Thursday’s BTR Call-in Show Featured Artist Returns from Kenya with Concerns…
by Stephen Kastner on 26/11/08 at 1:37 am
This week I have been privileged to meet and continue working with some very amazing women… Annetta Luce, Jane Kamuasi, Amara Charles and Anna Venice.
Dancer and educator, Annetta Luce spent several weeks living with a Maasai family while teaching in Kenya recently. What she experienced as “traditional” African tribal practices will be vividly remembered for the rest of her life. Jane Kamuasi is a Maasai woman here in America seeking amnesty, a mother determined to protect her 12-year old daughter who remains in Kenya, from the traditional Maasai rite of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Because I live in a Global Village I have clients all over the world… and the Web keeps extending. Amara Charles and Anna Venice are two such people, teachers of Daoist Tantra in Arizona. They filmed a video interview and sent it to me for production. I got so involved in learning about the Maasai people and FGM as it is known at WHO and the UN – where November 25 is remembered each year as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women – that I am now knee-deep in producing a 30-minute documentary on the subject.
Here is my 3-minute intro, a director’s cut that I have rushed to the Web because of the timely nature of the subject and the season for giving thanks. I know it will take a generation or more to possibly eliminate FGM and educate people bound by religious tradition in a culture far distant from my own but… if everybody just throws a few bucks in the kitty we can make a profound difference in one young girl’s entire life.
Sadie
Dec 8th, 2008
Gential Integrity for ALL children!
In all fairness and in the name of equality, you must do a blog post on iinfant male circumcision WIDELY practiced in the U.S. This issue just needs more awareness, period.
How about Penn and Teller’s “Circumcision is Bullshit” episode:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2577091532653693892
or info on the MGM Bill (mgmbill.org)?
Help to spread the word if you resonates with you
Stephen Kastner
Dec 8th, 2008
Sexy Sadie,
Thanks very much for alerting me to this and you can count on a follow up article before Wednesday. I am one of those guys who is irked to say the least, by my own “loss,” especially when out on the ski trails in extra cold weather and only the tip of one part of my body is freezing – not good! Needless to say none of my sons have been circumcised.