The Unopened ‘Pleasure Hospital’ of Bobo
And yet, Adjara says, “We might be poor but, sexually, things are changing.” As she shows me around, she tells me that every woman used to be genitally mutilated. “I was five when I was taken to be cut. The old woman used the same knife for us all. It was so painful. I cried and cried.”
Adjara takes me to her home, a dark hut some 8m wide, where the shelves are weighed down with heavy, clay pots. “It was part of the wedding package,” she explains. “When you get married, you get given these pots to take away with you by your mother. But if you weren’t cut, you didn’t get the pots and you couldn’t get married.”
Then, about 10 years ago, health workers came to the village and explained that the problems which used to be blamed on witchcraft - the death of girls after the mutilation and problems in childbirth which resulted in more deaths - “all were because of the cutting, they told us, and so we stopped”.
And now they are being told that their clitorises can be restored and that the pain they endure whenever they have sex will end and they could even experience pleasure. “I am happy,” said the husband of 24-year-old Bebe, who has come to wave her off for the trip to Bobo for the operation. “I did not like it that she cried out every time I came to her.”