LUCKY SEVERSON: Early morning in a remote part of Tanzania at the foot of Ol Doinyo Lengai, known to the Masai as the Mountain of God, the center of their universe. When it spews lava, the Masai think God is angry. The last angry eruption was in 2007. Legend has it that centuries ago, God dropped cows from the sky as a gift to the Masai and now all the cows on earth belong to them.

Christian missionaries have proselytized the Masai for over 150 years with little success. But within the last decade, the tribe started converting. Now as many as a quarter of the Masai have become Christians.

GARY WOODS: Through this area we’ve had 700 new Christians in the last two years.

SEVERSON: Gary Woods has been preaching in the bush for 25 years.

WOODS: When we first came into this community the witch doctors were very strong here and they cursed the church to die. And now today the witch doctors are seeing that they, they were defeated.

SEVERSON: In the small villages, or Bomas, that speckle the countryside, it’s as if time has stood in place, although these traditionally nomadic people are no longer quite as leery of outsiders.

WOODS: I remember one day when I first came here I heard two ladies talking and they said, is it an animal or what is it. Look at, he has hair on his arms. They were trying to figure out what I was cause they’d never seen a white man before.

SEVERSON: Woods is missionary with a U.S. based non-denominational organization called Christian Missionary Fellowship, or CMF. They call what they do “planting churches.”

WOODS: We empower national Masai to do the ministry. I didn’t start any of these churches. I’m not the leader of any of these churches. But we’ve trained these people so that they could move out and do it. When a Masai comes into a community it doesn’t quite, it doesn’t cause a stir, like when I come. When I come everybody is oh, the White man’s here. But when they come they know the culture, the language, and it’s easier to integrate into the community.

SEVERSON: (speaking to Joseph Nekenia Ngida) This is one of your churches Joseph?

PASTOR JOSEPH NEKENIA NGIDA: Yes. I am pastor here.

SEVERSON: This is Joseph, one of CMF’s planted pastors. He says his church is budding.

PASTOR JOSEPH: We started with 3 people.

SEVERSON: How long ago?

PASTOR JOSEPH: One year ago.

SEVERSON: And now you have 58?

PASTOR JOSEPH: 58. Yeah.

SEVERSON: Wow.

SEVERSON: Before he converted, Joseph, like all young Masai men, served a period of time as a hunter-warrior for the tribe.

(speaking to Ngida): Did you ever kill a lion?

PASTOR JOSEPH: No, I kill a leopard.

SEVERSON: A leopard with a spear?

PASTOR JOSEPH: With a spear. Yeah.

SEVERSON: Oh, that must have been very scary.

SEVERSON: Until a new tiny school can be built, the classroom for these young orphans of mother’s with AIDS is under an acacia tree. Pastor Joseph said he would rather have the church take care of them than put them in a state orphanage, of which there are many.

(speaking to Pastor Joseph): So you have two missions here. One mission is to help people learn to live better? Another mission is to convert people to Christianity? Is one more important than the other?

PASTOR JOSEPH: No. We normally say it is holistic, so if you treat one side and leave another side, it is like dividing your body, so it is holistic.

SEVERSON: Which means CMF’s planted churches also help with more temporal challenges, like building schools, water systems, clinics, roads…

WOODS: We want to make the people have a better lifestyle but we want them to know Jesus Christ because there’s a life after this one.

SEVERSON: Converting to Christianity Is a big step for a traditional Masai, one that can have significant and painful consequences. Jacob Loserian is a Masai and a convert.

JACOB LOSERIAN: You lose friends. You lose friends. Completely you lose your friends. You will not companion with them, they will not come to your house because you already get cursed.

SEVERSON: Jacob says what convinces and converts Masai is the promise of something better.

LOSERIAN: The people become Christian because they think to be Christian you will be a good person, you know. If you were a thief you will not steal anymore. If you were a killer, you will not kill anymore, because the church will be only teach good things.

SEVERSON: The good things may have more to do with culture than religion. Traditionally the Masai eat meat almost exclusively. Vegetables are not part of their diet. Among Christian Masai that’s no longer true

WOODS: They have a proverb that says that God would be angry with you if you scratch the earth or, you know, did some digging. We can see right here, these people have broken that proverb and they planted and now they’re taking care of themselves, able to feed themselves.

SEVERSON: These young are men attired and painted this way because they were recently circumcised. In the Masai culture, girls also must go through the painful process. But now, among the Christians, this no longer happens. Those who have benefited the most may be women.

WOODS: Masai culture, the women are just a possession. It’s something that they own like their donkeys or sheep, their goats, cattle. And I asked a man why, how many donkey he had and he said he didn’t have donkeys, ’cause he had five wives.

SEVERSON: Critics argue that bringing the white man’s civilization to indigenous people isn’t always a good idea. Woods says he’s seen changes that can only be good. Girls are now going to school, husbands now know it’s wrong to beat their wives. Health care is better.

WOODS: They begin to treat their families different. We see husbands playing with their children. We see families caring about each other in a way they never did before.

SEVERSON: These are people who worship a volcano, live in constant fear of evil spirits, throw milk at the sky to thank the spirit God, make animal sacrifices at the base of a fig tree.

LOSERIAN: The Masai people are afraid especially for the owl. When the owl come, you know, fly, flying up on the house, then start make the sound, then the Masai, they are afraid, especially when they have a sick person, then they’ll be afraid that maybe this person is going to die.

SEVERSON: And when a person does die…

WOODS: What they traditionally did with dead bodies is they wrap them up in a sheet like that. The put them out in the bush here for the hyenas. The hyenas eat everything.

SEVERSON: To call the ruts we were on roads is an gross exaggeration. And the further into the bush we went, the worse they got.

We were invited to a Masai village for a goat barbeque which is a special privilege for outsiders. But the road is so washed out and after hours of digging, we just can’t make it. So we’re going to have to turn around for the long, rutty, bumpy ride home.

But then, with the help of some Masai warriors, we were on our way again.

The village chief here, James, is the only one in the village to live in a cement house. He’s an important man, and a converted Christian.

WOODS: You don’t drink this everyday, but when a man goes on a safari, when he comes home, his wife will have sour milk for him to drink. So now we get some special treat here.

SEVERSON: Becoming a Christian was particularly difficult for James who’s father is a witch doctor, a practice James now believes comes through the devil.

JAMES: The witch doctor uses roots of many kinds of trees to bewitch people. There is a very big difference. Because a miracle from God is through prayer.

SEVERSON: At the barbeque the women stood by and watched as the men ate the goat, and James talked about being a Christian and how painful it’s been to be cut off from his family and friends. Most no longer attend his barbeques. Still he insists he’ll remain a Christian because, he says he now knows where to get his prayers answered, and it’s not a volcano.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in the Tanzanian bush.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In recent years, thousands of rural communities in Senegal have held extraordinary public rallies they call “declarations,” and they’ve declared an end to a deeply rooted practice, one rarely discussed in public, one commonly known as female circumcision.

MOLLY MELCHING: Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would be sitting here years later, saying that 4,792 communities in Senegal had abandoned. In the beginning it was just unthought of, unbelievable, because it was so taboo.

DE SAM LAZARO: Molly Melching founded a group called Tostan—“breakthrough” in the local Wolof language—in the early ’90s. She had modest goals: to educate people about health and human rights, especially in rural areas and in local languages. The Illinois native is fluent in the ways of Senegal but she keeps a low profile in the work of Tostan.

Tostan’s work often begins with an ice-breaker, like an old movie. Many in the audience have never watched a film. To overcome the language barrier, the selection is a Buster Keaton silent movie classic from 1923, and it’s a hit. A more serious film followed, on vegetable gardening. It’s all part of seminars on nutrition, health, basic human rights, and other issues—in groups, songs, dances, and drama.

Skit: She needs to be cut. All girls need that.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s proven to be one of the most promising attempts in history to wipe out what Melching calls female genital cutting [FGC], a practice that dates back 2000 years. Each year, the World Health Organization says up to 3 million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 140 million women live with its consequences.

Skit: You can’t have a recognized marriage if she is not cut.

DE SAM LAZARO: That cut is a painful rite of passage for girls across a wide swath of predominantly Islamic African and Middle Eastern countries. However, the practice goes back hundreds of years before Islam or Christianity and is also practiced in both faiths and religions native to this region. It’s thought to have originated in the harems of ancient rulers as a means of controlling women’s fidelity, or as a sign of chastity among those who aspired to be consorts.

MELCHING: Those who were in the rest of society could move up, and you could marry someone who was more prestigious or had more money, more status, if you underwent this practice, because it was a sign of good reputation, and as the years went on, I mean 2,200 years, it became very much a part of what was considered criteria for good marriage.

DE SAM LAZARO: Melching came to this West African nation as a student in the 1970s and later as a Peace Corps volunteer. She stayed on to work on improving health education, which she found sorely lacking.

MELCHING: When you see a friend that you’ve known for several months and you’ve gone to her house for lunch, and then she tells you her child has some problem, that it’s someone who has cast an evil spell on the child, the baby, and that she’s going to take them to a religious leader to get the spell taken off, and you don’t know what to say, and it turns out the baby was dehydrated.

DE SAM LAZARO: But from the health education, women began to understand infection, and Melching says they began to connect the dots.

MELCHING: So suddenly as they started learning germ transmission and the consequences of FGC and how these infections occur and why they had more problems in childbirth than other women who had not been cut, they started saying wait a minute.

Seminar: People used to be afraid to talk about this before. Not anymore.

DE SAM LAZARO: But how did women in conservative, patriarchal societies become able to speak out, especially on a sensitive sexual topic? Melching says it’s because Tostan involves men and religious leaders who’ve confirmed that cutting is not required.

MELCHING: We share our modules with the religious leaders so that they see that everything that we do is for the well-being of the community, the health, and all these things are things that Islam espouses, and so they’re very happy in general, but first of all they’re happy because we start with them. We respect them.

DE SAM LAZARO: And that respect also carries over in the group’s message on genital cutting.

MELCHING: Tostan found that using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changing social norms. When you say to someone, we know you love your daughter and you’re doing things because you love your daughter, but let’s look at this and let’s try to understand together exactly what are the consequences of this practice. But you are the ones who will have to make the decision. Then suddenly people are willing to listen. They don’t get defensive.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s far more effective than the approach of many aid groups—religious, government, and private, says Princeton University professor Gerry Mackie.

PROFESSOR GERRY MACKIE: Not hectoring and preaching but having pro and con discussions. When we think of an ideal way of making a change, we’d say it’s democratic. We all get together and talk it over and decide what the best thing is to do. Whereas some development approaches would, say, force them to do it, pay them to do it, trick them into doing it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s volunteers and staff who conduct its seminars all hail from the local communities. Often they are leaders and elders speaking from personal experience or anecdotes. Diarre Ba used to make a living as a female circumciser.

DIARRE BA: I was part of this process. I felt bad. This is not right. But I didn’t know anything at the time. I had no learning.

DE SAM LAZARO: Others have painful, vivid memories. Ibrahim Sankare was very close to an older sister growing up. He walked into her room one evening.

IBRAHIM SANKARE: I saw her lying in a pool of blood. I thought someone had really hurt her. I screamed. My father explained to me. Since then, even now I get goosebumps thinking about it.

MARIAM BAMBA: It was very painful. I will never—you ask me if I can forget it? I will never forget the pain. So painful.

DE SAM LAZARO: Marieme Bamba is a long-time campaigner against genital cutting, and she’s spared her ten-year-old daughter the trauma. Yet before she became involved with Tostan and early in her marriage, she was determined to keep up the tradition. Even her own husband was opposed to genital cutting.

SULEYMAN TRAORE: She insisted that she had to do it. There were so many problems if you didn’t do it. If you cooked meals, no one would eat your food. It’s because we didn’t know. People told us that it was our religion. If you don’t do it, you’ll be going against your religion. All this is false. But I alone can’t do this in the village.

DE SAM LAZARO: They say Tostan was able to insure they were not alone—that communities in which they intermarried were also thinking alike, that their daughters would still be marriageable. The large declaration ceremonies have been critical.

MACKIE: One part of bringing about a change like this is to get everyone to change at once, what we call “coordinated abandonment.” Everyone has to see that everyone else sees that everyone is changing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Genital cutting is not the only tradition they want to change. Many communities have vowed to end the frequent practice of allowing older men to marry adolescent girls, acknowledging both the health risks and the girls’ human rights. Molly Melching says there’s plenty of historical precedent for abrupt changes in social norms and attitudes. She sees a very current example every time she comes home. That’s in American views about smoking.

MELCHING: People were smoking, and nobody said anything about it much through the ‘50s, the ‘60s, and even the ‘70s. As people became more and more aware of the harm that it causes, more and more people—there was a critical mass of people who started really protesting. It was amazing for me, coming from Senegal to the United States, to see how quickly things turned around.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s efforts have now expanded to 14 other African nations.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Kaolack, Senegal.