San Francisco Observer Oct 2004: click here

Celebrating the clitoris Sia Amma, Liberian native, uses humor and drama to educate about female genital mutilation by Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer - Sunday March 9, 2003

The three walls surrounding the rehearsal space boast paintings of larger-than-life silhouettes representing African drummers, dancers and tribal warriors. Sitting on a chair in the center of the stage, Corinthia Peoples easily slips into her larger-than-life character.

"My name is Clitoriana," she proclaims, her voice booming. "I am a clitoris activist. The clitoris has been tortured, mocked, punched, ridiculed, scoffed at, spit upon, mutilated, cursed, taunted, physically hurt, put through endless misery, agony, anguish, ignored, disrespected and cut off with knives, razor blades and scissors."

Peoples, 30, of Oakland, has no trouble delivering these piercingly painful lines. But a few moments later, when the script calls for her to mimic an orgasm, Peoples giggles and can't proffer up more than a few weak moans. She's quickly interrupted.

"Talk to us!" shouts Sia Amma, 34, who wrote the script and will accept no mealy-mouthed deliveries. "You're not having an orgasm by yourself. Share it!"

The other actors - gathered at the African American Art and Culture Center to rehearse Amma's monologues - quickly crane their necks to look at Amma. But she, standing barefoot and wearing a curve-hugging black dress, just throws her head back and bursts into her trademark deep-bellied, infectious guffaw. The other actors can't help but join in the chorus of laughter.

It's a rare woman who can present a performance about female genital mutilation - premiering Friday and Saturday in the form of the First Annual Clitoris Celebration at Berkeley's Julia Morgan Center - and make it OK for audience members to laugh.

But that's been Amma's goal since finding her comedic voice. She'll brashly tell strangers about the day she was 9 and elders in her village in Liberia cut off her clitoris with a razor blade - the same blade they used on five or six other girls. A previous version of her monologue, titled "In Search of My Clitoris," included her scurrying around the theater, asking audience members if they'd seen her missing piece of flesh.

In the same breath, the San Francisco State theater major easily rattles off risque jokes about the White House administration, the hubbub over John Wayne Bobbitt's missing member and the fact that she didn't know how she would be perceived in America until she arrived here at age 21 and saw the National Geographic special titled "The Buck Naked African Woman in her Natural Habitat. "

But Amma strives for more than punch lines.

Her primary goal is ending the practice of female genital mutilation, a ritual also known as female circumcision that has affected 130 million women around the world. In 1999, she founded the nonprofit Global Women Intact, which aims to educate African people about the dangers of the practice in a nonjudgmental fashion.

Amma, who speaks four African languages, travels back to Africa each year to teach children in villages in Liberia and Senegal a sex-education course she calls Clitoris 101. They have no word for clitoris, so she draws pictures of it on chalkboards, depicting it as a happy girl.

She leads workshops, showing African women who make their living circumcising girls how to farm or make artwork instead. She sells their artwork at San Francisco flea markets and sends the proceeds back to the villages. She helps Bay Area women from Africa who have had their clitorises removed find culturally sensitive gynecologists. She funds it all by braiding hair in her modest Western Addition apartment.

"I have nothing," she said. "But whatever I have, I want to use to work with the women. That's very important to me."

Mostly, though, she laughs. A lot.

She really has no choice, said Caitlin Clark, 31, of Berkeley, a volunteer with Global Women Intact.

"She's either going to cry or she's going to laugh," she said.

Shelley Mitchell, who founded Actors Center of San Francisco and befriended Amma after seeing her perform a few years ago, said she has been struck by Amma's endearing mix of innocence and bravery.

"There's no guile in Amma," said the Mill Valley resident. "There's no ulterior motive in anything she's doing. She's not sophisticated, going to cocktail parties and schmoozing with the Rockefellers and getting big grants.

"She's just using her own life to say, 'This happened to me and it keeps happening and help me try to stop it.' "

---

"When I got to America, I found out it was the day he was shot, not the day he was born!" Amma said, bursting into laughter.

Amma, whose late father was a farmer and schoolteacher, grew up with seven brothers and sisters. When she was 9, women gathered a group of young girls together and set out on a trip to a compound of huts outside her village. Amma had no idea where they were headed or the purpose of the venture, but a definite air of excitement surrounded the group.

Trips like these take place in 28 countries in Africa every three to four years, with women gathering the girls ranging in age from 5 to 13 who didn't make the trip the last time around. The groups stay at their compounds for as long as six months, drumming, dancing, discussing herbs and medicine, gossiping about men and celebrating the girls' passages into womanhood. They teach them about menstruation, sex and child care.

Amma supports the ritualistic atmosphere of these gatherings and hopes they always continue. But she adamantly opposes female genital mutilation, which tends to be an inherent part of the celebrations and affects 2 million girls every year.

"I could see them pouring a glass of wine on the clitoris, but not cutting it," she said.

For her, the mutilation occurred when six women held her down, cut off her clitoris and surrounding labia with a razor blade without anesthesia and threw the bits of flesh away. She bled profusely, became infected and couldn't walk for a while. She says she stills feels some sensation there, likening it to amputees who feel nerve endings in their lost limbs. Sex can be enjoyable with an understanding man, she said, but it's often painful.

The practice comes with many dangers, including scarring, swelling and the spread of AIDS because blades and knives are often shared. There are three types of circumcision performed: sunni, the removal of the tip of the clitoris; clitoridectomy, the removal of the entire clitoris and adjacent labia; and infibulation, the removal of the clitoris and labia and the stitching together of the edges with a tiny hole left for menstruation and urination.

She directs many African immigrants who have had the procedure done to Dr. Magdy Girgis, a gynecologist and obstetrician in Oakland, who is Egyptian and speaks Arabic. He has seen between 30 and 50 cases in his career, including several where all the outer genitalia had been removed and the area had been sutured together.

Several of his patients have been married as long as a year and haven't been able to have intercourse, leaving them and their husbands intensely frustrated. Girgis sometimes performs operations to open up the area so the vagina and urethra can be exposed. In addition to the physical pain, he said, the women tend to have psychological problems surrounding their sexuality.

One patient, a highly educated accountant, was so scared she had to return to Girgis' office numerous times.

"Every time I touched her thigh, she would jump three feet," he said. "It took me three weeks of trying until I was finally able to do any sort of examination."

He said he was pleased that, to his knowledge, none of his patients has ever carried on the tradition in their families. Some U.S. immigrants do circumcise their daughters, however, with estimates placed at 2,000 girls mutilated in this country each year.

Amma said that although information about female genital mutilation is becoming more widely available in the United States, many Americans condemn the African circumcisers as cruel without fully understanding the practice.

"As bad and gruesome as it sounds, they think they're doing a good thing," she said. "I don't think mothers do it to be vicious, to be mean. They do it out of love for their children."

Supporters of the circumcision say it promotes hygiene, prevents unwanted pregnancy and makes a woman more desirable for marriage. Many people believe the clitoris is dirty and, if not removed, will balloon into a nasty, dangerous thing. But more, they believe circumcision promotes a bonding of sorts among African women.

"It's very important - this sense of belonging and this sense of womanship, " Amma said. "You're not 'the other.' You're part of the group. If you don't do it, you're not part of them."

If the practice itself is intensely complicated, the means of ending it are even more so. Under pressure from Western countries, some anti-circumcision laws have been established. But with more pressing problems such as overwhelming poverty, war and famine, politicians and law enforcement officers don't spend their time monitoring the practice. Amma likened it to abortion in the United States, with laws just pushing it further underground and making it more gruesome rather than ending it altogether.

"It's not going away anytime soon," she said.

The key to ending the practice, she said, rests with changing the minds of the women who perform the circumcisions. The women, who also deliver babies, are highly regarded in society - and highly paid. Performing one circumcision could earn them two or three chickens, a bag of rice and clothing. The women have become a powerful lobbying organization, making the passage and enforcement of laws even more difficult.

Amma has met with circumcisers to try to convince them that there are other, safer ways to make their money. She's led workshops educating them about the dangers of the practice and has offered them money for each girl in the village who completes school without being circumcised.

She also has met with men to discuss their role in the mutilations. In a vicious circle, many men say they would marry women who hadn't been circumcised if it became socially acceptable. But the women won't stop circumcising their daughters until it becomes OK for men to marry them.

Amma also educates young children about the clitoris and the importance of keeping little girls intact. She hopes the girls rebel against the procedure - as she says she would have done if she had known what she was facing.

"Maybe if my mother had told me about the circumcision, I wouldn't have gone through it, and she wouldn't have let me go through it," she said. "But there's so much secrecy."

Despite the layers of complication surrounding the issue, Amma said she'll keep persevering.

"My ultimate goal in life is for every little girl in Africa to know about the clitoris and celebrate it," she said. "It's my ultimate dream that every woman appreciates her sexuality, knows how to pleasure themselves and asks their men to pleasure them. And to not let people abuse their bodies, but to keep the rituals alive."

---

Five years after she was genitally mutilated, Amma left her family's home to attend boarding school in Monrovia. She said she was "hardheaded" then and rejected the dorms in favor of living on the streets. She had a baby, Charlene,

when she was 17. (Five years ago, Amma brought her brother, sister and Charlene to live in San Francisco.)

After a street fight as a teenager, Amma was sent to a mixed-sex jail and was sexually abused by another inmate.

"It made me realize you can be so mistreated because of your gender," she said. "I decided if I could ever make a difference in a girl's life, I would."

She quit school for a while and saved money to visit her uncle in California. Eventually, she finished high school and got her tourist visa. Immediately taken with San Francisco's bright lights and exciting pulse, she applied for a student visa and began courses at City College. She transferred to San Francisco State and earned a bachelor's degree in speech communication three years ago. Upon advice from her adviser, she never officially graduated and is now pursuing another bachelor's in theater.

Initially, she felt alone because of the lack of African students. She didn't feel an immediate connection to anything - until she discovered the world of comedy clubs. She began going with other students frequently and decided on a whim to perform at an open-mike night at the Punch Line. She told jokes about a guy she'd dated, about how he never showed up on time - and about how he dumped her.

After more nights onstage, she began opening up and delved into comedy about her homeland and female genital mutilation. People were shocked.

"A man can go onstage and talk about his penis 24 hours a day, but a woman talking about her clitoris? Ack!" Amma said.

But she kept at it, performing "In Search of My Clitoris" at clubs around the country. Her Clitoris Celebration will benefit refugee women and children living at the borders of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Mick Berry, a comedian and teacher who is directing the Clitoris Celebration, said his interest in participating in the otherwise all-woman production stemmed simply from Amma's comedic talent.

"She's extremely funny. She knows how to write a really good joke," he said.

"And that's not easy to do. I think she could probably take any subject she feels strongly about and make it funny."

Mitchell said Amma's style is refreshing in San Francisco, a city where playful theater like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and gay burlesque shows is popular.

"San Francisco is famous as a city where you can come and reinvent yourself, dress up and party," she said. "It doesn't engender dark, soul-searching kinds of theater, whereas what Amma's doing clearly is very edgy."

---

Back at the rehearsal for the Clitoris Celebration, Peoples mimics an orgasm again, this time giving a performance to make Amma proud.

"Ooooh, Clitoriana!" Amma whistles, nodding her head eagerly. "Wasn't that wonderful? Wonderful!"

Off to the side sits Rhodessa Jones, an institution in the world of Bay Area theater. Now 54, she is working on her own production about menopause. She agreed to act in Clitoris Celebration after seeing Amma perform.

She plays Mariana, who believes her genitals are disgusting until she learns that "between every woman's legs is a pretty little flower that blooms. Once in a while, we should all stop by and smell the roses."

Asked to describe Amma, who wrote these words, Jones looked at her admiringly.

"She's very incandescent, very bubbly, and at the same time, there lurks a very tenacious spirit underneath all that," she said. "It just affirms what I've always believed - that women are very powerful creatures and very complex.

That she's sane and she's alive and in the theater is a credit to us as females."

---

From SFSU Xpress,
"Searching for her Clitoris while at SFSU" by Michael Austin

>> Full Review Excerpt:
"SiaAmma remembers it was a special day the day she had her clitoris removed. She remembers preparing for that special day, but not knowing what to expect. She also remembers a hot, searing, indescribable, unimaginable amount of pain rushing simultaneously down her legs and to the top of her head, then rushing back to its point of origin, her vagina. Twenty-four years later, she has transformed those tears of pain into cries of laughter by turning her experience into a one-woman stand-up comedic show. "

---

From Marigold Zine,
FGM Does Not Always Mean "Fairy God Mother"
by Audra Estrones Williams

I remember when I was seventeen, I tried on some new ideas. One of my ideas was that notions of "right" and "wrong" were false creations of society, and did not actually exist. Yeah, it didn't make much sense back then, either. Now, that's not to say that I still don't think a fair bit of cultural imperialism does occur, and that The Western World does tend to think the rest of the world should be Like We Are, but that's not this article. That is another article. Anyhow, one day I was testing out my "no such thing as wrong" theory by saying it out loud over lunch with an older and wiser friend of mine, who shot me down in an instant with "What about female genital mutilation? To me, that is inarguably wrong, because its only function is to remove natural human pleasure." Well. He had me there. Female Genital Mutilation is one of those concepts that hits you hard with the realization that universal female equality is a long way from being a done deal. For those who have heard the term FGM, but aren't sure on the exact details of it, I offer you this information:

The term FGM covers three main varieties of genital mutilation:
1) "Sunna" circumcision: Consists of the removal of the tip of the clitoris.
2) Clitoridectomy: Consists of the removal of the entire clitoris, and the removal of the adjacent labia.
3) Infibulation: This most extreme form, consists of the removal of the clitoris, the adjacent labia (majora and minora), and the joining of the scraped sides of the vulva across the vagina, where they are secured with thorns or sewn with catgut or thread. A small opening is kept to allow passage of urine and menstrual blood.

An infibulated woman must be cut open to allow intercourse on the wedding night and is closed again afterwards to secure fidelity to the husband. Now, if that doesn't just turn your stomach and cross your legs, you're made of stronger stuff than I am. Some people like to call it "female circumcision", so perhaps we'll just think "Oh, circumcision. They do that to boys everyday. No big deal." Well, if male circumcision was performed by the town barber with a rusty piece of metal, carried with it the risk of hemorrhage and HIV infection, involved cutting off the entire penis and testicles, closing up the whole shebang with some fishing wire, and was done so a man would never cheat on his wife, then maybe it would be the same.

What I'm saying is: It's not the same. FGM isn't just about fidelity. An intact woman is seen as unmarriageable, because she is considered unclean. There are those who believe a man will die if he has any contact with a woman's clitoris. (I think I dated some people who think that, actually.) Little concern seems to be given by its perpetrators for the long term psychological, physical, sexual and emotional damage that has happened to the over 130 million Muslim and Christian women in Egypt, Chad, Ethiopia, Niger, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other countries around the planet. Even the US and Canada have instances of FGM, and have only passed laws against it within the last decade.

So. You've got dozens of countries. Major powerful religions. Centuries of institutionalized sexism. Millions of women. Thorns and catgut and HIV transmission. It's enough to make you want to catch the next shuttlebus to Neptune, isn't it? It just seems like Too Much, you know?

Well, it is a lot. But there are people who are working to stop it, in a few different ways. Some through education of local mothers, in attempt to convince them not to have their daughters cut the way they were. Some through legislation against the procedure (although there is always the danger this will just push the practice underground). Some through awareness building in places where FGM doesn't occur, in order to let the rest of the world in on how serious this practise is, and the ramifications towards upwards of 90% of the women in some countries, in hopes it will mobilize them to join the fight for change.

One woman who is working a few of these angles is SiaAmma. SiaAmma is an adult woman who underwent FGM as a child in Liberia. She now divides her time between Africa and the US, and performs a one woman show called In Search Of My Clitoris, during which she re-enacts her own cutting onstage. She has also started an organization called Global Women Intact, which works in North American to teach teenage girls to love and respect their bodies, and in Africa offers communities the knowledge with which they can hopefully transform rather than eliminate initiation ceremonies for their daughters that would leave their bodies and spirits unharmed.

What can you do? Well, you can talk about it, that's important. You can make sure that people know exactly how catastrophic the procedure is. You can also check out groups like Amnesty International, who have a very detailed article about FGM and what is being done to stop it here , and find out about SiaAmma, where she will be performing, and how you can support her organization here. You can give your time and money and voices to those trying to make this practise stop. Most importantly, you can honour and appreciate your own intact body and sexuality, and never take it for granted.

---

March 10, 2000
"In Search of Her Clitoris" by Elizabeth Hollander

Female genital mutilation is no joke. But Sia Amma turns her tale of tragedy into a startling and provocative comedy show.

>> Full Review Excerpt:
"Amma's one-woman routine is certainly comedy. 'If I find that clitoris, this show is fucking over,' she shouts with a laugh. 'Most of you American women have a clitoris and you don't even know it!'

But Amma's routine is also part tragedy. As a young girl growing up in Africa, Amma was a victim of female genital mutilation -- a cultural practice that affects more than 135 million women and girls worldwide, according to Amnesty International. The World Health Organization estimates that two million girls a year -- some 6,000 a day -- undergo genital mutilation."

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March 2000
Review by Nancy Kelly

In this moving and hilarious one-woman show, dynamic performance artist and comedienne Amma takes us along on her journey halfway around the world and back again in search of her most precious possession, taken from her when she was a young girl in West Africa. Coming to the states, Amma searches for wholeness in the promised lands of psychotherapy and plastic surgery hoping to find a fix -- and finding none.

Amma mines the cultural divide between the two worlds of America and West Africa, surprising the audience with her humor, courage, and insights in the face of the dark subjects she takes on. Ultimately she must return to her memories of the circumcision ritual itself to come to terms with what happened.

Never gravitating toward easy answers or polemics, she makes us laugh when we expect to cry, and asks us to dance and celebrate with her, all the while keeping our eyes out for what she lost.

---

March 2000
Sia Amma: In Search of My Cliotris
Healing Past and Future Wounds With Laughter

"Yooo-hoooooo!" a shrill female voice cries out from the back of the dark, crowded auditorium at La Peña, a cafe and cultural center in Berkeley. Followed by a deep-throated, inquisitive: "HEY! Has ANYBODY seen my CLITORIS around here?" An African woman dressed in a bright orange, brown, and black print dress and turban enters the room, barefoot, and proceeds to ask the audience members in her accented voice, as she peers down the aisles: "Excuse me, have you seen my clitoris?" "Is that it, there?"

She asks one woman:
"Could you get up? I think you might be sitting on it." After a few more inquiries, she makes her way onto the stage and turns to face the audience. "'Cause if we find it," she says, smiling, "this show is fucking OVER."

Amma, who was born in Liberia and underwent female circumcision at the age of seven has courageously and hilariously devised a comedy act that combines humor, dance, music, tradition, culture, and drama in an effort to bring celebration and attention to the part of a woman's body that has been subjected to mutilation and removal according to a ten thousand year old tradition in African societies.

Rapping on a variety of topics with a vibrant, no-nonsense-style delivery (seasoned with occasional expletives for emphasis), she talks about women, sex, her childhood, AIDS, and makes fun of American celebrities, from Oprah to Linda Tripp to Dr. Ruth. She reenacts the celebrations with dancing and drumming that lead up to the ceremony, and at one particularly moving and rather tense moment, reenacts the cutting itself. Amma's goal is not to shock and sadden her audiences with the experience of genital mutilation. Rather, she encourages the embracing of the celebration and reverence that characterizes the traditional ceremony, while calling for an end to the horrendous, conclusive act of the cutting itself. The clitoris should be celebrated and worshipped, she emphasizes, not subjected to this terrible, dangerous act.

Mimi Ramsey, the founder of Forward USA, an organization calling for a stop to female genital mutilation (FGM) in the U.S. and abroad, was a victim herself at the age of six in Ethiopia and was also present at the show. Mimi found out about Amma's show by coincidence and said she was rolling on the floor with laughter and "felt her heart fill with joy" upon seeing a flyer with a humorous take on FGM.

Since FGM is a secret, traditional practice, Mimi explained, most people don't know the details about how, why, or how often it occurs and see complete elimination of African traditions as the solution instead of transformation of the existing traditions to not include FGM. The practice is not an illustration of unloving, cruel parents but rather the difficulty in trying to change or destroy a tradition that has existed for centuries. People like Amma and Mimi are calling for a reformation of the tradition rather than complete abolishment.

In Africa, FGM is an alarmingly widespread practice in East, West, and South Africa. In Ethiopia 90 percent of women are circumcised; in Sudan, 80 percent; in Egypt, 95 percent and in Nigeria, 50 percent. Some African mothers in the United States -- who endanger the lives of 150,000 girls alone -- also attempt to preserve the tradition by taking their daughters to Africa for the ceremony or performing it in the U.S. themselves and risking imprisonment. Because the practice is so embedded in tradition, it is difficult to persuade mothers -- including those who emigrate to the U.S. -- to stop the practice.

The expression "female circumcision" itself is grossly inadequate to describe the mutilation which actually takes place: it is not just removal of the clitoris but of the entire labia and sometimes even the stitching closed of the entire vagina until marriage. Primitive tools -- glass, razor blades, scissors -- are often used to perform the operation and agents like battery acid have even been used to cauterize the wounds. Many girls die from the mutilation or when they give childbirth. Women who survive must suffer the pain for the rest of their lives.

At the end of the show, after inviting the audience to dance and eat with her in celebration of the clitoris (at one point Amma hands around a basket of fresh fruit and chestnuts to audience members), Amma says "I want to state where I stand here. I LIKE the mountains. I LOVE the rivers. I LOVE the dancing. I LOVE my country. I love everything. But I think that instead of cutting up the clitoris we should celebrate it." Amma and Mimi both have daughters that have undergone modified, non-mutilating versions of the ceremony. They have also encouraged their relatives and other people to preserve the celebration part of the ceremony but to stop the mutilation. Amma chose humor as a way of reaching out to audiences that might otherwise be daunted by or misunderstanding of a discussion of the practice. Her method of celebration and humor as a means of highlighting the positive aspects of the tradition and encouraging reform is unique and effective.

Amma will be starting an organization called Mothers and Daughters Against Female Circumcision and hopes to perform more frequently around the Bay Area. Another performance is scheduled at La Peña for Mother's Day Weekend and she will also be performing in Santa Cruz.

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From URBAN VIEW,
March 29, 2000
In Search of My Cliotris: Cutting Humor at La Peña, February 10
by Sarah Coleman

The Liberian comedian Amma sweeps majestically into the theater of La Peña, a basket in one hand and a straw brush in the other. "Excuse me, I'm looking for my clitoris," she announces. "Do any of you have it? Have you seen it over there?"

Amma isn't sexually naive or biologically uninformed: She's literally lost what she calls "the seat of power for women." Back in Liberia, she was circumcised at the age of nine, though she tells us that she didn't fully understand what hd happened to her until years later, when she tuned in to Oprah one day to see a man waving his hand over a diagram of a vagina. That's when she learned to recognize her "hygienic" circumsicion as a mutilation -- and to know what she'd lost. "I was ANGRY!" she shouts. "They tell you in this country, don't sweat the small stuff. Well, I'm telling you, a clitoris is not the small stuff. A clitoris is THE BOMB!"

The audience -- 80 percent female, 80 percent white -- explodes with laughter, which continues much of the way through Amma's monologue. While female circumcision is obviously no laughing matter in itself, Amma finds an improbable amount of humor as she dishes up her life story with impeccable comic timing.

"Even when I was a child, my mouth was bigger than Linda Tripp's," she alleges, sashaying across the stage in a multi-colored print dress. "You've heard of the First Lady's book, It Takes a Village (to raise a child)?" She pauses, rolls her eyes dramaticlally. "Well, it took a whole village to shut me up." I believe it. Throughout this two-hour show, Amma takes the audience on a rollercoaster ride through a strange cultural landscape, one in which a Bomoe (tribal circumciser) tells her that, if uncut, her clitoris will grow so long she won't be able to walk, and an American doctor attempts to bond with her over the loss of his foreskin. This is vexing, difficult subject matter, and Amma does justice to its complexities -- she points out, for example, that when African women are educated from birth to see the clitoris as dirty, you can't expect them to stop performing clitoridectomies overnight. Amma doesn't blame her mother, who she says was "doing her job," though she's happy to have broken the cycle with her own daughter. ("She calls me a bitch. I call her a bitch with a clitoris.")

At two hours, the show is a tad too long. But it works, because Amma is able to convey a visceral sense of her loss while also refusing to wallow in her victimhood. Towards the end, her sassy stand-up routine gives way to a terrifying scene where she reenacts her toma (circumcision ceremony), and I'm sure no audience member will ever forget it. As we walked out of the theater, I overheard a fan telling her, "You're ready for HBO!" It's an intriguing thought. Received wisdom tells us that people want to hear about female circumcision about as much as they want to hear about flesh-eating bacteria -- but at La Peña, Amma proved that a little education can be a wonderful thing.