Danielle Mérian, president of the association SOS Africaines en danger, and Omar Sy, actor, fight for the respect of the rights of the girls.
"International Girl's Day, October 11, highlighted three fundamental rights that girls crave: not to be mutilated, to go to school, not to be forcibly married.
The fate of girls is tragic. Are violated multiple rights: the right to be born (200 million have not emerged because girls), the right to be declared to the civil status and therefore to be citizens, the right to continue their studies (132 million in the world are out of school), the right not to be victims of incest or rape, the right not to be mutilated (200 million in the world are excised).
Excision is very poorly known in France, despite awareness work. In 2013, the association SOS Africaines en danger (s osafricainesendanger.org ) was born from a group of words in a center of care for tortured, Parcours d'Exil, in Paris. It brings together young refugee women from West Africa, all circumcised and forcibly married to old polygamists to whom they are given by their fathers.
Buses transformed into clinics
The African women in danger are their girls left in the village and they could not take in their flight, when they managed to escape their sexual slavery, raped repeatedly by their old husbands, and their economic slavery as last wife to serve everyone. This means that for them, the school ended with the marriage. These refugees who have found freedom in France want to bring their children to avoid the excision of their daughters. They also want, in Africa, to abandon this crime.
To do this, in 2017, SOS Africaines en danger conceived a campaign in the ten French-speaking countries from which they come: to see the abandonment of excision, to circulate for five years ten American school buses transformed half into dispensaries, half into cyber- centers.
These school buses have the advantage of being high trucks on wheels, without any modern technology. They will be able to drive to the bottom of the villages, even without roads, will not fear the heat, the dust, or the difficult repairs. The clinic will allow local doctors to care for mothers and girls, and teach them why excision is the cause of all their physical ailments: painful sex, twenty minutes to urinate, eight days a month of atrocious rules, death in childbirth, when they have not died of bleeding on the day of knife-cutting in the bush.
The cyber-center, all the buses being connected by satellite, will allow to exchange in the ten countries the videos realized everywhere, as in Senegal, the pilot country, with videos done with the association of the ex-excisers who explain each why they stopped mutilating.
The first right of a girl who comes into the world is not to be mutilated. In early 2018, to implement this campaign, SOS Africaines en danger launched a call for donations on the platform www.gofundme.com/daniellemerian .
With the actor Omar Sy, in solidarity with this great cause of public health, where the dignity of women is flouted, our association calls on civil society, foundations, CAC 40 companies, diplomats of all countries to commit to the respect of girls' rights, and to relay this call for donations, to subscribe to them and to allow this campaign to be conducted for the honor of humanity. "