone is it allowable to know the truth in this density. You hold in your hands the keys of unknowing. The answers do not lie within this density. It is the questions that lie within this density. We can offer you the answer that we know to offer you, and that answer is love, love, love.
“Realize that the love in your life is completely up to you and your faculties of faith and will. And we wish you every good fortune in persevering until you have managed to find all possible love and light within your heart and within your environment, knowing that that which is in your heart is that which paints the colors of your environment.”
I open my arms and embrace your spirit. May we, like Agnes Pareyio, lend our hearts, thoughts, words and actions to doing what we can to find and celebrate the love and light in our hearts and shine it forth in our world. Be love! Live love! And spread love! Thank you, Agnes!