The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [50]
In 1993 I left the shelter for asylum seekers and applied to the Netherlands Center for Interpreters. Although I scored well in the tests, they said I would have to wait until I had been resident in the Netherlands for at least three years. When I realized that more and more Somali people were moving to the Netherlands, I knocked on the door of the immigration and naturalization services. They added me to their list of on-call interpreters, and from then on I got plenty of work. I worked as an interpreter from 1995 to 2001. I saw dozens of men and women who had contracted sexually transmitted diseases (AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, et cetera), and many women who had gotten pregnant by accident. There is a much higher incidence of unwanted pregnancies among newcomers from third-world countries, where anything remotely sexual is still heavily taboo, than among native Westerners, who have a more liberal attitude to sex.
Here are four experiences from the time I worked as an interpreter.
“I AM NOT PREGNANT; I AM A VIRGIN”
A nineteen-year-old Somali girl goes to the Medical Services at the Refugee Center in ’s-Gravendeel and complains of not feeling well. One of the doctors examines her urine and concludes she is pregnant. The doctor wants to tell her this and asks me to be an interpreter over the telephone.
Shocked, the girl breaks down in tears. I can hear her crying over the phone but cannot make out what she says. She seems utterly desperate. It gives me the shivers even to remember it.
Then she says, “But that is impossible, I am a virgin, I can’t be pregnant.” She continues to deny it. She says she can prove that she is a virgin: “I was stitched.” She can’t have done it with a boy, because the stitches are all intact.
The doctor tries to calm her down and promises he will test her urine a second time.
Not long after this I receive another phone call from the same girl and listen to the same story. The doctor tells the Somali girl that he has tested her urine again and that she really is pregnant. He asks whether she has had any sexual education. She answers: “Why should I? I didn’t need any: I was going to remain a virgin until marriage.”
She tells the doctor she has been in the Netherlands only a month. A Somali boy, who has been in the Netherlands much longer and speaks Dutch, has helped her with everything. Each time she had to see her solicitor he came with her. One day he invited her and two other Somali girls to his home in Dordrecht. There he made a pass at her. He took her up to his bedroom while the two other girls remained in the sitting room. He wanted to go to bed with her and took off her clothes. He promised he would not make her lose her virginity. He kept saying that he had helped her, and that now it was her turn to do something for him.
The doctor has to drag the story out of her. She tells him that the boy did not insert his penis inside her, but merely rubbed it against her. He did ejaculate while he was on top of her, but the stitches had remained intact. They had both been convinced she was still a virgin.
The doctor explains that in order to become pregnant you need a man and a woman; that some women are more fertile than others; and that there are certain times when you are more fertile than others, depending on where you are in your menstrual cycle. She seems to have had the misfortune of being particularly fertile at that moment, which has allowed her to become pregnant, possibly through a single drop of semen.
Her reaction shows that she hasn’t a clue about sexual intercourse or