Wabalozi

Good morning, friends.

I wanted to send you a short update on God's work here at QuadW Tarime. Today, I'll mainly be sharing about our anti-FGM Girls Camp which took place this past December.

We are very thankful that we were able to educate so many girls about the truth about FGM, why it should be avoided, and their immeasurable worth in Christ. There were no FGM rituals in 2023, but there will be FGM rituals for the last 3 weeks of December 2024. Educating these girls was a great step to make sure that they do not go to these upcoming rituals. We really appreciate QuadW Skunkworks for sending two volunteers to help us with the girls camp. They made an excellent video about the camp, which you can watch here:

It's a heartbreaking fact that the tribal elders influence a small group of girls to be "ambassadors", to apply peer pressure to their friends, to get them to go to FGM rituals. In 2022, we found several cases where a girl wanted to go to the FGM rituals, but her parents and extended family did not want her to go. They were afraid that she would run away anyways. "Why!?", we asked. In each case they pointed us to another girl... a friend, a neighbor, a classmate, who was pressuring their daughter to go. I wanted to cry when I got the news that several of those girls did, in fact, run away, and were cut.

So this year, we decided to send out counter-ambassadors. After all, we are Christ's ambassadors here on earth. Couldn't we train young girls to tell their friends not to go to the cutting?

One of the most exciting things to see was the way that some of the girls became ambassadors immediately.

On the first day of the camp, December 9th, 71 girls came.

As we taught the girls to be ambassadors, they went and invited more and more girls to the camp.

By December 14th, we had 153 girls at the camp, and by the final day, December 21st, there were 171 girls. It was incredible to see the way that they went out and told more and more of their friends.

Our next step is to continue mentoring these 171 girls to stay strong in their faith, and to continue to tell their friends the truth about FGM, to tell them that they are worth more, and to tell them that there will be a safe space for them at the 2024 Girls Camp if people pressure them or try to send them to the rituals.

Since the final day of the girls camp, QuadW team members Doto and Gloria have been mentoring all of the girls from the Tarime area in continuing to be ambassadors.

It's a lot to balance, as we have 26 house churches to mentor, but I know that the Holy Spirit will keep working to free the girls of Tarime from the scourge of FGM.