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7 for 7 Campaign
A Story Change is making one girl’s life better. $7.00 for Saffi and Moma Jaki will help make them smile again. It’s embarrassing to not give it if you can afford it. Give $7.00 if you have a young girl in your life or you remember needing something you didn’t think would come to help you. Find your own way to help her and others like her who are close or far and you will have put your arms around her. Do something that animates and makes your spirit visible. Whatever you do, be grateful that we have the technology to reach Saffi and tell her story. That’s the first step. She’ll know when you take the next one. May 22, 2008 Tanzania's Missing Girls Rarely Raise a Murmur By Zoe Alsop WeNews correspondent Poverty and tradition help fuel a potent business in human trafficking in East Africa, where a girl can sell for $20. Most kidnapped children are not as lucky as Saffi, who returned after her mother bought TV ads. Many disappear without much notice.  (WOMENSENEWS)--For five months last year Kim Kitchen, a Canadian expert on sexual violence and community development, lived in a crowded shantytown on the outskirts of the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam while she set up a women's safety program. She began to notice that nightfall was an anxious time for mothers. "One of the startling realities for me was as the sun started to set I observed the women would start calling in their daughters," said Kitchen. "As the sun set more and more, and daughters hadn't come, the urgency in their calls grew. It was just a matter of fact that every girl has to be in their home after dark." Across East Africa--once a corridor for merchants trading slaves from the continent's interior for fine cloth, frankincense and spices from the Middle East--conditions are in place for a boom market in the traffic of human beings. Poverty and instability in the region mean many are desperate enough to trade themselves or their children for a ticket out. Tanzania is no exception. At the same time, some traditional practices--such as witchcraft and child marriage--are implicated in the disappearances of many young girls. Kitchen is a trainer with the San Francisco-based organization Girls Speak Out. Its organizers in the United States, Australia, Kenya and Tanzania arrange workshops for girls and women to talk about what it means to be female in their communities. They are meant to give girls a chance to discuss their bodies and traditions in the light of their legal rights. Kitchen collaborated with local groups based out of the slums who are fed up with watching helplessly as their children vanish. "They are just groundbreaking kind of people," said Kitchen, referring to their willingness to challenge some time-honored practices that can sometimes be deadly, particularly for women and children. "The majority would say, 'Why would you do that? This is going against tradition.'" Vital Work "If you went to a witch maybe to be wealthy, you take a small baby, a boy or a girl, to offer," said Rutta Thobias, a project coordinator for Dar es Salaam's Mass Development Association, known as MaDeA, an antipoverty program focused on women and children. This kind of witchcraft is suspected in the case of a 4-year-old girl, Salome Yohana. Security guards found her severed head in the bags of a boy on his way to visit his aunt at the hospital in late April. The girl's body was found at a public latrine across town, where someone had apparently tried to dispose of it. Her parents had not reported her missing to police or the press. "The issue of killing children, especially girls, needs to be taken more seriously," said Thobias, who just days earlier had been drawn into the kidnapping case of his neighbor's 5-year-old daughter, Saffi. Saffi's story was unique and shows the impact work like that of Kitchen and Thobias can have in Tanzania. Early on the morning of April 1, the little girl said goodbye to her mother and set out for kindergarten, just 600 meters along a dirt path through her neighborhood. Saffi's family didn't see her again until seven days later, when she turned up at a bus stop in another part of town, terrified and shivering with malaria. She said she'd been raped. Extraordinary Return For her mother and neighbors, the extraordinary thing was not that she'd disappeared but that she'd turned up again at all. "On the first day we think maybe she was raped and killed," said Thobias. "On the second we think maybe she has been taken into trafficking." A girl like Saffi is a liquid asset as far as kidnappers are concerned. They can sell her to families eager for cheap house servants, pimps, witch doctors and men seeking virginal brides. In 2003, a girl could be bought for as little as $20 in Dar es Salaam, according to the United Nations. Children's parents are often complicit in the deal; sometimes they must sell one child to afford meals for younger siblings during especially difficult economic times such as when crops fail. But even when they aren't, they rarely go to the police or publicize the case, particularly when the child is a girl and rape may be involved, said Thobias. "Most of the people, after the same incidents happen to them, they believe more in magic power, that if you campaign the kidnappers may kill the child." A Determined Mother But Saffi's mother, who's employed by the Tanzanian military to train cadets, was different. She helped Kitchen meet women in Mbagala. She made as much noise as she could, including going to mosques around the city to ask that the muezzins include a description of Saffi in their calls to prayer, and then to local government offices to report her daughter missing. She spent what little savings she had on advertisements and then went to Thobias to ask for more. Within days, Saffi's face was in newspapers and on television screens. The media attention made Saffi's kidnappers decide she was more trouble than she was worth. They put her on a bus. By chance a family friend spotted her, slumped at a busy bus stop miles from her home and called her mother. The odds that the men who kidnapped Saffi will be found are very low. Because her mother did not report to the police on the night her daughter was found, they say she has no case number and they cannot investigate. But Thobias has taken the case into his own hands. "We are fighting to collect information from different people," he said. "But we are trying our very best to look for some way because we see so many issues with children here. There are abuses from all sides. Raping is too much nowadays." So far, he's discovered two things. No. 1: the house where Saffi was held was near the airport; she knew because she could hear the sound of planes coming and going. No. 2: She says there were other small children at the house with her. As far as anyone knows, they are still there today. May 13, 2008 Update Moma Jaki, Saffi's mother pictured below, hopes that learning about her daughter's ordeal will "help prevent it happening to other girls." Saffi was not raped during her abduction; she was going to be sold as a child bride when her abductors decided to let her go in the face of growing publicity. Again, the importance of our connections can save a girl's life. Unfortunately, according to MAdeA in Tanzania, a four-year girl who was kidnapped right after Saffi was beheaded. Her body was stuffed into a sewer pipe and her head carried as a trophy in a plastic bag. An 11-year old boy suffered a similar fate. You can e-mail Saffi and become a supporter by clicking here. |
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When Little Matters: Saffi's Life |
April 13, 2008 Published on feminist.com By Andrea Johnston, President and Co-Founder, Girls Speak Out I have a story to tell you that you can help give a happy ending. It begins with a seven year-old girl who has a brilliant smile and a playful spirit, both of which seem to be captured here. Her name is Saffi, and she comes to us through Kim Kitchen, a woman who traveled to meet women and girls living in a place that vests life-shaping power in male hands and genitalia. Kim learned about a grassroots’ women’s group via the Internet that is across a continent or two. It provides services to girls and women whose rights to health, safety and happiness are invisible, and she decided to work with them.  Saffi, September 2007 So Kim trained to bring Girls Speak Out in her suitcase along with some medical supplies and the spirit that keeps her three daughters and husband connected with affection to their farm and the harsh climate in her country. Kim knows about spring, too, and painting and art grants and caretaking ill friends and growing food and watching the antics of a new pet pig because her life is allowed to be as rich and varied as her family designs. After working double duty for six months to earn money to buffer her family during a three-month absence, in September 2007, Kim arrived in a place where malevolence is the official currency towards girls and women. Kim found a home with Rutta and Marina, a husband and wife connected to MAdeA, the agency that welcomed Kim; their next-door neighbor is Moma Jaki, mother of four daughters, and the second youngest is Saffi. So here they are, this new family of people brought together by a passion for life and challenging belief systems that can breathe fear into their lives. Kim listened as Moma Jaki told Saffi and her sisters how to take care of themselves because it isn’t safe, especially for young girls, where they live. Good men like Rutta reject other men’s beliefs such as creating wealth by taking the body of a young-girl virgin, and he knows that rape is a landmine in the roads surrounding their neighborhood. Kim came together with her new chosen neighbors to help create a Women’s Safety Program that incorporates some of the safety practices instilled in girls and women, and they sought funding and support locally to help spread their teachings. They must, they say, increase the safety net from their homes to the paths that blow dust around and on them as they walk to gather food, wood and experiences. Despite the dangers that could outweigh a love of life and nature, as Zora Neale Hurston writes, "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground." Saffi had jumped on her path to school on March 31st when she disappeared into darkness. Kim was back home and I, too, was thousands of miles away. Rutta organized a search, doing the best he could without official support, because such disappearances are "inevitable," and Girls Speak Out sent e-mails to individuals and organizations and posted appeals for help on our website. When a week had almost passed, and Tania Bien-Aimé and Faiza Mohamed of Equality Now and Jane Shuma of Human Rights were gathering information for help on the ground, Rutta told us what we have to call good news, which is a disappointing measure in some ways of where we are now in Saffi’s story. After seven days, someone who knew her family found our seven-year old huddled at a bus stop. Saffi has been raped, and is in what is called "distressed condition." Her return is enough of a rare occurrence to be a miracle, and the emotions are complex yet welcome. Saffi told her Moma that there was a TV where she was taken, and she saw the advertisements for her return. That moment of being visible in the middle of trauma is going to help anchor Saffi as she heals. But there are no support services on the ground, and providing medical attention such as HIV/AIDS follow-up and counseling are remote possibilities. Yesterday a friend donated part of "President Stupid’s" stimulus check due next month to support Saffi, and another told me that the only people who replied to voluminous forwarded e-mails about Saffi are women victims of childhood sexual abuse. In my experience, we are triggered for many reasons and they’re often very personal, which is something that has to expand as our world grows more intimate and we are free to virtually move about the planet. Too many of us feel that we can’t do anything, which means the bad guys are winning. While this is not good news times in this country, it is in contrast to remembered good times. Saffi, who needs good times, has more hard times ahead of her, Rutta and the others are depleted financially from the search, and while I reluctantly used "good news" in the subject line of the e-mails announcing her return, it is a sad lesson in relativity, which brings me to another point that I hope you are open to reading because I know you have your own problems. Saffi is not our daughter or niece or neighbor, and that just about erases the chances resources or time to include her healing will be set aside in the schedule of most of the people who read this article. We are conditioned to believe Too many like her anywhere, and too much to do. I ask you to look once more at her smile before you scroll and click away. I ask you to help bring that light back to her and her family. MOMA JAKI  |