It is Tuesday and market day in Delafagi. People travel from far to sell their goods, to stock-up and to socialise. Hasna is 19 years old and part time health worker trained by AISDA. She spends the morning in the market to advocate stopping the FGM practise, a practice she as a young woman only knows too well the consequences of. She uses a megaphone and she does not mince her words, when she proclaims that 'salot', the Afar word for mutilation of the female genitals is bad and a wrong practice and must be stopped. Action for Integrated Sustainable Development Association (AISDA) work in the AFAR region of Eastern Ethiopia, based in Delafagi. The Afars practise an old tradition of Female Genital Mutilation where the baby girls has her clitoris and labia cut away and her vagina sewn up. The day before her wedding day the girl is un-stiched ready for marriage. Its a brutal and barbaric tradition which AISDA is challenging with great effect, now more than a hundred girls in Dowe district have been saved from the knife and AISDA is now rolling out the scheme in Delafagi. Delafagi is where the oldest ever human remains have been found, the found is thought to be 4.5 mill years old.
