Reading to fund girls’ education, not mutilation

In 2006, Kim Rosen arrived at the Tasaru Safe House in Narok, Kenya, and stood before a group of Maasai girls who had run away from their homes, and their tribe’s traditions of female genital mutilation and early marriage, seeking education and an alternate way of life.

[...] I always have been very shy personally, and I figured if I could come out of myself and relate to these 50 teenage girls, in a culture that was totally other than my own, I would make great strides in overcoming my shyness.

Rosen had long heard of the Safe House from her friend Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues” and founder of V-Day, a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls.

In 2002, V-Day provided the funding for the Safe House, which was founded by Agnes Pareyio, a Maasai woman who spent years traveling by foot from village to village, teaching people about the harms of female genital mutilation in an effort to end its practice.

“It’s always Agnes’ intention to bring the girls back to the community to, in a very public ceremony, create a reconciliation with the parents,” Rosen said, and to show the community this beautiful, educated young woman, and what the alternative to FGM and enforced childhood marriage can look like.

In 2010, Rosen set up the Safe House Education Fund and began to sponsor the first girl, Jacinta, through college — including all costs, a total of $3,500.

A fundraiser on Saturday, Feb. 11, features readings by poets and early SHE Fund supporters Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Jane Hirshfield and Rosen, with a special performance by vocalist Melanie DeMore.

Writers With Drinks features readings by cartoonist Tom Tomorrow (“This Modern World”), writer Sarah Schulman Conflict Is Not Abuse:

Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll (“The Particle at the End of the Universe”), Jennifer Ouellette Me, Myself and Why: