It wasn’t until she was 22 and already living in the U.S. when she realized what it means, as a woman, to be “circumcised”. "I remember taking an English composition class and there was a lecture about other cultures. The professor started talking about female genital mutilation and showed a video about it. I felt this boom in my heart when I saw it,” she said, fluttering her hand in front of her chest to indicate the palpitation she felt. “That’s when I realized that circumcision is to remove the clitoris and understood that is what happened to me."

Mali is a West African nation. It has eight regions or what we would consider states whose borders go deep into the Sahara desert. Located near the Niger River, Bamako, where Ali is from, is one of its largest cities. Mali has a population of about 15 million people and a little over half are female. A UNICEF report estimates that 89 percent of those females have been subjected to female genital mutilation.

Ali was too young to recall her own cutting but does remember some of the cutting ceremonies that she witnessed in Mali, where the practice is illegal but still occurs. Her mother’s side of the family has a tradition of cutting girls before they turn 12. “On that day there’s a big ceremony, they dance, and all the little girls have the same hair styles, same clothes, and then [the cutters] circumcise them all. I remember my cousin was very excited about her party but she didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Female genital mutilation is an African cultural practice. Tribes that do practice it consider uncut women to be promiscuous and ridicule them, Ali said. And so, the practice is passed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter. “My mother, she follows the rules. I know she wants something completely different for us but she doesn’t want to go outside of what is supposed to be,” Ali said. “Mothers in general, I think they worry about the daughter and who she is going to be because if she’s a wild girl, that’s going to show the bad in the family. The daughter might not be able to get married later even.”

The purpose of female genital mutilation is to keep a firm grasp on a woman's sexuality. In this case, it means squashing it before she can even consider becoming sexually active and bringing shame to the family. It is a conditioned thought that runs deep—one that even Ali can't seem to shed. “My friend [who isn't cut], I can see she’s wild," she said mentioning her friend's various boyfriends and likelihood of being sexually active.

Ali first learned about clitoral restoration surgery in the same classroom where she learned about the reality of FGM. “Someone in my class mentioned that there’s this surgery they do for women to fix it and I couldn’t wait to go home and get on the Internet to do research,” she said. It was then that she stumbled across Clitoraid. She first got in touch with the organization in 2011 but Bowers had not yet trained Henning at the time, so her only option was to travel to California. “I almost went but then I got scared, going all the way to California alone was going to be scary and costly. I cancelled my appointment.”