Below is a short excerpt from a post I wrote about my Atlantic Fellowship. You can see the full post on the Atlantic Fellows website here.

When I was applying for my Atlantic Fellowship, I was inspired by time spent with Negar Esfandiary, a UK-based oral historian who had been working with an organisation called the Women’s Learning Partnership.  We’d met in Beirut at a raucous feminist gathering in a restaurant that didn’t know what had hit them. egar had been documenting the lives of extraordinary women human rights defenders and activists for an archive based at the British Library, and I was transfixed by the stories of courageous women she was capturing. Women like Aminetou Mint Ely, working at the frontlines to protest the fat farms of Mauritania.

Mint Ely, a women’s rights campaigner, is fighting a tradition in which, every year, girls as young as five are subjected to the tradition of leblouh. Intimately linked to early or child marriage, leblouh involves girls from five to nine years of age being forced to eat excessively to become overweight and rounded so that they can be married off as young as possible. To achieve this, girls are sent to fattening farms in Mauritania, where they are forced to consume thousands of calories each day to gain weight. The weight gain is believed to accelerate puberty and make younger girls appear more “womanly”.

…To read the full post click here.